Film
Bristol Film Festival: Airplane!
- Director
- Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, David Zucker
- Certificate
- PG
- Running Time
- 88 mins
Back in the ‘70s, cinemas became clogged with increasingly ludicrous Airport flicks in which the starry likes of George Kennedy and Robert Wagner faced all manner of airborne peril. The genre was clearly ripe for spoofing, but who could have imagined the spoof would become a genre all of its own, with permutations of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team at the helm and Leslie Nielsen usually in a starring role? Technically, the lesser-known Kentucky Fried Movie came first, but 1980’s Airplane! established the ground rules of that now-familiar scattershot style: not all the gags are funny, but they come so thick and fast that you’re never more than 30 seconds away from a guffaw. The plot has washed-up fighter pilot Ted Striker (Robert Stack) pursuing his stewardess ex-girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagarty) onto a flight, only to find himself forced to land the jumbo after paedophile Captain Oveur (Peter Graves) – they wouldn’t get away with those gags today – and his co-pilot Murdock (Kareen Abdul-Jabbar) contract food-poisoning. Every cliché is mercilessly parodied (the terrorist, the terminally ill child, and so on), with plenty of clever wordplay and sight gags. The cast play it all perfectly straight, especially Lloyd Bridges as the deranged air traffic controller. Even the Elmer Bernstein score is hilarious.
This Bristol Film Festival screening is the second outing for Airplane! beneath Concorde itself at Aerospace Bristol. And, yes, you will have an opportunity to nose around the iconic supersonic craft before the screening. Just don’t call anybody Shirley. Go here for ticket information.
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