Chandler’s Trailers: “Airport 1975” (1974)

     This entirely unnecessary second chapter to the “Airport” tetralogy is not a sequel in the technical sense of the word-  there is not a returning character or cast member save for George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni who seems to be suffering from some form of wasted performance Hell  -but is actually a shameless retread of 1960″The Crowded Sky”, especially apparent since the same two actors (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. and Dana Andrews) play the pilots of colliding aircraft in both films. Karen Black plays airline stewardess Nancy Pryor whose role it will be to pilot the damaged 747 after the cockpit crew is either killed or disabled by a direct hit with a private Beechcraft plane and to provide the film with its signature visual legacy of a widescreen Black making almost obscenely licentious oral invitations during some of the climactic moments of the film. The object of her infatuations, and thus the probable hero of the drama is Charlton Heston’s Alan Murdock, a character with so much swagger he literally squirts testosterone off of the screen, though this disaster drama is saddled with a peril even greater than that of ineffective air traffic control and that is a screenplay by Don Ingalls of stunning ineptitude; it actually makes the paint by numbers script for the parent “Airport” seem to have the complexity of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’.

 

To read the complete review, click the following link to:  https://chandlerswainreviews.wordpress.com/chandlers-trailers-short-bits-for-emerging-cinephiles-and-a-better-america/