Airplane!

Airplane!

“Airplane!” is a comedy that follows in the tradition of high school skits, the old Sid Caesar TV show, Mad magazine and those dog-eared screenplays people’s nephews write instead of going to college. It’s sophomoric, obvious, predictable, corny and quite often very funny. And the reason it’s funny at all is because it’s so sophomoric, predictable etc., i.e., like a joke we’ve heard before.

Doctor: I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.

That sort of humor went out with Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis and knock-knock jokes. That’s why it’s so funny. Movie comedies these days are so hung up on being contemporary, radical, outspoken, cynically satirical and box-office oriented that they sometimes forget to be funny silly funny. They also have lost their nerve to be as corny as “Airplane!” to actually invite loud groans from the audience. The recent “Wholly Moses,” for example, is no doubt a smarter comedy than this one but the problem was we didn’t laugh at it.

“Airplane!” has two sources for its inspiration. One is obviously “Airport” (1970) and all of its sequels and imitations; the other might not come immediately to mind unless you’re a fan of those late-night movies where you’re never sure what decade they came from (the commercials are always in black and white). It’s “Zero Hour” (1957), starring those B-movie stalwarts Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell.

“Airplane!” comes from the same studio (Paramount) and therefore is able to lovingly borrow the same plot (airliner imperiled after crew are stricken with food poisoning). The “Zero Hour” crisis situation (how can we get the airplane down?) also was borrowed for that terrible movie about Karen Black taking instructions from the ground.

“Airplane!” has two desperately sincere people in the cockpit: Julie Hagerty, as the stewardess, and Robert Hays, as a former Air Force pilot whose war trauma has made him afraid to fly. (The cockpit also contains one of those automatic pilots who begin steering after the human pilots lose consciousness but never mind.)

The picture gets all it can out of those previous movies. There’s a little old lady (like Helen Hayes in “Airport”), a guitar-strumming nun (like Helen Reddy in “Airport 1975”) and even a critically ill little girl being flown somewhere for an emergency operation (Linda Blair played it in “Airport 1975”). You can predict what happens when the nun’s guitar knocks loose the little girl’s intravenous feed and she starts to die while all the passengers join hands and sing.

But the funniest sequence occurs during a flashback explaining how our stewardess and pilot first met and fell in love years ago. The scene takes place in an exotic bar that looks like something out of Casablanca, until somebody is hurled toward the jukebox and it starts playing “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees. Then it turns into a devastating parody of all those disco scenes where John Travolta defied gravity to impress some chickadee while nobody else was looking except us.

The movie called “Airplane!” is basically a satirical collection of old movie clichés. Lloyd Bridges, who plays the ground-control officer, appears to make fun of most of his serious roles. A big laugh comes when the opening titles refer unexpectedly to “Jaws.” The new nervous pilot is talked back into the cockpit in a scene from “Knute Rockne, All American.” And soap opera love scenes are played straight. None of this is great comic artistry, but if “Airplane!” lacks originality in comedy it makes up for in eagerness to filch or duplicate anything that might work.

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