Flying High

Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker

Cinerama

Comedy has had a pretty good innings in Wellington of late; from the sublime of Being There, through the slapstick of Pork Pie, via the mirth of the Secret Policeman's Ball, to the ridiculous of Flying High.

Titled Airplane in the US, it is a spoof of the Airport movies with a plot based on the 1950's film Zero Hour - the overall effect is something like the full version of the Crunchie ad stretched out to feature length (and showing a few stretch marks on the way). Because of this it is both anarchic and anachronistic - the lead character is an ex-WWII fighter pilot, but the film is set in our time, and Striker is obviously too young to have flown in that war. The inclusion of the real Ethel Merman in one flashback, and the Saturday Night Fever sequence in another, as well as the jet plane constantly sounding as if it has propellors, are clever but confusing effects. Flying High is a parody of B movies and disaster movies (they're the same thing aren't they?) and, although perhaps not as cleverly done as The Big Bus, the film is still successful in its intent. The script is surprisingly good. While funny word games are not usually found in American films, it is actually the verbal non-sequiturs that save the film (and the audience) from drowning in the usual mire of slapstick that Americans seem to find so funny.

Sight and Sound Success

There is a good combination of visual and verbal humour - the guy looking under the bonnet of the jet and checking its oil would be funny in any film, but the little gags like the shit hitting the fan, and the passengers watching a disaster movie in-flight are just as memorable as the radio problems caused in the cockpit by the pilot's names being Roger and Oveur.

The use of other films in the parody is not laboured - the most obvious scenes being the Saturday Night Fever sequence, the Jaws opening scene, and the singing nun (Helen Reddy in Airport '75). Less obvious but cleverly done was the flashback to the love scene on the beach, originally used in From Here To Eternity.

The film is actually so crammed full of jokes that even the flatter patches are grinnable - the subtitles for jive-talk, the people coming off the baggage conveyor belt, the crash landing position employed by the two Hare Krishna passengers, and the series of air traffic controller jokes being some of our favourites.

Acting to Match

The actors' performances are all superbly B grade. Peter Graves as the pilot who likes little boys, and Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack as the heroic men who talk the plane down obviously relished the opportunity to send up the sort of roles they have previously played straight.

Robert Hayes and Julie Hagerty are suitably mediocre in the lead roles. Hagerty is just oh-so-dumb, while Hayes is so depressing that passengers kill themselves when he tells them his life story. The auto-pilot (Otto the inflatable) was a good idea - notice how well the plane flies in his capable hands - but the joke wears a bit thin by the end and falls flat at the end when he takes off in the crashed plane with his inflatable girl friend.

The minor characters are all excellent - watch for the Japanese soldier committing ritual suicide, the old lady who refuses whisky and snorts cocaine instead, and the contortions of the little girl needing a heart transplant when her IV drip is pulled out by the exuberant guitar-playing air hostess.

Brilliantly Bad

Flying High is a trashy cheap little comedy that delivers the goods. It manages to prove that you don't have to have a big budget to make an enjoyable film (of National Lampoon's 1941). The models are so bad you can almost see the strings, the acting is so bad you can almost see the cue cards, yet the film gives itself away by its clever script and its casual technical expertise. It's a brilliantly bad movie, but that's the whole point of Flying High, to parody all the other B movies like it.

HM and SD