Just watched 1957’s Zero Hour!, another gift from Turner Classic Movies. Zero Hour(!) is the basis of the plot and many many jokes in the greatest spoof film of all, Airplane! It’s all here… Ted Striker (same name) follows his girl (wife in this movie) onto a plane to patch up their relationship. The choice of dinner is meat or fish and the fish is poisoned. The flight crew have the fish and only Ted Striker, who led a disastrous air raid during the war, has any flight experience. With his girl by his side talking to the ground and a random doctor tending to the sick, he’s coaxed down by an airport crew led by a man who hates him.
At no fault of the film, it was a hilarious watch. It’s a fairly good movie as a air disaster suspense film, but a great inadvertent comedy. Everything is here… they are on instruments, Joey, have you ever been in a cockpit before?, pouring lights onto the field, you’re coming in too fast!, good luck, we’re all counting on you, and so much more. The movie even has an auto-pilot (non-inflatable) and its very own Johnny. Hell, the guy on the ground still picked the wrong week to quit smoking.
Now, as a dramatic film, sometimes the film is kind of sluggish, like a wet sponge. But other times it works well. It’s a little uneven but that’s ok. I generally liked it, though still hard to separate the two films.
Airplane! still has plenty of its own original jokes… not everything is taken from this film. But enough is. I’m kind of amazed that, in 1980, Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker were able to ape a film I doubt many people remembered and still made it work. Surely that’s partly due to all the Airport movies from the previous decade but it’s a hoot they borrowed so heavily from the earlier flick.
So, yeah, I kind of recommend this old flick. Partly it works as a progenitor of the air disaster films that were big in the late 70s, partly for being a pretty good suspense film, but mainly for its inadvertent comedy for those of us steeped in Airplane!
Catch it occasionally on TCM, I suppose.
Score: 81