Remember when you got a full meal on domestic flights? When you’d board a plane with no security line? When female flight attendants were called “stewardesses” (and they all were female)?
Remember flying?
On Netflix my wife and I stumbled on the 1980 film “Airplane!” Remember when comedies were actually full of laughs?
Of course not all were. But this one sure was. The gags were sometimes lame, yet funny for their very lameness, with puns abounding. This film’s iconic signature piece of dialog:
“Surely you can’t be serious.”
“I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.”
“Airplane!” was, again, very much a time capsule. There was political incorrectness you couldn’t get away with now. Like two Black passengers using dialect so thick it needed subtitles. When a stewardess can’t understand them, a white passenger (played by Barbara Billingsley, who my wife remembered as Beaver’s mom) steps up to interpret, saying, “I speak jive.” Hearing her do so was jarring.
Both pilot and co-pilot are incapacitated by sickness, and stewardess Elaine takes one of their seats. Instructed to press the “automatic pilot” button, it inflates a pilot-shaped balloon into the other seat. The sexual aspects of Elaine’s relationship with the automatic pilot are tastefully explored.
Meantime, Elaine’s (other) boyfriend, Striker, couldn’t get past his WWII fighter pilot tragedy. This couple didn’t seem to have aged in the intervening 35 years, but never mind that detail. Anyhow, Elaine, finally having had enough of Striker’s crippling emotional baggage, left him behind when boarding the plane. He determines to overcome his fear of flying and go after her.
“Smoking or non-smoking?” the ticket agent asks him. (Remember smoking on planes?)
“Smoking,” Striker answers, so he’s handed a ticket that’s literally spewing a plume of smoke.
My wife chimed in, “He’s going to save the plane.”
She’s always right; of course he does. And they live happily ever after. (It helps if you never age beyond twenty.)
The autopilot, it seems, also lives happily ever after, with an inflated female counterpart.
We give this film two thumbs up, four stars, and a partridge in a pear tree.
