James Brolin really steals the show here as a crazed war veteran who hijacks a plane and causes utter mayhem with the terrified passengers and crew.Charlto Heston, again our hero, tries to thwart Brolin at every turn, and almost winds up dead for his actions.Jeanne Crain showed here that her film career was ending by having a very benign part as one of the passengers. Leslie Uggams, as a stewardess, comes across as a thin, modern day Hattie McDaniel, acting totally subservient here. This was so unlike her actions in the television masterpiece Backstairs at the White House.The film is definitely exciting and action packed. Even when the hijacker's identity is revealed half-way through the film, we're still in for plenty of excitement and adventure as the plane heads for Moscow.Walter Pidgeon has a small part as a U.S.Senator on his way to a mission by the president.

Another Seventies Disaster, a Disaster Movie that Viewers Today Love to Poke Fun and some even call these Things Camp Classics. But in 1972 it was a Stinker and no Amount of Glossing Over its Inanities could make it anything more than a Boring Bunch of Passengers on board a Commercial Flight with a Former Military Pilot hoping to keep Control of "His" Airplane from a Nutjob Determined to Fill Two Hours of Screen Time with Clichéd Scene Chewing among the Clichéd People that Populate these Things.Bland, Hardly Exciting Waste of Time Watching Blurry Flashbacks that Attempt to Add Weight to the Proceedings and come off as nothing more than Sopa Opera Filler. There isn't an Interesting Character Aboard of the 100 Souls and the Tension is too Choreographed and Badly Edited to Amount to Much. This is Anything but Sure Handed Filmmaking. What's with all the Zooms to the Lipstick Counter, wouldn't One be Enough. The Movie has got no Heart and no Intrigue and Yes, it may be Laughable but at the Expense of Your Wasted Time and Trying to get Any Fun from this is Futile. It is just Plain Bad from the Awkward Beginning to the Overly Staged Ending.

Had this been made by Universal Studios instead of MGM, they might well have called it AIRPORT '72, so closely does it follow the template of that popular disaster movie series; it even casts Charlton Heston as a pilot two years prior to his playing a similar role in AIRPORT 1975. The film introduces us to the personal lives of several passengers, including a U.S. Senator (Walter Pidgeon), a jazz cellist (football legend Roosevelt Grier), a smart-mouthed teenage girl (Susan Dey from The Partridge Family), and a very pregnant lady (Mariette Hartley, who used to do those cute Polaroid commercials with James Garner)who probably shouldn't be flying to begin with at this late stage. There's also an unusually twitchy Vietnam vet on board (hammily played by James Brolin) which should remove all doubt as to who is leaving scary notes on the bathroom mirror and threatening to blow up the plane if his demand to be flown to Moscow isn't met. Yvette Mimieux and Leslie Uggams appear as two of the best-looking flight attendants in aviation history (they were called stewardesses back then, but then again that was a time when you could also smoke openly on a commercial airplane.) TV's Claude Akins shows up in the control tower, essentially playing George Kennedy. This sounds pretty ridiculous, and in some ways it is, but director John Guillermin (The Blue Max, The Towering Inferno) keeps up a brisk pace and makes this quite watchable, for what it is.

Considering the popularity of the disaster-movie heyday of the 1970s, it’s surprising that I took so long to catch this one; perhaps I thought that, having already watched AIRPORT 1975 (1974), made it somewhat redundant. Truth be told, I taped it twice off TV (both local and Cable, though always in pan-and-scan) – but only managed to get to it via Warners’ bare-bones DVD (released as part of a batch of “Cult Camp Classics”, which also included the similarly airborne flick ZERO HOUR! [1957]). This was also Charlton Heston’s introduction to the genre – he would follow it with EARTHQUAKE (1974), the aforementioned AIRPORT 1975, TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976) and GRAY LADY DOWN (1978): all of these apart from the first one, I was only familiar with via a childhood viewing on Italian TV but, since I own the lot on DVD-R, I now opted to include the last three in my ongoing Heston tribute.Anyway, the film itself isn’t too bad as these things go (in the AIRPORT [1970] mold yet anticipating, in fact emerging as slightly superior to, any of the sequels) – but, having watched it, I can’t say that the epithet of “Camp” was too far off in its case! This has to do as much with the dated feel of it all (the look, the soundtrack, the politics) as the contrived melodramatics of the plot (married pilot Heston has had a fling with stewardess Yvette Mimieux – his kid sister from DIAMOND HEAD [1963]! – whose new beau is, of all people, the co-pilot…and, amid this soap opera stuff, he has to contend with an unbalanced soldier – an eye-rolling showcase for James Brolin – who threatens the plane with a bomb because he wants to defect to Russia!). The brief flashes to the corny Heston/Mimieux romance and Brolin’s back-story (whose deranged state-of-mind eventually transforms into a fantasy sequence depicting his reception by the Soviets!) add to the fun factor.The solid MGM production managed a fair name cast (a given for this type of film, going back to the grand-daddy of them all – THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY [1954]): also appearing in the film are Claude Akins (in a one-scene role as a George Kennedy/Joe Patroni wannabe, guiding the plane-in-peril towards a safe landing in Alaska), Walter Pidgeon (as an elderly Senator whose destination, a fishing trip with his teenage son, is diverted by a direct call from the U.S. President!), Jeanne Crain (as a passenger whose shaky relationship with her husband is saved when he uncharacteristically decides to turn heroic and confronts Brolin) and Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier (as a cello-playing jazz musician who, sitting next to Brolin, is first alerted to his disturbed personality – ironically, it was Heston’s personal intervention that won Brolin a seat on the plane in the first place!).Of course, it all ends badly for Brolin – as he finds the Russians aren’t as willing to obtain his services as he had anticipated; just as predictably, Heston – who has to take a lot of crap, and a good trashing, from Brolin during the flight – stays behind to fight for his plane…which he does almost at the cost of his own life. For the record, director Guillermin would go on to co-direct what turned out to be perhaps the definitive disaster epic of the age – THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974); incidentally, I’ve just acquired one of the two novels on which that film was based and, besides, I need to pick up its 2-Disc “Special Edition” re-issue – as well as the equivalent one for another touchstone of the genre, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) – which I’ve been postponing long enough already...