Airplane! - Don't Call Me Shirley Edition

No matter how many times that I've seen this film - and, probably, like you, I've seen it many, many times - it gets a laugh no more than three minutes in with, "Listen Betty, don't start up with your white zone shit again!" Until then, it could have been yet another sequel in the Airport series of films, it could even have been a straight retelling of Zero Hour!, the 1957 disaster movie on which Airplane! was famously based but the moment when the two airport announcers start bickering about how one wants the other to have an abortion, you know you've drifted out of a serious disaster and into something different altogether..."You know you've drifted..."

But such is the nature of Airplane! that with jokes as obvious as that one, it rarely feels tired as a comedy. Principally, I would suggest, this is because the film is largely a straight remake of Zero Hour! Indeed, there are three minutes or so on the disc to illustrate how the Zucker Abrahams Zucker directing team used it as a storyboard for Airplane! When the jokes come - and how they come, thick and fast until, by the end, there's not ten seconds that pass without a gag - they simply fall out of an otherwise straight movie, surprising even the most jaded of viewers. There is never the sense, as you get in some comedies, of the gags being wheeled on, so clearly are they being flagged into the movie that you can almost see the actors smirking the moment before they deliver the lines. The melon falling onto the desk, McCroskey (Lloyd Bridges) striking the same pose as a photograph on the wall behind him, Dr Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) conducting an internal examination of a female patient in the aisle, "...and Leon's getting larger!" - Airplane! never lets up and by having their actors keep a straight face, the moments of insane comedy are made so much more welcome leaving this as one of the greatest comedies.

The plot, as it is, is not really worth dwelling on, other than to say that it involves Ted Striker (Robert Hays), a one-time Air Force pilot who, due to his guilt over a decision that he made that cost the lives of his squadron, has given up flying. In pursuing his girlfriend, Elaine (Julie Hegarty) aboard the plane on which she is a stewardess, he is forced to confront his fear of flying a plane when the pilot, Captain Oveur (Peter Graves), co-pilot, Roger Murdock (Kareem Abdul-Jabar) and navigator, Victor Basta (Frank Ashmore) as well as half the passengers take ill with food poisoning. With time running out - the passengers have little over two hours to live and there is a sick girl aboard the plane who is being rushed to a clinic for a heart transplant - Striker must land the plane in Chicago with only his old Air Force commander, Rex Kramer (Robert Stack), to talk him down.

Or is that the plot for Zero Hour! Well, they're remarkably similar with only the names being changed - Ted Stryker (Dana Andrews) becomes Ted Striker, Elena Stryker (Linda Darnell) is divorced and returns as Elaine Dickinson and Capt. Treleaven (Sterling Hayden) sneers from the ground in the manner of Rex Kramer in this movie. Lines remain from one to the other - "The life of everyone onboard depends on just one thing: finding someone out there who can not only fly this plane but who didn't have fish for dinner!" was lifted out of one and put into the mouth of Dr Rumack here - whilst the jet aircraft of Airplane! has the pleasingly vintage purr of the propellers on the plane that Dana Andrews is forced to land.

From that point on, though, Airplane! heads off in an entirely new direction, with lightning outside the cockpit to accompany the more portentous announcements from Rumack, McCroskey failing in his attempts to give up all manner of addictions - "Looks like I picked a bad week to give up sniffing glue!" - and Capt. Oveur's wife waking up in bed with a horse whilst her husbands asks a twelve-year boy if he's ever seen a grown man naked. There's jive talk, an autopilot receiving, literally, a blow job and topless woman jiggling in the aisle of the aircraft. Stryker imagines the chaos of crashed aircraft, including a man with cardboard wings riding a bike off a pier, there's the third finest sight gag of all time - the finest is in this film's sequel whilst the second best is in Evil Dead 2 - and there's the all-too-true sign in a newsagents of Whacking Material.

Shit...er, "Golly!" there's also simply far too much to describe all that happens but, of course, there's no reason to - writing about why Airplane! is so funny is like trying to catch running water in a net. If you haven't seen it, there's really no excuse not to be catching it as soon as you can - countless National Lampoon or Hot Shots movies have not dimmed the brilliance of this film - and even if you think you know it all, there's always more to catch. This viewing alone was the first time that I noticed the gasping fish and weird sea creature during Ted and Elaine's clinch on the beach, was the first time that I got the odd translations of the back-of-seat announcements - "No Smoking!"/"El No A You Smoko!" - and the first time that, despite drawing attention to it here, I noticed there was a sight gag in which Rex Kramer's reflection appears to step out of a mirror. Airplane! still makes this viewer laugh more than any other film and whilst I can't recommend the film highly enough, questions can be asked over the quality of this DVD despite it looking like a very special edition.

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Transfer

It may just be that the prints aren't in particularly good condition and that Paramount figures the market isn't there to restore Airplane! but it's disappointing to see it in this condition. It's not even as though this is an unsuccessful little film that ought to be limping out on DVD - according to Amazon, Airplane! cost only a few million but made $88m at the box office back in 1980 so one would like to think that it deserves a little more care and attention than it gets here. There's bad news on the transfer from the off with the Paramount logo wobbling onscreen, the blue background to it wavering through various shades and the spotting of obvious print damage. Things don't get any better as the film progresses with print damage throughout

The original audio track sounds good - clear, crisp and with only the occasional bit of background noise - but Paramount have, surprisingly, remixed the Stereo source into Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround. There's not much to choose between them but the Stereo one wins out, simply on account of the surround track sounding as though the remix consisted of no more than adding a delay between the front and rear channels.

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Extras

Commentary: Jerry and David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and producer Jon Davison have recorded this feature-length commentary which, despite not having worked together in some years, shows that their friendship is still strong. Their gags aren't exclusive, though, and this is a good commentary that pulls the listener in with their gentle ribbing of each other, their memories of the making of the film and of their frequently separate careers since then. The only fault with it is that, with four similarly sounding men on the commentary who often talk and shout over one another, it's difficult to tell who's who.

Long Haul Version: As Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker make clear in their introduction to this, the Long Haul Version is not a Director's nor Extended Cut, more that everything that worked and was funny made it into the film. As Jerry Zucker says, "We were scraping to find eighty-seven minutes of film to project!" Instead, this allows the viewer to branch out of the film on seeing the TransAmerican logo onscreen for what few deleted scenes there are as well as interviews with the cast and crew. If your DVD player allows you to navigate the disc, you can find all of the branched interviews in titles 5 through 65.

Trivia Track: If you've listened to the commentary and watched the Long Haul Version of the film, there won't be anything new in this Trivia Track, which is selectable as a subtitle track. As is typical of these things, information on the actors, the crew and the making of the film is available throughout the film but you would need to have very little knowledge of the film to glean much from this.

Theatrical Trailer (3m32s): Much as you would expect, this is simply the most memorable gags from the film compiled into a three-and-a-half minute trailer.

There are also previews for a new 2-disc edition of Tommy Boy, The John Wayne Collection, Bad News Bears and the Bueller...Bueller...Edition of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

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Overall

"Not much of a review, this, little more than a list of gags!" you might be saying. "Where's the analysis of the father/son relationship between Kramer and Striker? The struggle by Ted Striker to overcome his, for a pilot, crippling handicap? The inability of Elaine to live with a man who suffers so?" Well, I've written about them as much as Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker did in the film and, indeed, Airplane! isn't much more than a series of gags that simply couldn't come any faster should the film hope to sustain a plot.

Airplane! is simply a very, very funny film and not much else - you won't learn anything about your fellow man, you won't see the world in a new way and you won't have a life-changing experience unless, that is, just laughing a lot - almost constantly, in fact - for an hour-and-a-half counts as such. It's a great film that fully justifies its reputation as a classic comedy and although you'll have seen much like it since - The Naked Gun, Hot Shots and Dumb And Dumber are all films that sprung up in the shadow of Airplane! - it remains a hugely enjoyable and funny comedy. The DVD could certainly be better but I doubt we'll see any improvement over this, at least not for a few years yet when we might have a different generation of hardware altogether...oh, which I'll leave to you.