Airport 1975

Directed by Jack Smight, Airport 1975 details the chaos that unfolds aboard a packed airliner after it collides with a small passenger plane in midair. It’s a larger-than-life premise that’s employed to erratic yet mostly entertaining effect by Smight, as the filmmaker, armed with a script by Don Ingalls, delivers an unapologetically broad thriller that boasts a handful of genuinely exciting interludes and scenes – including the aforementioned midair collision and a climactic attempt to drop an experienced pilot into the damaged aircraft’s cockpit. The movie’s watchable atmosphere is, in addition, heightened by the ongoing emphasis on the less-than-subtle exploits of its various characters, including Charlton Heston’s heroic Al Murdock, Dana Andrews’ doomed Scott Freeman, and Linda Blair’s ailing Janice Abbott, and yet it’s equally apparent that Airport 1975 suffers from a palpably thin narrative that’s reflected most keenly in a third act that feels awfully prolonged and padded out (ie certain sequences, particularly those in which Karen Black’s Nancy endeavors to communicate with the ground and maintain control over the plane, just seem to go on and on). By the time the relatively engrossing finale rolls around, however, Airport 1975 has confirmed its place as a solid entry within the disaster-movie canon that is, predominantly speaking, more hit than miss.

*** out of ****