Airport Terminal Pack [2 Discs] DVD

Airport
Airport had enough plot and enough star power in its cast for three feature films, and it only encompassed about half of the complexity or characters found in Arthur Hailey's best-selling potboiler. Essentially built around 12 harrowing hours at a major Midwestern airport, the film had everything an audience of the period could have wanted -- suspense, omance, drama, and comedy -- all spread across a vast canvas. Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is the manager of Lincoln Airport, facing a night beset by the worst blizzard in a decade, a wife (Dana Wynter) who announces she wants a divorce, a primary runway blocked by an airliner stuck in a snowdrift, and a governing board ready to fire him. Bakersfeld's cynical, smooth-talking brother-in-law, Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), won't let up on his criticism of the management at Lincoln, but he has his own problems as well, mostly in the form of a young stewardess, Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset), who is pregnant by him and whom he finds he genuinely loves. Add to that the presence of an old lady stowaway (Helen Hayes) and a mentally disturbed passenger (Van Heflin) carrying a bomb, and there's more than enough plot to keep viewers engrossed for two hours plus. Airport became one of the top-grossing movies of its era, racking up seven-digit box-office numbers and spawning an entire film genre -- the disaster movie. With Jean Seberg, George Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Barry Nelson, and Maureen Stapleton filling out the rest of the leading roles, there was something for almost everyone in this film. The movie still has a lot to offer if only as a prime example of Hollywood at its most successfully glitzy, but, if possible, viewers should try and see the letterboxed version of Airport on DVD (released May 2001). ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Airport 1975
In the wake of the 45-million-dollar gross of the original Airport (1970), Universal was all but required by an act of Congress to produce Airport '75. Charlton Heston heads the all-star cast as Alan Murdock, the former test pilot who must keep a disabled 747 from crashing in flames. The crisis begins when a businessman (Dana Andrews), flying his small private plane, suffers a fatal heart attack and the plane smashes into the cockpit of the 747. Following Murdock's radioed instructions, stewardess Nancy Pryor (Karen Black) takes over the controls. The special-guest passenger lineup includes Helen Reddy as a singing nun (a character wickedly satirized in the 1980 parody Airplane!), Myrna Loy as an alcoholic, and Sid Caesar as a garrulous passenger. While Airport '75 yielded only 25 million dollars at the box office, the franchise continued, spawning Airport '77 a few years later and Airport '79 two years after that. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Airport '77
Stretching the Airport concept as far as it will go, this third film in the series sticks a jet full of old actors 50 feet underwater in the Bermuda Triangle. Oxygen (and credibility) grows short, and Jimmy Stewart plays an art collector targeted for a heist. Jack Lemmon is the unfortunate pilot, and Christopher Lee shows up along with Brenda Vaccaro, Joseph Cotten, and Olivia de Havilland. Jerry Jameson, auteur of The Bat People, was selected to helm this entry featuring that film's star, Michael Pataki. George Kennedy, the only man to appear in all four Airport films, is along for the ride as well. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Airport '79: Concorde
The fourth Airport film may be the silliest of them all, as George Kennedy returns, this time co-piloting with Alain Delon. The plane is on its way to the Moscow Olympics, has a bomb on board, and gets fired upon with missiles that necessitate flying upside-down. A look at the cast list resembles a bad episode of Fantasy Island, but it's always fun to see shameless touches like casting Mercedes McCambridge (Johnny Guitar) as the coach of the Soviet team. If you don't understand the significance of that choice, you may find this film more tedious than laughable, but fans of bad movies will have a field day, as Jimmie Walker, Charo, and -- oddly enough -- Bibi Andersson rub shoulders with high-altitude disaster. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Cast Burt Lancaster as Mel Bakersfeld Dean Martin as Vernon Demerest Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston Jacqueline Bisset as Gwen Meighen George Kennedy as Patroni Helen Hayes as Ada Quonsett Van Heflin as D.O. Guerrero Maureen Stapleton as Inez Guerrero Barry Nelson as Lt. Anson Harris Dana Wynter as Cindy Lloyd Nolan as Harry Standish Barbara Hale as Sarah John Findlater as Peter Coakley Jesse Royce Landis as Mrs. Harriet DuBarry Mossman Larry Gates as Commissioner Ackerman Peter Turgeon as Marcus Rathbone Whit Bissell as Mr. Davidson Virginia Grey as Mrs. Schultz Eileen Wesson as Judy Paul Picerni as Dr. Compagno Robert Patten as Capt. Benson Clark Howat as Bert Weatherby Lew Brown as Reynolds Jim Nolan as Father Lonigan Patty Poulsen as Joan Ena Hartman as Ruth Milila St. Duval as Sharon Harvey as Sally Albert Reed as Lt. Ned Ordway Nancy Ann Nelson as Bunnie Dick Winslow as Mr. Schultz Lou Wagner as Schuyler Schultz Janis Hansen as Sister Katherine Grace Mary Jackson as Sister Felice Shelly Novack as Rollings Chuck Daniel as Parks Charles Brewer as Diller Charlton Heston as Alan Murdock Karen Black as Chief Stewardess Nancy Pryor George Kennedy as Joseph Patroni Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as Pilot Stacy Susan Clark as Mrs. Patroni Gloria Swanson as Herself Jack Lemmon as Don Gallagher Lee Grant as Karen Wallace Brenda Vaccaro as Eve Clayton Joseph Cotten as Nicholas St. Downs, III Olivia de Havilland as Emily Livingston Darren McGavin as Stan Buchek Christopher Lee as Martin Wallace Robert Foxworth as Chambers Robert Hooks as Eddie George Kennedy as Joe Patroni James Stewart as Philip Stevens Monte Markham as Banker Kathleen Quinlan as Julie Gil Gerard as Frank Powers James Booth as Ralph Crawford Monica Lewis as Anne Maide Norman as Dorothy Pamela Bellwood as Lisa Arlene Golonka as Mrs. Jane Stern Tom Sullivan as Steve M. Emmet Walsh as Dr. Williams Michael Richardson as Walker Michael Pataki as Wilson George Furth as Gerald Lucas Alain Delon as Capt. Paul Metrand Susan Blakely as Maggie Whelan Robert Wagner as Kevin Harrison Sylvia Kristel as Isabelle George Kennedy as Capt. Joe Patroni Eddie Albert as Eli Bibi Andersson as Francine Charo as Margarita John Davidson as Robert Palmer Andrea Marcovicci as Alicia Martha Raye as Loretta Cicely Tyson as Elaine Jimmie "J.J." Walker as Boise David Warner as O'Neill Mercedes McCambridge as Nelli Avery Schreiber as Coach Markov Sybil Danning as Amy Monica Lewis as Gretchen Nicolas Coster as Dr. Stone Robin Gammell as William Halpern Jon Cedar as Froelich

Crew Burton Miller - Costume Designer Newt Arnold - First Assistant Director David Lowell Rich - Director Dorothy Spencer - Editor Lalo Schifrin - Composer (Music Score) Henry Bumstead - Production Designer Philip H. Lathrop - Cinematographer Jennings Lang - Producer Mary Ann Biddle - Set Designer Mickey Michaels - Set Designer Abe Milrad - Special Effects Universal Hartland - Special Effects James R. Alexander - Sound/Sound Designer George Sawava - Stunts George Sawava - Stunts Coordinator Eric Roth - Screenwriter Jennings Lang - Screenwriter Burton Miller - Costume Designer Newt Arnold - First Assistant Director David Lowell Rich - Director Dorothy Spencer - Editor Lalo Schifrin - Composer (Music Score) Henry Bumstead - Production Designer Philip H. Lathrop - Cinematographer Jennings Lang - Producer Mary Ann Biddle - Set Designer Mickey Michaels - Set Designer Abe Milrad - Special Effects Universal Hartland - Special Effects James R. Alexander - Sound/Sound Designer George Sawava - Stunts George Sawava - Stunts Coordinator Eric Roth - Screenwriter Jennings Lang - Screenwriter Burton Miller - Costume Designer Newt Arnold - First Assistant Director David Lowell Rich - Director Dorothy Spencer - Editor Lalo Schifrin - Composer (Music Score) Henry Bumstead - Production Designer Philip H. Lathrop - Cinematographer Jennings Lang - Producer Mary Ann Biddle - Set Designer Mickey Michaels - Set Designer Abe Milrad - Special Effects Universal Hartland - Special Effects James R. Alexander - Sound/Sound Designer George Sawava - Stunts George Sawava - Stunts Coordinator Eric Roth - Screenwriter Jennings Lang - Screenwriter Burton Miller - Costume Designer Newt Arnold - First Assistant Director David Lowell Rich - Director Dorothy Spencer - Editor Lalo Schifrin - Composer (Music Score) Henry Bumstead - Production Designer Philip H. Lathrop - Cinematographer Jennings Lang - Producer Mary Ann Biddle - Set Designer Mickey Michaels - Set Designer Abe Milrad - Special Effects Universal Hartland - Special Effects James R. Alexander - Sound/Sound Designer George Sawava - Stunts George Sawava - Stunts Coordinator Eric Roth - Screenwriter Jennings Lang - Screenwriter

Airport
Airport was widely lambasted by critics for its tried-and-true technique of showcasing a raft of Grand Hotel-style big-name box-office stars in a melodramatic hriller; Judith Crist called it "the best film of 1944." But no one could argue with its success or its influence. Director/screenwriter George Seaton displayed a masterful old hand's touch for showcasing stock characters in a soap opera format, adapting Arthur Hailey's blockbuster novel with Dean Martin as the pilot and a cast top-heavy with stars. Airport won huge audiences and six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, with veteran Helen Hayes, one of the first Oscar winners in 1932, winning a supporting award. The crowd-pleasing behemoth spawned almost a decade's worth of big-budget disaster films, including three inferior sequels, and then another round of disaster spoofs, beginning with 1980's Airplane! ~ Michael Betzold, All Movie Guide
 

Airport 1975
Jack Smight's Airport 1975 was four years and a whole Hollywood world away from George Seaton's Airport. Gone were the likes of Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Van Heflin, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, Helen Hayes, et al., and, on the production end, Alfred Newman, Edith Head, Ernest Laszlo, Preston Ames. In their places were a more ragged, and even downright silly, cast (halfway toward the parody of Airplane!), and a threadbare-looking production -- at least by the standards of a feature film. Indeed, Airport 1975 seems like a hybrid, somewhere between a made-for-TV movie and a theatrical feature. It's shot in Panavision, but offers a John Cacavas score that sounds like a dry run for the music he wrote for Kojak. The opening credits also have a cheap, flat look about them, with minimal style to their design or care in their editing or structure, whereas Airport's opening credits were exciting, as well as a study in slick editing. Even the lack of crowds and extras make the sequel look more like something out of a movie-of-the-week. Once the movie actually gets going, it looks a little better, though the screen is filled with names that would mainly be associated with television in the years to come, including Erik Estrada, Norman Fell, Conrad Janis, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Sid Caesar, Ed Nelson, Beverly Garland, Christopher Norris, and Jerry Stiller, interspersed with such real movie veterans asMyrna Loy (trying to be this film's Helen Hayes) and Gloria Swanson, plus one former star (Dana Andrews) on his last legs. Add to all that one star treading water in his career (Charlton Heston); another collecting his biggest paychecks and on his way to the biggest billing of his career (George Kennedy); one pop singer (Helen Reddy) doing one of the most wretchedly miserable acting turns ever attempted by a vocalist; Linda Blair turning in a performance so frighteningly bad that she makes her role in The Exorcist look benign; and one genuinely talented actress (Karen Black) trapped in the middle of this mess, and you've got the makings for a real train-wreck of a movie. That's what happened on subsequent entries in the series, but what averts the same outcome here is the presence of a suspenseful plot supported by excellent special effects and aerial photography (which can only be appreciated seeing the film letterboxed) and the fact that the three stars and the lesser-known supporting players (such as Alan Fudge and John Lupton) perform well enough so that the movie leaps over the seemingly impossible chasm of its schlocky casting and production and a script so bad that it even has Sid Caesar's character making light of the drinking problem that blighted his life. Needless to say, this was not a movie that producer Jennings Lang was going to be proud of. Like Jaws 2, Jaws 3, etc. from the same studio, it was made to generate easy money for Universal. Interestingly enough, there is one supremely ironic moment early in the film that should have shown anyone involved just how far removed they were from producing anything of real cinematic value. The in-flight movie is George Lucas' American Graffiti, which showed a level of invention and a loose, free-flowing approach to cinematic storytelling that makes this movie seem all the poorer. Indeed, American Graffiti has rated a serious Special Edition DVD from Universal, whereas no one would ever seriously propose a such a release of Airport 1975. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
 

Airport '77
(not reviewed)
 

Airport '79: Concorde
This movie represented the point in the Airport films from Universal at which they directly anticipated Jim Abrahams' Airplane! (1980) in look, execution, and content, and almost mapped out Abrahams' and the Zucker brothers' formula for the successful parodies. Indeed, the shots of the Concorde flying upside down and doing loops and rolls, with appropriate interior scenes depicting the havoc among the passengers, are almost indistinguishable from similar scenes in the Abrahams film and its sequel. Gone is any attempt at recalling the Hollywood glamor or glitziness of the original Airport; the whole movie -- except for one assassination scene early in the picture -- was instead marked by a made-for-television blandness and populated by B- and C-list non-celebrities, late-'70s pop-culture faces (Charo, Jimmie Walker, etc.), spiced with some old-time Hollywood faces (including Martha Raye in a very tiresome gag appearance), two good actors (Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson) actually trying to earn their paychecks amid this silliness, and the rest, including George Kennedy, walking through their roles. One could even question whether this movie belongs in the continuity with the other films in the series, since the Joe Patroni character portrayed here by Kennedy seems to have a completely different professional background from the character of that name that he played in Airport. One also wonders on what basis director David Lowell Rich was selected to direct this film -- could it have been the memory of his debut feature, the Three Stooges' Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959)? The scenes of the actors experiencing the havoc of upside-down flight and other aspects of aerial acrobatics (any of which would have ripped the real Concorde in two) are similar, and it takes a certain knack to get serious actors (as he did with Jerome Cowan et al. in the earlier movie) to engage in nonsense like this without cracking up. As a guide to American popular culture and social attitudes of the period, however, Airport '79: Concorde may also have taken on some unintended value in the decades since its release. The original Airport and its immediate sequel, made nine and five years earlier, respectively, showed an old-time moralizing and moralistic outlook in behavior and taste, both within the context of the action and the broader range of the movies' own orientations; Airport '79: Concorde is so free with its images of people having casual sex and talking about sex (all of this in the pre-AIDS era, almost a last gasp of the sexual revolution), and also casual drug use and other decadent activities, that it seems to emanate from a completely different society, or at least reflect an audience that had changed vastly in what it considered "entertainment" in those nine years. And the choice of Mercedes McCambridge as the coach of the Soviet women's gymnastics team is so knowing a piece of casting that it leads one to suspect that the makers of this movie knew, down to the last frame, exactly how much fun they were having with this last gasp in the series concept. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
 

Disc Title: Airport - People Awards: Alexander Golitzen: Academy, Best Art Direction (winner) Alfred Newman: Academy, Best Original Score (nominated) Alfred Newman: Golden Globe, Best Original Score (nominated) David Moriarty: Academy, Best Sound (nominated) Edith Head: Academy, Best Costume Design (nominated) Ernest Laszlo: Academy, Best Cinematography (nominated) George Kennedy: Golden Globe, Best Supporting Actor (nominated) George Seaton: Academy, Best Adapted Screenplay (nominated) Helen Hayes: Academy, Best Supporting Actress (winner) Jack D. Moore: Academy, Best Art Direction (winner) Maureen Stapleton: Academy, Best Supporting Actress (nominated) Maureen Stapleton: Golden Globe, Best Supporting Actress (winner) Mickey Michaels: Academy, Best Art Direction (winner) Preston Ames: Academy, Best Art Direction (winner) Ronald Pierce: Academy, Best Sound (nominated) Stuart Gilmore: Academy, Best Editing (nominated)

Airport - Film Awards: Academy, Best Picture (nominated) Golden Globe, Best Picture - Drama (nominated)

Disc Title: Airport 1975 - People Awards: Helen Reddy: Golden Globe, New Star of the Year - Female (nominated)

Disc Title: Airport '77 - People Awards: Burton Miller: Academy, Best Costume Design (nominated) Edith Head: Academy, Best Costume Design (nominated) George C. Webb: Academy, Best Art Direction (nominated) Mickey Michaels: Academy, Best Art Direction (nominated)

General Specifications: Language Options: English Subtitle Options: English, Spanish, French Sound Processing: DD5.1: Dolby Digital w/ sub-woofer channel 2: PCM stereo DTS: Digital Theater Systems (akin to 5.1) Additional Features: Original trailers Production notes DVD Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1: Cinemascope 1.85:1: Theatre Wide-Screen MPAA Rating: DVD Discs Included: 2 DVD Sides: 4 DVD DVD Region Code: 1 Content Length: 472 min Part of Series: Franchise Collection   DVD Chapters: Side #1 -- Airport 1. Emergency 2. Disaster Insurance 3. Fringe Benefits 4. Stowaway 5. For Better or for Worse 6. Don't Worry 7. Extra Passenger 8. Full Throttle 9. We're Leaving 10. Check and Report 11. Someone Else 12. Extreme Caution 13. It's Goodbye 14. Mayday 15. Structural Damage 16. Mobile One 17. Shut Down 18. Welcome Home Side #2 -- Airport 1975 1. Main Titles 2. Passengers of Flight 409 3. Welcome Aboard 4. Help Him Untie 5. In-Flight Entertainment 6. Hands On 7. Alternate Heading 8. Impact! 9. The Stewardess Is Flying 10. Big Problem 11. Lost Contact 12. Here Comes TV 13. The Radio's Dead 14. We're Too Low 15. Transfer Attempt 16. On Our Way Down 17. Back on the Ground 18. End Titles Side #3 -- Airport '77 1. Prototype Aircraft (Main Titles) 2. Priceless Cargo 3. Preflight Preparations 4. Cleared for Takeoff 5. Right on Schedule 6. Skyjackers Take Over 7. Into the Bermuda Triangle 8. Unexpected Obstacle 9. Keep It Together 10. "We're on Our Own!" 11. Drown or Sufficate? 12. Opening the Gates of Hell 13. Activate Emergency Beeper 14. Scramble Rescue Units 15. Underwater Pilot 16. Going to Chance It 17. Increase Pressure 18. End Titles Side #4 -- The Concorde: Airport '79 1. Close Call (Main Titles) 2. The Buzzard 3. Terrorists and Assassins 4. Reprogram the Drone 5. A Beautiful Lady 6. Evidence Delivered 7. See You in Paris 8. Launch Attack Drone 9. Fasten Your Seat Belts 10. Scramble Jet Fighters 11. No Brakes! 12. It's Over 13. Sabotage 14. Stop That Man! 15. Gremlins 16. Explosive Decompression 17. Threading the Needle 18. End Titles