The Concorde: Airport '79

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The Concorde...Airport '79

Directed by	David Lowell Rich
Produced by	Jennings Lang
Written by	Jennings Lang (story) Eric Roth (screenplay)
Starring	Alain Delon Susan Blakely Robert Wagner
Music by	Lalo Schifrin
Cinematography	Philip H. Lathrop
Editing by	Dorothy Spencer
Distributed by	Universal
Release date(s)	August 17, 1979
Running time	123 min.
Language	English
Preceded by	Airport '77
IMDb profile

The Concorde...Airport '79 is a 1979 American disaster film (in the UK, it was released a year later as Airport '80: The Concorde). The film was the fourth and final installment of the Airport series and is widely considered the poorest effort of the series. Upon the film's release, it was universally derided by critics. Despite poor reviews, the film made US$13 million [1] at the box office.

Some, such as All Movie Guide's Bruce Eder have interpreted the film as a self-parody, due to the film's outrageous premise, situations, and casting. In The Concorde...Airport '79, the airplane rolls inverted, which, among other aerobatcis, would be difficult for even the most experienced pilot to accomplish safely. Also notable is the casting of Mercedes McCambridge as a Russian Olympics coach. For a period in the 1950s, McCambridge was blacklisted during the Red Scare in America.

Many of the flying sequences in the movie feature Concorde F-BTSC. Coincidentally this aircraft, operating as Air France Flight 4590, is the same Concorde that crashed into a hotel after take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport on July 25, 2000 killing all on board, and four on the ground. This accident led to permanent grounding of the Concordes, in 2003.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Trivia
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Plot

Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) co-pilots the inaugural flight of the first Concorde supersonic jetliner owned by an American airline with Paul Metrand (Alain Delon). Unfortunately, anti-Concorde protests are nothing compared to the threats to this plane: a reporter Maggie Whelan (Susan Blakely) is on board, and she has hold of documents that indict her boyfriend Kevin Harrison (Robert Wagner), an arms manufacturer, for illegal weapons sales to communist countries during the Cold War. He is determined to destroy the Concorde if that's what it will take to silence the woman.

[edit] Cast

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 Sands
Bibi Andersson as Francine
Charo as Margarita
John Davidson as Robert Palmer
Andrea Marcovicci as Alicia Rogov
Martha Raye as Loretta
Cicely Tyson as Elaine
Jimmie Walker as Boise
David Warner as Peter O'Neill
Mercedes McCambridge as Nelli
Monica Lewis as Gretchen
Stacy Heather Tolkin as Irina

[edit] Trivia

The movie was parodied in an issue of MAD Magazine because of the plot; first introducing the Concorde as a Mach 2 airliner, and then the slightly faster surface-to-air missile. ^[1]