Movie · 1974 · Drama, Thriller, Action · 1h 47m · PG · English
Curator score: 0.7/10 (13.6K ratings)
Something hit us... The crew is dead... Help us, please, please help us!
Overview
When an in-flight collision incapacitates the pilots of an airplane bound for Los Angeles, stewardess Nancy Pryor is forced to take over the controls. From the ground, her boyfriend Alan Murdock, a retired test pilot, tries to talk her through piloting and landing the 747 aircraft. Worse yet, the anxious passengers — among which are a noisy nun and a cranky man — are aggravating the already tense atmosphere.
Ratings
Curator score: 0.7/10
IMDb: 5.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
Metacritic: 50
TMDB: 5.8/10
Director
Jack Smight
Production
Universal Pictures
Cast
Charlton Heston, Karen Black, George Kennedy, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Susan Clark, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Dana Andrews, Roy Thinnes, Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy, Ed Nelson, Nancy Olson, Larry Storch, Martha Scott, Jerry Stiller, Norman Fell, Conrad Janis, Beverly Garland, Linda Harrison
Where to watch
Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
A quintessential 70s disaster sequel: clunky, overstuffed, and often unintentionally funny, but also briskly engineered and intermittently thrilling. The premise is absurd in the best and worst ways, with Karen Black carrying the movie’s most memorable tension while the ensemble leans into camp, panic, and melodrama.
Best for
fans of 70s disaster movies
viewers who enjoy campy high-stakes melodrama
audiences curious about the template later parodied by Airplane!
people who like star-packed ensemble thrillers with practical-effects spectacle
Skip if
you want polished realism
you dislike dated sexism and broad character writing
you need sustained suspense rather than episodic crisis beats
you’re allergic to camp or accidental comedy
Overview
Airport 1975 is less a serious thriller than a pressure-cooker of 1970s disaster-movie mechanics: a big plane, a helpless crew, a chain of escalating emergencies, and a cast of recognizable faces reacting with maximum sincerity. The movie’s reputation rests on how preposterous its setup becomes, but that same absurdity is part of the appeal. It plays like a relic from the era when spectacle and melodrama were enough to carry a studio event film.
Worth noting
Karen Black is the movie’s anchor, giving the chaos a human center even when the script keeps piling on new complications. Around her, the film alternates between tense procedural beats and broad, sometimes unintentionally comic character moments. The result is uneven, but rarely dull, and it has a kind of shambling confidence that makes it easy to watch even when it is hard to take seriously.
Bottom line
If you like disaster cinema as a genre artifact, this is a worthwhile stop: not the best of its kind, but a very readable example of how these movies worked before parody flattened their seriousness. If you want airtight plotting or modern emotional realism, it will probably frustrate you. If you want a time capsule of mid-70s studio spectacle, it delivers exactly that.
Top Letterboxd reviews
theironcupcake (4★) · 121 likes
"Colonel, is this thing gonna work? It's gonna be like trying to put a raw egg back in its shell!"
Mini-Collab w/ Rob
I'm calling it now: out of all the most incredible things ever to happen in a classic 70s disaster movie, nothing else can compare to flight attendant Karen Black shrieking "THERE'S NO ONE LEFT TO FLY THE PLANE!" after a smaller Beechcraft Baron has hit the Boeing 747 head-on and taken all the pilots out, followed by… more
Matt Singer · 118 likes
Very little of this movie takes place in an airport. Also it was released in 1974, not 1975. False advertising.
Daniel (3★) · 99 likes
"In 1917 I was flying in something wilder than this. Do you know who the pilot was?""Wiley Post?""No. Cecil B. De Mille, and we flew from Hollywood nonstop to Pasadena. Yes, and on the way home we did loop the loops so I could see the moon upside down."
Columbia Airlines Flight 409 - a Boeing 747 - is on a red-eye flight from Washington to Los Angeles. Among the passengers are an aging filmstar and a young… more
Jesse (3★) · 83 likes
I seem to be stuck in a mix of Airplane disaster movies lately from Final Destination to Sully. In the middle of all that I keep trekking through the Airport series and it was really hard to take the 1975 sequel seriously.
Primarily because I didn’t realize how much Airplane! riffed on this film especially with the little girl needing an organ transplant this time played by Linda Blair. You even have someone singing a song throughout the plane while… more
theironcupcake (4★) · 68 likes
"Is there much damage?""No, not much, there's just a hole where the pilots usually sit!"
When the team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker created their supreme comedic tribute to disaster films, Airplane! (1980), there were two obvious inspirations: one was the 1957 thriller Zero Hour!, in which a plane's passengers fall ill from food poisoning, depending on whether they had the chicken or the fish for dinner, while the other source of parody was Airport 1975, a gloriously campy drama… more