Stricken with a massive heart attack - on his private light aircraft - Dana Andrews
collides into the nose of an unsuspecting 747 jumbo jet..alternated (for bad weather) to land in Salt Lake City..
Impact puts a gaping hole in the cockpit of the heavy jet..The co-pilot (Roy
Thinnes) is sucked from his seat & goes flying into the wild blue space..the navigator (Erik Estrada) is killed by a falling
instrument panel..the pilot (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) is blinded..in great pain (unable to speak clearly & with continuity..)
& cannot fly the aircraft..Nancy (Karen Black), the flight attendant (scared but cool) has to maneuver the jumbo to safety..("Something
hit us! All the flight crew is either dead or..or badly injured! There's no one left to fly the plane! Help us! Oh, my God...help
us!")
On the ground everyone has been alerted..Joe Patroni (George Kennedy--competent
& desperate) vice president of Columbia Airlines Operations & Alan Murdock (Charlton Heston--Nancy's lover), a brave
chief instructor pilot, decide to meet the jetliner (with 120 passengers) for a daring midair rescue.
Among the passengers : a famous movie star Gloria Swanson (" Every morning is
beautiful..You're just too young to know."); a lovely teen-ager awaiting kidney transplant (Linda Blair); the wife & son
of the airport operations chief (Susan Clark & Brian Morrison); two nuns (Martha Scott & Helen Reddy); plus a "needlepoint
woman"; an "hostile man"; a "dowager with dog"; a Rock star & two Rock singers.
"Airport 1975" marked the 4th happy co-starring of Heston with Martha Scott..They
were together on Broadway, & she played his mother in both "The Ten Commandments" & "Ben-Hur".
For all the lovers of disaster films, this old-fashioned "Grand Hotel" of a movie
does offer excitement, suspense & breathtaking shots of 747 death-defying flight.. just yards above the peaks of the Rocky
Mountains..
By Robert Frangie
FSPLANET.COM
Well, I'm not really a movie lover. I dare say that most of the time I do not enjoy
watching movies at all, especially when we go to the movies/cinema (poof poof!!) it's like I'm being sacrificed there(!?!)
You know, I really CAN'T stand sitting still for almost 2 hrs in a dark place staring at a flickering screen (!)
But there are certain movies that I do enjoy watching them over and over again
and one of these lucky films (to be chosen by me!!) is AIRPORT 1975.
I first watched this movie when I was just 5 or 6 back in the early '80s
('81/'82). At that moment it appeared to me that I like it and thought it would be good to become a pilot. Then very unexpectedly
I came across that fabulous film once more in 1987 and this time I fell in love with it (actually I fell in love with its
Captain Stacey(Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) and made my mind to become a pilot (what shall I do that am a girl and cannot become
a pilot in the after- the- Islamic- rvolution Iran, sigh!!). Anyway, I so enjoyed the movie for the second time that
used to watch it every day after returning from the school (I even studied and prepared my homeworks during playing
it!!)but unfortunately one day, the Betamax tape and video couldn't stand the overwtching of mine and
the tape jammed and was eaten by the video.Ah, you should have seen me at that moment.Being shocked, I Nervously did my best
to release the tape from around the video tape but the result was disasterous and the tape was finally cut >_< Oh My,
I could never watch the midair collision anymore (but I was fortunately given another shiny copy of the movie but within a
year it got all kinds of scratches on it so the video couldn't track some certain parts of it anymore!!!) Again I was bought
another copy whose picture was not as crystal clear as the previous ones but who cares!!( please note that buying and selling
of the foreign movies and video equipments was/ somehow is illegal after the '79 revolution>_<) hmm, but this time the
video (a professional Sony T7-ME) was suffering the head problem which was needed to be replaced (but you couldn't find an
original one really suiting in the market) so I patiently waited and waited and waited till it finally got its new head and
I enjoyed my fav movie once more. But then we changed our house and moved from a big one to a somehow small apartment (by
comparison) so I couldn't watch it night and day anymore. Then the video faced another difficulty and we called a new technician
(wish him be dead) sure you can't believe it that in front of our very eyes he replaced its brand new Japanese video head
with an used non original one!!
Shame on you Mr. Bostaak (or Bastaak), you ruined our great video player,
I'll never forgive you, NEVEREVER.
Well, because of his kindness I no longer was able to watch my most favourite movie,
even when we bought our first vhs video player/recorder (a great Panasonic J22) back in 1991, it was impossible to make a
copy of. So I was somehow forgetting all about the planes and my beloved captain(!!) till I saw an announcemt of it being
shown on the Satellite (also an illegal equipment!!) On Kanal D at 2.30 in the morning. So I sit awake till then and then...BINGO,
I saw it once more and made a copy on the vhs tape (but there was a minor problem, it was a Turk channel so the movie is also
dubbed in Turkish which I can't make any heads or tails out of it!!)
Thanks to the Internet World and Online Markets I found a copy of it availably
on dvd, so I asked a relative to order it for me and bring it here and thankfully I now have my dvd widescreen version of
"Airport 1975" with a superquality picture uncomparable with my old copies. Wow! I still love this movie and do go for it!
~_^.
Hey, we still got that good old T7 video and once in a decade(!) make use of it
to watch some small parts of very urgently needed to watch Betamax tapes. Huh, I tried to watch a video through it the
other day and noticed that it stops playing after just some seconds, so it itched me to open it (I had done it before right
after it was being robbed out of its head and had done some kind of engineering to make it able to at least play my movie,
what a gal I am!?!) and did open it and noticed that the tape leader device vibrates a lot and this makes the system feel
as the tape is being jammed and it stops the playback (I told you that it was a professional one back in its time) By finding
the source of this malfunction, I used a very ordinay thread and attached it to the tape leader, then played the video and
found the certain point at which it touches the tape hardly and prevent its normal playback and then, I fixed the thread at
the suitable distance and watched a 2 hr long movie without anydisturbance (except for the bandings and trackings caused by
the strange picture head) So this is a patented result of the Atom Age and is just to my own name!!!?!!!!^_^
Now, my purpose of devoting some pages to only the pictures of this movie is that
I thought there might be some other mad-about-airport 1975 people who seek some photos of it and can't find alot (as I did
not) so this can be a source for those NICE enthusiasts. Enjoy it!
