86) Flying High

Airplane! (1980)

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Starring: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Leslie Nielsen, Lorna Patterson, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Robert Stack

It's a Saturday afternoon, we weren't heading out for a couple of hours, Kate had some college reading she needed to get onto and I had nothing to do, so I figured I'd sit down and watch a comedy. I wanted something really basic, and they don't get much more basic than spoofs. Enter Flying High.

Shell-shocked former air force pilot Ted Striker (Hays) boards an aeroplane for the first time since the war in order to try and save his relationship with air hostess Elaine Dickinson (Hagerty). When numerous passengers, including the plane's pilot and co-pilot, fall violently ill with food poisoning, the fate of everyone on board depends on whether Ted can overcome his fear and safely land the plane. Hilarity ensues.

I'm kind of ashamed to say that I'd never seen Flying High. Growing up, I used to be quite the fan of the spoof comedy genre. I've seen numerous 1980s and 1990s spoof comedies; Naked Gun, Hot Shots, Top Secret, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Spy Hard, Wrongfully Accused. Heck, I even saw Dracula: Dead and Loving It. So the fact that I hadn't seen Flying High, the one which sits at the top of the pile, is like saying you're a fan of gangster movies but you've just never got around to seeing The Godfather.

Like all really good spoofs, the central narrative does not read as anything particularly hilarious or absurd. The narrative of the film is a direct parody of the 1957 movie Zero Hour, about a shell-shocked ex-navy pilot who has to land a commercial plane filled with food poisoned passengers. So the storyline itself is played reasonably straight and the humour comes from the gags which fill the scenes, and Flying High is amazingly dense with gags. Rather than playing a certain interaction as a set up for a single payoff, there will be numerous gags layered on top of each other within a scene. The film employs numerous different types of gags too; there are sight gags (the emergence inflation tube being located on the inflatable co-pilot's belt buckle), puns and word play ("... and don't call me Shirley" as well as the brilliant confusion caused by radio transmissions when you have a pilot named Ouver and a co-pilot named Roger), non-sequiturs (having the co-pilot played by basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but his presence only being acknowledged by one character), running jokes ("I picked the wrong day to quit smoking/drinking/sniffing glue/etc"). While the film directly parodies Zero Hour it is a more general parody of the disaster cycle of movies that was at it's height in the 1970s. So if you are aware of some of those films you will recognise certain passengers from other films; the guitar playing nun originally played by Helen Reddy in Airport 1975 and the sick little girl from the same film.

One thing which really made Flying High work at the time, though it has probably lost this impact today, is that rather than filling the cast with comic actors they used some notable dramatic actors. Flying High launched the spoof comedy careers of Leslie Nielsen and Lloyd Bridges, both of whom had been dramatic actors up until that point. I noted in my earlier blog on The Poseidon Adventure that it was difficult taking Leslie Nielsen seriously in his role as the ships captain because this is exactly the kind of role I'm used to seeing him play in spoof comedies. When Flying High was first released his casting would have had kind of the flipside effect. Because people were used to seeing him playing similar roles in serious movies, it made it all the more hysterical watching him ham it up. Similarly, Lloyd Bridges performance as the air traffic controller seemingly lampooned numerous previous roles of his. Both Nielsen and Bridges had their careers completely reinvented by the success of this film, to the point that there are a couple of generations now who would only recognise them as spoof actors.

The one thing which does bug me about the film though, is why the hell did they have to change the title of the film from Airplane! to Flying High for the Australia release? Was is simply because that isn't how we spell aeroplane here that they didn't think we could decipher what the film was about? That wasn't an issue for The Color Purple. And that's not the only example of a film with an English title having it's title changed for overseas releases in English speaking countries. It happens quite regularly. 13 going on 30 became Suddenly 30, Four Christmases became Four Holidays. I don't get it.

This spoof style of comedy has dated quite a bit (that being said it was always intended to be a bit hammy and groan inducing), so it doesn't quite pack the punch that it once did. I'd have to say the dating of the genre is mostly because it was so heavily imitated by numerous inferior films. Even now though, you get the feeling that Flying High is a cut above everything else in that genre. With this film, which one critic has since described as "the Citizen Kane of zany comedies", the Zucker brothers and Abraham usurped Mel Brooks as the kings of the spoof, a position they would reinforce with Top Secret and the Naked Gun series.