Airport ’77

Directed by Jerry Jameson, Airport ’77 follows a privately-owned airliner’s crew and passengers, including Jack Lemmon’s Don Gallagher, Olivia de Havilland’s Emily Livingston, and Christopher Lee’s Martin Wallace, as they’re forced to fight for their lives after it crashes into the ocean. Filmmaker Jameson, armed with Michael Scheff and David Spector’s screenplay, delivers a better-than-average entry within the remarkably consistent Airport series, as Airport ’77 boasts a compelling narrative that’s heightened, to say the least, by the efforts of a top-notch roster of performers – with, especially, Lemmon’s commanding and charismatic turn as the aforementioned airliner’s captain anchoring the proceedings and, ultimately, elevating it above its similarly-themed brethren. The pervasively watchable atmosphere is perpetuated by an ongoing emphasis on exciting and appreciatively larger-than-life action set-pieces, and it doesn’t hurt, either, that the movie’s been suffused with a series of melodramatic subplots and digressions that prove impossible to resist – which, when coupled with a genuinely thrilling climactic stretch, finally does cement Airport ’77‘s place as a first-class 1970s disaster picture.

*** out of ****