All Movie Guide

Stretching the Airport concept as far as it will go, this third film in the series sticks a jet full of old actors 50 feet underwater in the Bermuda Triangle. Oxygen (and credibility) grows short, and Jimmy Stewart plays an art collector targeted for a heist. Jack Lemmon is the unfortunate pilot, and Christopher Lee shows up along with Brenda Vaccaro, Joseph Cotten, and Olivia DeHavilland. Jerry Jameson, auteur of The Bat People, was selected to helm this stupefying entry featuring that film's star, Michael Pataki. George Kennedy, the only man to appear in all four Airport films, is along for the ride as well. It's not as campy as other episodes in the series, but disaster-movie completists will still be shaking their heads in disbelief. Robert Firsching

All Movie Guide

The fourth Airport film may be the silliest of them all, as George Kennedy returns, this time co-piloting with Alain Delon. The plane is on its way to the Moscow Olympics, has a bomb on board, and gets fired upon with missiles that necessitate flying upside-down. A look at the cast list resembles a bad episode of Fantasy Island, but it's always fun to see shameless touches like casting Mercedes McCambridge (Johnny Guitar) as the coach of the Soviet team. If you don't understand the significance of that choice, you may find this film more tedious than laughable, but fans of bad movies will have a field day, as Jimmy Walker, Charo, and -- oddly enough -- Bibi Andersson rub shoulders with high-altitude disaster. Robert Firsching

All Movie Guide

If they loved it once....In the wake of the $45 million gross of the original Airport (1970), Universal was all but required by an Act of Congress to produce Airport '75. Charlton Heston heads the all-star cast as Alan Murdock, the air traffic controller who must keep a disabled 747 from crashing in flames. The crisis begins when a businessman (Dana Andrews), flying his small private plane, suffers a fatal heart attack. The small plane smashes into the cockpit of the 747. Following Murdock's radioed instructions, stewardess Nancy Pryor (Karen Black) takes over the controls and tries to negotiate a safe landing. The special-guest passenger lineup includes Helen Reddy as a singing nun (a character wickedly satirized in the 1980 parody Airplane!), Myrna Loy as an alcoholic, Gloria Swanson as Gloria Swanson (or a reasonable facsimile) and Sid Caesar as a chatterbox. While Airport '75 yielded only $25 million at the box-office, the franchise was too good to let go at this point: hence, Airport '77. Hal Erickson

All Movie Guide

Airport had enough plot and enough star power in its cast for three feature films, and it only encompassed about half of the complexity or characters found in Arthur Hailey's best-selling potboiler. Essentially built around 12 harrowing hours at a major Midwestern airport, the film had everything an audience of the period could have wanted -- suspense, romance, drama, and comedy -- all spread across a vast canvas. Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is the manager of Lincoln Airport, facing a night beset by the worst blizzard in a decade, a wife (Dana Wynter) who announces she wants a divorce, a primary runway blocked by an airliner stuck in a snowdrift, and a governing board ready to fire him. Bakersfeld's cynical, smooth-talking brother-in-law Vernon Demarest (Dean Martin) won't let up on his criticism of the management at Lincoln, but he has his own problems as well, mostly in the form of a young stewardess, Gwendolyn Mehan ({Jacqueline Bisset) who is pregnant by him and whom he finds he genuinely loves. Add to that the presence of an old lady stowaway (Helen Hayes) and a mentally disturbed passenger (Van Heflin) carrying a bomb and there's more than enough plot to keep viewers engrossed for two hours plus. Airport became one of the top-grossing movies of its era, racking up seven-digit box-office numbers and spawning an entire film genre -- the disaster movie. With Jean Seberg, George Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Barry Nelson, and Maureen Stapleton filling out the rest of the leading roles, there was something for almost everyone in this film. The movie still has a lot to offer if only as a prime example of Hollywood at its most successfully glitzy, but, if possible, viewers should try and see the letterboxed version of Airport on DVD (released May 2001). Bruce Eder

Product Details

• UPC: 025192422928
• Source: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Theatre Wide-Screen (1.85.1), Cinemascope (2.35:1)
• Presentation: Wide Screen
• Sound: stereo, DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Español, Français
• Time: 7:52:00
• Sales Rank: 1,795

This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:

• Airport
• Airport 1975
• Airport '77
• Airport '79: Concorde

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