Skip to main content

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #368: Airplane!


Say it with me: “Surely you can’t be serious?” “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.” Now is that comedy gold or what? A lampoon of all the disaster movies set on airplanes during the 1970s, “Airplane!” (1980) was the blueprint for movie parodies for years to come. Unfortunately this would lead to the inferior and unimaginative “Scary Movie,” “Disaster Movie,” and “Epic Movie.” All of those movies were filled with cheap gags and references to movies that came out less than a year ago, whereas “Airplane” is filled with jokes and gags that still hold up 30 years later.

When I rented the movie to watch it for the first time while finishing high school, I knew the late great Leslie Nielsen was in it, and that was enough. Even when he was in a sub-par comedy that great Canadian import always did his best to make the audience laugh. For examples, see “The Naked Gun,” “Spy Hard” and Mel Brook’s “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.” I was watching the movie with my mom, and the moment she recognized him as one of the plane’s passenger, she knew more laughs were coming.  

Written and directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, “Airplane!” tells the story of a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago where everything goes hilariously wrong. The pilots and many of the passengers suffer a serious case of food poisoning after eating the fish dinner. Chicago tower supervisor Steve McCroskey (Lloyd Bridges, father of Jeff and Beau) instructs stewardess Elaine (Julie Hagerty) to activate the autopilot. Unfortunately, the autopilot is an inflatable doll called Otto.

Onboard the plane is ex-fighter pilot and Elaine’s ex-boyfriend Ted Striker (Robert Hays) who could land the plane if it wasn’t for just one minor hiccup: he is afraid of flying. That’s right, the pilots are down, the stewardess is in charge and the only man who can land the plane is so scared he is literally drenched in sweat. Oh, and the plane later runs into a lightning storm and a little girl onboard needs a heart transplant.

This may sound ridiculous, and it is, but Abrahams and the two Zuckers were spoofing films that featured pretty similar storylines. I know at least one of those “Airport” movies had the line “The stewardess is flying the plane?” Since it was a crazy situation to begin with, the writers generated the humour by hiring serious actors and having them say the craziest lines of dialogue with a straight face. One of my favourites: “Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”

Even the names of the characters are clever. Basketball giant Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Peter Graves, from the Mission: Impossible TV show, play pilots Roger Murdock and Clarence Oveur (pronounced over). This leads to conversations such as “Roger that, Oveur” and “Roger, Roger.” Another sign of things to come, the Abrahams and company managed to sneak in a paedophilia joke. When captain Oveur asks a kid if he has ever been in a cockpit before he follows that with “ever seen a grown man naked?” As if the word cockpit was not enough of a signal. 

Sadly today Leslie Nielsen is dead and Jim Abrahams’ last movie was “Scary Movie 4” which will most likely not end up on anyone’s list of the funniest comedies of all times. Hopefully “Airplane!” will live on as a classic of the genre and continue to inspire young would-be directors who discover it on DVD. As a matter of fact, the special edition DVD was called the “Don’t call me Shirley!” edition. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #49: Evil Dead 2

What do you get when you mix buckets of fake blood, creative camera operators, the humour of the Three Stooges, and a man with the most recognizable chin in Hollywood? You get Evil Dead II (1987), the horror classic that somehow manages to remake the original in the first 15 minutes and yet feel entirely original. Even though it is mostly set in a cabin in the woods, that staple location in the horror genre, it feels like a roller coaster ride. This is especially true once the film's hero, the scrappy Ash Williams, embraces the madness by arming himself with a sawed-off shotgun and attaching a chainsaw where his hand used to be. "Groovy" indeed. This gore-soaked franchise has had a long run, starting off with one low-budget movie directed by a young Sam Raimi and then growing into two sequels, a remake, comic books and a TV show with three seasons. My starting point was the third entry, Army of Darkness, which moves the action to the Middle Ages with the same

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #97: Reservoir Dogs

One of the most surprising things about Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs (1992) is the fact that it has never been adapted for the stage. They will make a show out of Beauty and the Beast , Monty Python and the Holy Grail , and even Spider-Man , but somehow a movie in which most of the action takes place in a warehouse has never made it to Broadway? In any case, this was the movie that announced the arrival of the insatiable film fan that could regurgitate everything he had learned watching movies at the video store into stories filled with sudden bursts of violence, sharp-dressed characters, awesome soundtracks, and crackling dialogue.   Since this violent piece of American cinema came out at a time when I was still learning basic math in elementary school there was no way I would watch this on the big screen. However as the years went by it became a cult classic, and even a classic of the independent movies genre, and was re-released on special edition DVD for its

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #102: The Hustler

Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) is proof that any sport can be used for good cinematic drama even if that sport is pool. Although this is not a game that involves a massive sport arena and bloody boxing gloves, things can get dramatically interesting if the monetary stakes are high, and visually arresting if the filmmakers shoot from the right angle. It also helps a lot if the man putting his money on the table is played by a young Paul Newman in a career-breaking role. Prior to watching the film I had a vague idea of the meaning of the word “hustling” and a rather passive interest in the game of pool. It’s a fun game to play if you are having a couple of nachos and chicken wings on a Friday evening with friends, but I didn’t see it as a spectator sport. Watching The Hustler in the classics section of Netflix two years ago was a bit of an education since it shows the sport as a way of life for some people, and a huge source of revenue for big time gamblers. Newman star as