Charlton Heston as Captain Alan Murdock | Directed by Jack Smight | Released 1974
Few film titles are as misleading as Airport 1975, which was released in October 1974 and takes place almost entirely in the air. That confusion is part of its charm. Directed by Jack Smight, the film is the first sequel to the hugely successful Airport (1970) and the opening entry in the great disaster trilogy of late 1974, alongside Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. It stars Charlton Heston as Captain Alan Murdock, a pilot who must board a stricken Boeing 747 in mid-air and land it safely. The premise is gloriously implausible, and Heston plays it with such conviction that audiences believed every minute of it.
The story begins on the ground, at Washington’s Dulles Airport, where Murdock, Columbia Airlines’ chief flight instructor, is saying goodbye to his girlfriend, chief stewardess Nancy Pryor, played by Karen Black. Nancy is working Flight 409, a red-eye 747 bound for Los Angeles, carrying a typically star-studded disaster-movie passenger list: Gloria Swanson, in her final screen role, playing herself; Helen Reddy as a singing nun; Linda Blair as a young girl travelling for a kidney transplant; Myrna Loy, Sid Caesar, Dana Andrews, and George Kennedy, returning as the ever-reliable Joe Patroni. Shortly after take-off, a small private plane, whose pilot has suffered a heart attack, collides with the 747, tearing a hole in the cockpit, killing or incapacitating the crew, and leaving the aircraft flying on autopilot with no qualified pilot at the controls.
Nancy, who has taken over in the cockpit, must be talked through the basics by radio from the ground, while Murdock and Patroni devise a desperate plan: Murdock will be lowered from a helicopter, in mid-air, through the hole in the fuselage, and into the cockpit. It is the kind of set piece that could only exist in a 1970s disaster film — technically absurd, dramatically irresistible — and Smight stages it with a straight face and considerable suspense. The transfer sequence, with Murdock dangling on a cable between two aircraft at altitude, remains the film’s signature moment, and Heston, who was fifty years old at the time, sells it with physical confidence and dry humour. He makes Murdock look like a man who has done impossible things before and expects to do them again.
Heston’s Murdock is also a romantic lead in the old Hollywood sense. His relationship with Nancy is the film’s emotional thread: they are a couple whose commitment has stalled, who plan to talk things over in Los Angeles, and who are forced to resolve their differences at thirty thousand feet, over a radio, with hundreds of lives depending on them. Black, fresh from her success in Five Easy Pieces and The Great Gatsby, gives Nancy a steely competence that prevents her from becoming a mere damsel in distress. She holds the aircraft steady, she follows instructions, and she panics only when panic is reasonable. The scenes between Heston on the ground and Black in the air — his voice calm, hers increasingly strained — are the film’s best, and they show Heston’s gift for playing authority as reassurance rather than as dominance.
Director Jack Smight, a veteran of television, brings a clean, efficient style to the material. He does not have the visual flair of some of his contemporaries, but he understands pacing: the film moves briskly from vignette to vignette on the ground, then narrows its focus, once the collision occurs, to the cockpit and the control room. The ensemble cast is used well, with each passenger given a small, memorable moment — a nun leading a prayer, an elderly woman refusing to panic, a businessman discovering courage — before the film returns to its central problem: how to get a pilot into an aeroplane that cannot land itself. The score, the cinematography by Philip Lathrop, and the genuine 747 interiors all contribute to a sense of scale that television movies of the era could not match.
Airport 1975 was a major box-office hit, and it cemented a pattern that would define Heston’s mid-1970s career: the professional hero in an ensemble disaster. In the same year he also headlined Earthquake, and the two films together made him the most reliable star of the genre. Critics often dismissed these films as formulaic, and in some respects they were — the all-star cast, the interwoven subplots, the race against time are all present and correct — but audiences recognised something genuine in Heston’s performances. He never condescended to the material. He played Murdock as if the fate of a real aeroplane depended on him, and that sincerity is why the film still works as entertainment.
There is also a nostalgic pleasure in revisiting Airport 1975 today. It captures a moment when air travel still felt glamorous, when a 747 was a marvel rather than a routine, and when a film could assemble a cast spanning Hollywood’s golden age — Swanson, Loy, Andrews — and its new generation — Black, Blair, Reddy — and let them share the same cabin. Heston, standing between those generations, was the perfect bridge: old enough to command respect, modern enough to feel contemporary. His Murdock is a man of the old school, but he is not stuck in it; he listens to Nancy, he trusts her, and he risks his life on the strength of her competence.
For Past Tunes readers, Airport 1975 is the most purely enjoyable of Heston’s disaster films: less grim than Earthquake, less sombre than Gray Lady Down, and more tightly constructed than many of its imitators. It is a reminder that, in the 1970s, a big star, a big aeroplane, and a big problem were enough to fill cinemas — and that Charlton Heston, lowered on a cable into a hole in the sky, was exactly the man audiences wanted to see doing the impossible.