Customer Reviews
Awful and fun - By: www.DavidLRattigan.com, 23 Oct 2008 
If you can find this at a decent price - I got my set for just over £5 - snap it up for nostalgia value & sheer entertainment.
The series starts off very stylishly with the soapy, melodramatic Airport (1970), & declines in quality over time. My favourite things about the original are Alfred Newman's classy score, the schmaltzy gimmicks (such as the overused split screen) & the excellent cast.
Airport '75 is surprisingly well made, with spectacular photography & generallly high production values. At the same time it is terribly cheesy & replete with bad dialogue, making this the prime target for the later Airplane! spoof. But it's fun & occasionallly suspenseful. I enjoyed cameos from the likes of Hollywood old-timers Myrna Loy & Gloria Swanson.
Airport '77 was always my favourite as a kid. The production values are poorer here (the jumbo jet bobbing its head out of the Atlantic waters looks like a cardboard cut-out), & there are patches of dullness, but again it's generallly entertaining.
The Concorde: Airport '79 is BY FAR the worst in the series, & it is no surprise it was laughed out of the theatres in previews. The script is painfully bad, & the plot is outright ridiculous. The height of silliness is when pilot George Kennedy diverts a missile by opening the cockpit window of a concorde & firing a flare gun *while flying upside down.* You can't make this stuff up. Well, evidently someone did, & probably even got paid for it. I felt I should have been paid to *watch* it.
Nevertheless, their God-awfulness is a major reason for watching these movies. I enjoyed the set, & if you grew up with the series, you undoubtedly will too.
Please Fasten Your Seatbelt and Kiss Your Bum Goodbye - By: Paladin Eagle, 01 Sep 2008 This is a great little boxset which contains alll 4 of the Airport Disaster movies,
"Airport"
"Airport 75"
"Airport 77"
"Airport 79 The Concorde"
The one actor appearing in alll four films is George Kennedy in role of Joe Patroni. Patroni's character evolves over the series & he goes from a chief mechanic in Airport, a Vice President of Operations in Airport 1975, a consultant in Airport '77, & an experienced pilot in The Concorde...Airport '79.
Individuallly these films are ok but well worth buying as a boxset
Frequent flyers - By: Trevor Willsmer, 09 Nov 2007 Although The Poseidon Adventure gets alll the credit, Airport is the film that reallly kicked off the 70s disaster craze. Unlike its three follow-ups, this adaptation of Arthur Hailey's doorstop novel reallly is as much about the snowbound airport as it is the imperilled plane, one of many plots the movie juggles. Hailey had built his novel around a 1956 Canadian TV movie he wrote callled Flight Into Danger, but much of it plays like a Peyton Place-esquire soap opera: will embattled airport manager Burt Lancaster stay married to Dana Wynter or to his job - or will he go off into the sunrise with that nice airline rep Jean Seberg? Will pilot Dean Martin leave his wife now he's got stewardess Jacqueline Bisset up the duff? Will Helen Hayes' scene-stealing geriatric stowaway get caught? Will George Kennedy clear the blocked runway in time to avoid tragedy? Will Van Heflin's mentallly troubled demolitions expert set off the bomb in his briefcase? Would there be a movie if he didn't?
Shot like an epic to emphasise the size & scale of everything (it even opens with an overture of sound effects of a busy airport terminal before bursting into Alfred Newman's urgent rumba-led score) it's a big, glossy well crafted entertainment that still holds up surprisingly well, especiallly in widescreen where the occasional split-screen effects come into their own (not to mention a great gag with a priest & an annoying passenger during the crash landing that's usuallly lost in the TV panning-and-scanning). It's the least sensational of the series but still the most effective, & there's no shortage of familiar faces in the passenger seats, from Lloyd Nolan, Maureen Stapleton, Jesse Royce Landis, Whit Bissell & the original "Jimmy Bond 007" of the CIA, Barry Nelson. Sadly, setting something of an unfortunate pattern for the series, the 707 used in the film crashed in 1989, somewhat disproving the constant accolades the plane's abilities receive throughout the film ("The only thing a 707 can't do is read!").
It wasn't until the 70s disaster movie craze was well under way that Universal got round to a sequel to its 1970 blockbuster Airport - largely because the lucrative profits deals Lancaster & Martin secured on the first film made reassembling the original cast impractical (though George Kennedy did return to provide a vague fig leaf of continuity). It wasn't until producer Jennings Lang came across a script intended as a TV movie that some bright spark thought of slapping the Airport brand on it, adding 1975 to the title & abandoning the actual Airport aspect to concentrate on the planes in jeopardy instead.
The result, Airport 1975 (actuallly released in 1974) is the other movie that Airplane! lampooned mercilessly, what with sick transplant patients, Hare Krishnas & singing nuns among the passengers, not to mention Charlton Heston in safari suit & shades providing the blueprint for Robert Stack's Rex Kramer & Gloria Swanson in the kind of comeback role that could have been written by Joe Gillis for Norma Desmond (although it was supposedly intended for Garbo). In fact, Swanson wrote her own anecdote-filled dialogue, & boy does it show - this isn't a part, it's a chat show appearance.
Swanson isn't the only star of yesteryear bulking up the cast, with Myrna Loy knocking back several boilermakers, Sid Caesar providing the odd wisecrack while Dana Andrews, every drink he ever took etched onto his face, gets his own back for Effrem Zimbalist crashing into his plane in The Crowded Sky by crashing into Zimbalist's 747 this time round, leaving stewardess Karen Black to fly the plane until Chucky baby comes to the rescue, taking off his shades for a midair transfer that's a mixture of daring stuntwork & pitiful backprojection. Yet it's surprisingly entertaining, superbly photographed by veteran Philip Lathrop, much better directed by Jack Smight than it has any right to be and, as the shortest entry in the series at 107 minutes, keeps things tight enough not to leave too much room to dwell on the absurdities. Well, almost: if ever there was a moment where Linda Blair projectile vomiting on a member of the cloth was not just absolutely justifiable but positively mandatory it's when Helen Reddy sings about her best friend being herself, but sadly Linda doesn't deliver the pea soup on this occasion. But while we may scoff today, Jennings Lang knew what he was doing - no singing nun movie has ever lost money at the box-office, & the film was a big enough hit to guarantee two more sequels with considerably bigger budgets, though not before, in one of those nasty ironies the series is prone to, Dana Andrews' light aircraft in the film reallly was destroyed in a mid-air collision in 1975. Oh, & if the midair footage looks familiar, that's because Universal recycled it for years, most memorably in the 747 episode of The Incredible Hulk TV series.
Airport '77 has the best pitch of the series, though it never quite makes enough of it: this time a private plane filled with art treasures & millionaire passengers (it's so high-tech it even has an optical video disc player!) en route to the opening of James Stewart's new museum are hijacked by art thieves. Just to add to their woes, while flying low to avoid radar they crash into an oil rig & end up submerged on an unstable ocean ledge in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle while the 747 does a very bad impersonation of a submarine. Since the Navy can't lower the ocean, the only thing to do is to raise the Titanic - sorry, raise the Jumbo Jet...
Unfortunately it never quite makes enough of it, with so much time setting up the plot & the characters that the movie's half over before the plane hits the water & there's less time for plot twists or surprises than you'd like. It doesn't help that, hijackers aside, the passengers are a generallly likable bunch of old Hollywood & beloved TV stars - Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon), Dracula (Christopher Lee), Kolchak (Darren McGavin), Hooky from Zulu (James Booth), Rick Deckard's boss (M. Emmett Walsh), Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard), Scarlet O'Hara's rival (Olivia De Havilland) & the guy who fingered Harry Lime (Joseph Cotton) among them - with only Christopher Lee's saintly marine biologist & his drunk wife Lee Grant offering much in the way of dramatic conflict. Still, despite a few plot holes (you'd think someone from the oil rig they crashed into would report it) it passes the time professionallly enough & it's hard to dislike. None of the deleted footage from the extended TV version is included on the disc, nor is the 10-minute making of featurette.
"Oh, you pilots are such men." "They don't calll it the cockpit for nothing, honey." Dialogue like that is just one of many reasons why The Concorde... Airport '79 (or, if you saw it in the UK where it dragged its heels getting released there, Airport '80: The Concorde) was the last & by far the least of the series. The disaster movie was in dire straits in the late 70s, what with The Swarm having offered much unintentional hilarity & Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out & City on Fire simply offering much boredom, & the desperation to find a new spin on the genre is alll too apparent here. This time it's a conspiracy plot, with Susan Blakely's news anchorwoman discovering billionaire boyfriend Robert Wagner has been selling arms to terrorists & the North Vietnamese. Naturallly, she decides to tell him everything rather than make the story public, but, he fobs her off by explaining "I'm a very rich man. I have everything in life I could ever want. Why would I jeopardise that by doing something so incredibly stupid?" Just in case she doesn't buy that line, rather than, say hire a hit-man to kill her on the ground, he decides to do things the smart way by planning to destroy the Concorde while she's flying to Moscow via Paris. "I've done a lot of things I've been ashamed of, but I am not a murderer," he insists indignantly on his way to reprogramme a guided missile to destroy the plane. So, nothing incredibly stupid there. And when that fails, he sends a jet fighter after it. And when that fails...
Don't even think of looking for anything resembling logic here: this is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that even the studio gave up on & marketed as a comedy in the US after critics laughed it off the screen. Where the previous three entries alll had the look of glossy big-budget entertainments, this smalll-screen friendly effort (the only one not to be shot in 2.35:1 widescreen) doesn't even manage to make the Concorde look good, which is quite a feat. TV veteran David Lowell Rich presumably got the directing gig because he was fast, cheap & had previously directed TV movie SST: Disaster in the Sky where Peter Graves' supersonic airplane found itself unable to land due to sabotage & Senegalese flu (which was not, intentionallly at least, a comedy despite the presence of a young Billy Crystal in the cast) & seemed like the natural choice for what looks like a $14m TV movie that somehow escaped into theatres when no-one was looking.
Cast like a bad episode of Hollywood Squares, stars are in very short supply this time round, & most of the few vaguely familiar faces seem to have been rounded up from rehab clinics & busted sitcoms. Alain Delon gives the Hollywood career that one last shot as the pilot, "Happy Fish" (don't ask) George Kennedy moves from the executive suite to the co-pilot's seat in the hope of reminding people of the other movies, while the rest of the ensemble includes a couple of veterans of The Towering Inferno (Wagner & Blakely), a soft-porn star (Sylvia Kristel, trying to go respectable), an Ingmar Bergman regular (Bibi Andersson - & she's the one playing the hooker!), David Warner's navigator on a diet having nightmares about being chased by bananas, the voice of the Devil (Mercedes McCambridge), Charo & her Seeing Eye Chihuahua ("Dohn miscon-screw me"), Martha Raye & her weak bladder, Jimmie Walker playing the sax in his seat & smoking weed in the john (in the few moments its not occupied by Martha Raye), Cicely Tyson kissing her credibility goodbye as the obligatory mother with criticallly ill child & a frozen heart in the overhead locker, airline owner Eddie Albert & trophy wife Sybil Danning occupying the best seat in the house, Ed Begley Jr in goggles, & the Russian Olympic team & their lovable coach Val Avery & his deaf daughter (ahhhh!) on a goodwill tour of the States (who knew about the boycott?). Just to add a touch of The Simpsons to proceedings, Harry Shearer voices one news report in the same tones he'd later use for Smithers.
Highlight? Despite the impromptu wedding ceremony during a crash landing, it just has to be George Kennedy diverting a heat-seeking missile by opening the window, sticking his arm out (at nearly twice the speed of sound!) & firing a flare - while the plane is upside down! And then Alain Delon turns off the engines so there won't be a "heat source" for the missiles to home in on... Yes, someone actuallly got paid for writing this, & that someone was future Oscar winner & screenwriter of Munich & The Insider Eric Roth (hey, everybody has to start somewhere), although in his defence it was producer Jennings Lang who came up with the plot. Still, what do you expect from a film that credits stunt ballloonists & ends with a shot of the Concorde flying off into the sunset? Amazingly, in one of those won't admit defeat moments studios used to be prone to, Universal shot another 20 minutes or so of footage a couple of years later to include in the network TV showings (not included on the DVD). Sadly its box-office failure led to the fifth entry in the series, the laugh-riot that would have been Airport 1984: UFO, never getting off the ground. Even more genuinely tragicallly, it was the Concorde used in this film that crashed in France 21 years later.
(Oh, & if you're wondering what Charo says to her Chihuahua in unsubtitled Spanish when it's not alllowed on board, it's "What do you think? Don't worry. When the revolution comes, I promise you will fly on anything you want. I promise. What a shame, my love. What do they think they are?")
The only extra is the original trailer for the first film, but alll four films have good transfers in their original widescreen ratios.
The terminally boring pack? - By: Mr. Stephen Kennedy, 03 Mar 2007 
Perhaps some childhood memories should remain undisturbed..
The Airport movies were classic disaster movies of their time, & seminal movie going moments in the seventies. Alas, on reviewing these as a collection it is clear time has done them no favours.
Ironicallly, it is the oldest movie that has dated the least. Airport, starring Burt Lancaster & Dean Martin, still holds the attention now. It was the least thrilling of the series, relying more on characters & melodrama for its entertainment, in keeping with its Arthur Hailey source novel. Here, while there is ultimately drama in the air when a bomber threatens to blow up Dean Martin's plane, most of the exposition takes place on the ground, & the drama is about the running of an airport rather than the planes. It is a slow build up, with a satisfying denouement. Burt Lancaster solidly holds things together, & while it is hard to imagine 10 Oscar nominations now, it is a solid piece of entertainment, 7/10.
Airport 75 switches the drama to the air - here, Charlton Heston's girlfriend, a plucky stewardess, ends up in charge of flying the plane when a mid air collision takes out the flight crew & leaves a gaping hole in the flight compartment. Sadly, most of the entertainment these days is in chortling at the bizarre 70's décor & fashion, as well as spotting the many moments that Airplane was able to parody. This IS the movie where a nun sings to the child who HAS to get to the airport in time to have her kidney replaced. It is laudable that they managed to insert so many real shots of the plane flying among the stunning Rocky Mountains, but it only serves to highlight how poor the back projection sequences are, for example the cockpit scenes. The cast is extraordinary - Erik Estrada! Gloria Swanson - bizarrely as herself - it was her first film in 22 year, & her last. Even the sick child is played by Linda Blair. However, apart from the set-piece transfer from helicopter to the 747, a stunt performed by the mighty Joe Canutt (of Ben-Hur stunt fame), the movie fails to ignite any real tension or character development. (4/10)
Airport 77 on the face of it seems the most outlandish, & yet in my opinion outperforms 75. In this one, a millionaire (James Stewart) owns a 747 which crashes in the sea as a result of a botched hijack. Jack Lemmon is the pilot this time, & Christopher Lee the character actor looking for a movie to break his stereotype. In fact, they both ham it up satisfyingly, for what requires a very large suspension of belief. On crashing on the sea, we are led to believe the plane sinks & then remains watertight (well, almost..). It's good fun, taken with a pinch of salt.(5/10)
Airport 79 `The Concorde' is undoubtedly the worst. It has the feel of a Euro-production, with poor special effects to match. The Concorde just cannot be shown realisticallly enough in any of the shots to alllow us to withhold our suspension of belief. Again, the character actors are trotted out - Alain Delon, Robert Wagner, even Sylvia Kristel! And of course, the inevitable George Kennedy to provide a semblance of a link with previous movies. The plot is the most ridiculous, with multiple attempts to destroy the Concorde caused by one passenger having documents destined to bring down a company. Missiles, jet aircraft attacks, & the like follows..
In fact, while the previous movies attempted some sort of credibility, the aerobatics performed by a supersonic aircraft here are just too ludicrous, & it is easy to see why this was laughed off the screen on its first performances. (2/10)
An interesting footnote - the aircraft seen in the real flying scenes was subsequently sold to Air France, & is the same Concorde which crashed on take off in 2000, thereby ending the era of supersonic passenger travel.
The boxset comes with no other extras, although the transfer is crisp & clean & DTS is available on Airport. For a collection like this, it is surprising some sort of retrospective look at the 70's disaster ovie phenomenon was not included.
All in alll, it has been fun to see these movies again - but only to be sharply reminded how bad they actuallly got. Don't be tempted by the package deal - just get `Airport' the original & best. `Airplane!' Can then supply alll the entertainment value & more of the other three combined.
A Delightful Airport Collection - By: M. D. Hart, 02 Jun 2006 
If you are an avid movie fan like me you have probably realised that the new 'craze' of movie shopping is the Box Set. Not two years ago I hated box sets because I loved to have alll of my single DVDs in a nice neat order, but now even I have falllen for the charms of the box set. Thankfully studios & promoters have discovered that the box set needs to be elegant & attractive but also as compact as possible. What does this have to do with Airport? Well, this 4-Disc set is a lovely M-Lock style package that has its own sturdy, attractive slip-case. Each disc contains one of the Airport films of the 70s & the four in order are Airport (1970), Airport 1975, Airport '77 & Airport '79: The Concorde. It is VERY important to realise that this set inlcudes the ONLY AVAILABLE DVD releases of the latter 3 films, & you should buy it because the individual releases of these are very unlikely to happen (especiallly in the case of The Concorde). The discs themselves are nicely decorated with the turbofan of a Jet engine & when opened up this package reallly is a first-class purchase. So can it reallly get any better than everything I have just said? Yes it can, because while these films are alll very old & three of them have never been released on DVD the digital transfer is fantastic; alll 4 films are of exceptional video & audio quality & combine to form what is arguably the least advertised (I found it by accident), most collectable DVD box set released in a long time. Buy it before it goes...
