The Concorde… Airport ’79

• (Known in the UK as Airport ’80: The Concorde)
• Directed by David Lowell Rich
• August 17, 1979

A supersonic flight headed for the Moscow Olympics is targeted for disaster.

The Concorde… Airport ’79 is so much a snapshot of the era. From the cast of main actors to the supporting actors to even the use of a Concorde jet. That’s not even a thing anymore! George Kennedy returns as Patroni who gets to fly the plane this time, but we also get Eddie Albert as Eli Sands, 70s/80s TV fixture Charo as Margarita, John “That’s Incredible!” Davidson as Robert Palmer, Martha “The Big Mouth” Raye as Loretta, Cicely Tyson as Elaine, Jimmie “J.J.” Walker as Boise, David Warner as Peter O’Neill, Avery Schreiber as the Russian coach Markov, and Sybil Danning as Amy. That is practically the cast of a Love Boat episode.

The plot this time around involves not only the now defunct Concorde jet but illegal arm sales along with a fanciful look at what 70s/80s thought drone technology would be like. Yep it’s called the Buzzard and is at least for the time a bit of science fiction that has since become science fact.

What this lacks is a classic-star male or female-to imply quality. The closest we come is Martha Raye around her Polident commercials era and Robert Wagner from his Hart to Hart era. And poor Martha Raye is much more of a punchline than she is a character. The only thing that could’ve been worse for her character is if she had to use an outhouse and it got knocked over. And they do get so very close to that.

There are some things that you could only get away with at the time this movie came out. Patroni’s friend Capt. Paul Metrand (the legendary Alain Delon) gets Patroni a prostitute but doesn’t tell him at first to help him move on from his wife who died in a tragic car accident a year earlier and it’s all treated like a funny thing. Patroni approaches him all excited and happy that he’s fallen head over heels in love at first sight and then they laugh when it’s revealed it’s a hooker Metrand paid for. That’s not a normal human reaction but it is a normal 70s movie reaction. 

If there is a major strike against this it’s not that the cast is surviving one disaster or a series of escalating issues but rather the passengers are surviving assassination attempts. Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner) has been selling illegal arms and his intrepid reporter girlfriend Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) is on the plane with solid proof so she must be killed in rather spectacular fashion because no other way is possible. He could not find a hitman overseas to knock her off? He found a guy that could provide armed jets!

There is a distinct lack of subplots in The Concorde… Airport ’79. There are moments but no narratives of any type that really carry through from beginning to end. We already know Metrand is going to go off with his girlfriend and at least have a good immediate future and Patroni, having demoted himself to an airline pilot after being a corporate executive, is going to go on being Patroni.

With each successive film the effects got a little more obvious. Some because there was no way to effectively do them in a solidly realistic manner, but others just seem to have been halfhearted. Some of the shots of the plane are the cheap composite shots rather than a miniature against a background. There were ways to get around that but either they were cutting the budget here or just didn’t have somebody with enough knowledge executing the task. 

Maybe some of the shortcomings of this film are because it came at the tail end of the disaster genre. Begun essentially by Airport, the disaster film had a good run in theaters until the very early 80s or so. Once in a while they pop up to this day but are not as ubiquitous as they seemingly once were. 

While not as good as the original, The Concorde… Airport ’79 is an entertaining movie. It’s pure escapist trash of good quality. If you enjoy disaster films then this one will certainly entertain you, but I’m not sure if the general moviegoer will embrace it.