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19 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Classiest cast of the "Airport" sequels and most serious., 30 March 2000
Author: Poseidon-3 from Cincinnati, OH

Landing after the TV sitcom-level cast/plot of "Airport 1975", but arriving before the ludicrous "The Concorde-Airport '79" is this slick disaster film entry. Featuring Oscar-winning and nominated stars like Lemmon, Grant, de Havilland, Quinlan, Kennedy and Stewart, it also offers one of the best caliber casts of the '70's disaster cycle. There is no deep thinking involved in watching the film, but it does offer some watery thrills and some fun thrashing around as the plane first skips along the surface of the water and then slips under. Suspense builds as the pressure continues to wreak havoc on the plane's outer skin and, unusually for an "Airport" film, pretty many lives are claimed! The death toll in this film is higher than the other three combined. It's great to see so many once and future stars flopping around in the underwater tomb, but the main attraction is Lee Grant. Clocking in with only about a dozen or so total minutes of screen time, she is utterly hilarious and unforgettable as a shrewish, boozy, sarcastic lush. No one is safe from her rude, brash comments and she is a joy to behold for bad-move connoisseurs. Her husband in the film is Christpher Lee. Fortunately, they didn't marry offscreen or she would have become Lee Lee, but that's another story.......

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15 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Mid Air Ocean Caper Gone Awry, 29 July 2006

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Gazillionaire James Stewart is shipping his collection of art to a museum and he's using his private jet to fly the collection and a few friends down to meet him in Florida.

Of course this attracts the attention of a few crooks who have a pretty well thought out plan and the copilot, Robert Foxworth, working with them. Of course all good plans go awry and they go down in the Bermuda Triangle into some relatively shallow area of the Atlantic.

Hey they could have gone down and been lost for decades like the Titanic was.

That's essentially the plot here and in true Seventies disaster film tradition you load the screen with big names, dress them fashionably and put them in harm's way. The rest of the film is devoted to their rescue.

Incidentally the footage devoted to the air sea rescue is the best thing about Airport 77. No member of the audience will not go away impressed with the U.S. Navy's capabilities in that regard.

Jack Lemmon is the pilot and in an action role which is normally against type for him, he does quite well. Almost twenty years before he supported James Stewart in Bell, Book,and Candle and now the billing is most definitely reversed.

My favorites in the film are Joseph Cotten and Olivia DeHavilland, a classy and elegant pair of passengers who so typify the glamor of old Hollywood.

Christopher Lee also performs against type, he's not the villain here in fact he turns out quite the hero among the passengers. Lee Grant is his trollop of a wife and I remember seeing this in theaters and the shouts for joy from the audience when Brenda Vaccaro punches her out.

I'm not sure which is a wilder rescue this one or that other James Stewart film The Flight of the Phoenix. There's no way any of them should survive.

But this is a Hollywood disaster epic, so all things are possible.

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15 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Still A Fave, 28 February 2004
Author: richard.fuller1

Of all the disaster flicks, this seems to be the one I enjoy most, perhaps it was the first one I would see.

But looking back at the hot pants in Poseidon Adventure & Dunaway's dress and the tuxedoes in Towering Inferno, Airport '77 is quite an elegantly dressed cast, aren't they?

The movie would get famed Hollywood fashion expert Edith Head to dress the cast and it shows. Anyone else would have made Brenda Vaccarro look obese trying to put her in that pullover sweater.

Airplane! would make fun of Edith Head being credited for '77 like that, by crediting their own costumer, but 27 years later, the wardrobe makes the cast of '77 appear tremendously dashing, giving the tragedy that greater a feel as well.

Jack Lemmon was an incredible standout as the hero of the piece, in comparison to Paul Newman's sexism in Towering Inferno (he never speaks to Jennifer Jones as a human during their entire ordeal with the children) or Heston's stiffness or McQueen's inexpressiveness.

Two years after her Oscar nomination, Vaccarro was hardly the disaster flicks idea of a leading lady as well, so she is quite a one-of-a-kind casting also.

When I was little, I was most fascinated with Arlene Golonka, who I knew from the Andy Griffith show.

Later, identifying the rest of the cast just made it more and more fun. Dracula, Buck Rogers, Kolchak the Nightstalker (Darren McGavin & Jack Lemmon were a powerhouse duo).

Then the names and stars figured into it. DeHavilland, Cotten, Grant. No one looked more out of place than Olivia DeHavilland in an underwater airplane.

Robert Hooks as the crippled bartender and Tom Sullivan (who is actually blind) as the pianist added even more flavor.

There is M. Emmet Walsh, "The Name, But What Which One Is Him?" actor. He is the doctor, and I do enjoy his one scene when he explains who he really is.

Monica Lewis, disaster movie staple. She would appear in Earthquake and Concorde: Airport '79. Check out her expression as she and Olivia DeHavilland enter the lifeboat. It reads "Miss DeHavilland, I'm one of your biggest fans. I really enjoyed you in Gone With The Wind." Lucy Ricardo lives.

Should it have been a commercial airline, instead of a private plane? Not necessarily.

I enjoy watching it now and observing a few of the female extras at the beginning of the crash don't seem to be present anymore by the end. It seems that they weren't available for filming then.

I would argue, as a movie, that this one is more fun to watch than the first one. Lancaster and Seberg in the first Airport movie are comical to me trying to be so serious.

And the second Airport movie, Airport '75, is funnier than Airplane.

There is a very strong and different feel from Airport '77 than the other Airport flicks or the other disaster films in general.

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16 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
One of the better disaster films!, 23 August 2006

Author: boyinflares from New Zealand

Following the not-so-spectacular "Airport 1975" comes "Airport '77" which is a welcome addition to the Disaster Movie genre. In typical "Airport" fashion, a routine plane ride, this time carrying various celebrities and other high-profile people, gets into some trouble when it crashes into the ocean in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle....

Though the decor of the flash plane filled with VIP's is dreary compared to the fabulous colours of the chairs in "Airport 1975", the characters are a major improvement, along with the actual danger that the passengers and crew are placed in.

In typical Disaster Movie style, the cast is large, and many of them are forgettable, however, stand-out performances in "Airport '77" include Jack Lemmon in a serious role as the likable Captain Gallagher, Lee Grant is Karen Wallace a VIP guest of the nasty variety, the underrated Pamela Bellwood as a young mother, the lovely Kathleen Quinlann is as usual outstanding, but unfortunately under-used here, but the stand-out star of the film is of course Brenda Vaccaro as Captain Gallagher's girlfriend Even Clayton. Vaccaro is certainly one of the better leading ladies in a Disaster Movie, but is also a surprising choice. Nevertheless, she is fantastic, it is a shame she is not more recognized for her work.

Overall, "Airport '77" is a terrific, and often overlooked addition to the genre, with a super cast, great direction, and a very interesting scene in which the plane is raised from the ocean, according to the credits, this is the actual method used by the Navy, which is a nice addition to the film.

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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Surprisingly appealing rescue movie..., 12 August 2007

Author: dwpollar from Evansville, Indiana USA

1st watched 8/12/2007 - 6 out of 10(Dir-Jerry Jameson): Surprisingly appealing rescue movie despite some of the silly characterizations and typical goofiness that tends to accompany these type of movies. The thing that the movie does well is hold your attention to the very end. You genuinely care for some of the characters involved primarily because of the good acting by leads like Jack Lemmon, who plays the pilot in this one. The danger also seems very real all the way up to the end which adds to it's believability. The movie starts setting up the story as an airline president and master collector, played by Jimmie Stewart, is promoting the opening of a museum and a new plane that will be sent down to the island paradise with his very special guests. Included on the plane are his daughter and grandson, whom he has not seen for a very long time. A small group including one of the co-pilots decide to capture the plane while it's airborne, putting the passengers to sleep, in hopes to take it's valuables and run off to South America. Their plan goes awry when the pilot crashes in a shallow part of the ocean(wherever that might be) in the Bermuda triangle. The rest of the movie is an underwater rescue movie as the plane drifts to the shallow bottom. There are the usual stupid moments, like allowing the pilot to go nuts but the women passengers can't for some reason, and the attempt to save the plane in-tact with the people is a little far-fetched. These are the moments that get you talking to the screen. But despite this, the overall effect of the movie is satisfying which I honestly didn't expect because these movies usually don't appeal to me. I really think that the strong presence of the believable hero in Jack Lemmon as the pilot really helped the movie become a little more than the typical disaster movie for me.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Great premise, average results, 26 August 2007

Author: TrevorAclea from London, England

Airport '77 has the best pitch of the series, though it never quite makes enough of it: this time a private plane filled with art treasures and millionaire passengers (it's so high-tech it even has an optical video disc player!) en route to the opening of James Stewart's new museum are hijacked by art thieves. Just to add to their woes, while flying low to avoid radar they crash into an oil rig and end up submerged on an unstable ocean ledge in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle while the 747 does a very bad impersonation of a submarine. Since the Navy can't lower the ocean, the only thing to do is to raise the Titanic – sorry, raise the Jumbo Jet…

Unfortunately it never quite makes enough of it, with so much time setting up the plot and the characters that the movie's half over before the plane hits the water and there's less time for plot twists or surprises than you'd like. It doesn't help that, hijackers aside, the passengers are a generally likable bunch of old Hollywood and beloved TV stars - Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon), Dracula (Christopher Lee), Kolchak (Darren McGavin), Hooky from Zulu (James Booth), Rick Deckard's boss (M. Emmett Walsh), Buck Rogers (Gil Gerard), Scarlet O'Hara's rival (Olivia De Havilland) and the guy who fingered Harry Lime (Joseph Cotton) among them – with only Christopher Lee's saintly marine biologist and his drunk wife Lee Grant offering much in the way of dramatic conflict. Still, despite a few plot holes (you'd think someone from the oil rig they crashed into would report it) it passes the time professionally enough and it's hard to dislike.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Wow, i was impressed...really impressed., 19 January 2008
Author: Aaron Hassard

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I was looking at Airplane on wikipedia a few weeks ago, i then clicked on a link that was "Airport" and that's how i found out about this series of disaster flicks. I decided to watch this on Sky Movies to see what they were like before buying the Box Set, i was really impressed, it was a very enjoyable film, even if it was abit far-fetched.

It's basically about a luxury Airplane which, when Hi-jacked, crashes into an oil rig and crashes into the ocean. The original crew, try to get the passengers to safety, which they eventually do, thanks to The Navy!

All in all, i would recommend this to anyone really, it's very enjoyable and perfect to kill a couple of hours.

8/10

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
OK, so this isn't "Casablanca", 25 February 2006

Author: forever_swirl from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

OK, so this isn't the greatest film ever made, but not all films have to be Shakespeare to be entertaining. I mean, have you seen some of the garbage big stars make today? It's not all for the Oscars, believe me. This one of those great movies you can actually enjoy for a few hours. An early popcorn flick - like all the disaster films were.

In this sequel, Jack Lemmon plays the ever-present Heroic Captain who must save the day as his ship gets a) hijacked, b) crashed into the ocean and c) lost by the search planes. Sure, the plot's out there - no way would a plane not break apart under the ocean, etc, etc, but who cares? Sure, the ending's basically a commerical for the NAVY. It's all fun - and tasteful fun - not the tacky, cheap, makes-you-feel-like-you've-killed-brain-cells-by-watching feel of "The Swarm" or "Airport 75" or "79".

The best bits are the action scenes - when the hijackers take over, when the plane crashes into the ocean and the thrilling rescue mission at the end. I was LITERALLY on the edge of my chair!

My favorite parts were really the relationships on the plane. Sure, they were underwritten and great actors were ill-used (*ehm* Christopher Lee, Olivia De Havilad and Joseph Cotton), but there were hints of realism there. The touching love between the piano player and Kathleen Quinlan. The lovely reunion between rich folks De Havilad and Cotton (and she looked so dignified when tumbling around in the sinking craft!). The sweet 70's romance between Jack Lemmon and Brenda V. (and she was more James Stewart's secetary then Head Stewardess!). I think I liked that relationship the most because they did seem to have actual chemistry - something that was lacking in even the great "Airport".

OK, so this isn't Oscar material, but it's a great popcorn flick right up there with "Towering Inferno" and "Poseidon Adventure". The actors do seem to take themselves seriously (well, except for the bitchy wife of rich chap Christopher Lee, Lee Grant) and aren't totally phoning in their performances. Lemmon gives the best performance here and he seems to relish the role of hero. Good for him to break the mold! Too bad he couldn't do it more often.

BOTTOM LINE: A darn good action flick that ranks up there with "Towering Inferno" and "Poseidon Adventure". Watch this if you want to be thrilled and watch the time fly by.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Average disaster movie, 26 December 1999
Author: JeffG. from Boston, MA

This is a so-so movie. Not as good as the previous two Airport movies. The movie gets off to a slow start, introducing the characters and trying to bring some character development to the film. And not doing too well in that regard. Even the late, great Jimmy Stweart doesn't add much to the film. As with the other movies, you have to suspend your disbelief at times. While not the best installment of the series, this is a somewhat entertaining disaster movie. Though only recommended if you've seen everything else in the store.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Not for claustrophobics, 16 March 2008

Author: Petri Pelkonen (petri_pelkonen@hotmail.com) from Finland

Airport '77 is the second sequel in the Airport franchise.Boeing 747 is carrying some valuable art of wealthy philanthropist Philip Stevens.A group of art thieves hijack the plane and soon they crash it to the Bermuda triangle.The passengers survive but for how long? Jerry Jameson's disaster movie from 1977 is a mighty entertaining movie.It's packed with the brightest stars.James Stewart is Philip Stevens.Jack Lemmon is Captain Don Gallagher.That's two of my favorite actors.The real lady Olivia de Havilland plays Emily Livingston.Joseph Cotten plays Nicholas St. Downs III.George Kennedy is Joe Patroni.Christopher Lee is Martin Wallace.Lee Grant is Karen Wallace.M.Emmett Walsh plays Dr.Williams.So there are many great stars in a great jam.Airport '77 offers many intense moments under the water.Everybody not suffering from claustrophobia should see this.

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