It seems appropriate to me that the week I reviewed Airport I should also review the spoof that signaled the end of the Disaster movie era, 1980's classic Airplane!, which is still one of the funniest movies ever made.
The story goes that while writing Kentucky Fried Movie, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker would record late night television, specifically looking to spoof the commercials. One night they recorded the 1957 movie Zero Hour! with Dana Andrews having to land a plane after the pilots succumb to food poisoning. They lifted whole scenes, including line for line dialogue, right from the movie and managed to create comedy gold.
Robert Hays plays Ted Striker, who hasn't been near an airplane since a disastrous mission in The War (what war is never specified). His relationship with girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagerty in her screen debut) is on the rocks. She's a stewardess on a flight from L.A. to Chicago and is planning to leave him. Desperate, he boards the plane. While in flight, everyone who has fish for dinner--which includes the pilot, co-pilot and navigator--becomes violently ill and it's up to Striker to land the plane.
Given the premise, what's a surprise is just how damn funny the movie really is. One of the genius things Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker--or ZAZ as they were referred to in the 80s--did was to hire actors better known for dramatic parts instead of comedic actors. We may think of Leslie Neilson and Lloyd Bridges as great comic actors now, but before 1980, they were straight arrow dramatic guys. Bridges is even a serial hero in 1945's Secret Agent X-9 and Neilson is probably best remembered before this for Forbidden Planet. Peter Graves, who plays Captain Ouver, was best known for Mission: Impossible. Robert Stack was best known as Eliot Ness on The Untouchables. And yet, as Stack himself is reported to have pointed out, the actors were the joke in Airplane!--a joke that works beautifully. The actors' deadpan delivery is a large portion of what makes the movie work. Because while the actors are doing their lines, all manner of chaos is playing out around them, something they largely seem oblivious to.
In fact, the only actor that you could argue had comedy experience at the time was Hays, who was appearing on the TV show Angie when this was done. There's also Stephen Stucker and William Tregoe, both of whom were in Kentucky Fried Movie. If Tregoe's name is unfamiliar, he basically reprises his Count/Counterpoint character from KFM ("I say, let them crash!").
The movie also had the great humor to hire Maureen McGovern as the singing nun. McGovern, of course, did the Oscar winning theme songs to two of the biggest disaster movies of the 1970s, namely The Poseidon Adventure ("A Morning After") and The Towering Inferno ("We've Never Loved Like This Before").
The film is loaded with insane sight gags such as the shelves of mayo in the Mayo Clinic to the horse in the bed. You can literally see it twenty times and still not catch every joke in the movie. That alone might be what makes this film so great. While not quite every joke works, it hits far more than it misses. If this isn't the funniest movie ever made, it's in the top five for sure.
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