Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Zero Hour!

Having watched Airplane! dozens of times, it was impossible to screen this film on which it was largely based with anything resembling objectivity. If you haven’t seen Airplane!, I suppose Zero Hour! can be viewed as a decent disaster flick — airliner in peril, passenger with post-war flying issues called upon to save the day. Dana Andrews is solid, as usual, and the presence of Sterling Hayden is always appreciated. But Airplane! fans in particular will want to seek this one out, if only for the fun of experiencing the extent to which that timeless comedy lifts element after element from this film, from the basic plot all the way down to word for word borrowing of dialogue.

Indeed, I was amazed to realize that far from relying on invented jokes to poke fun at airplane disaster movies, Airplane! painstakingly recreates entire sections of Zero Hour! ’s dramatic content, mining the original scenes for the barest modicum of humor and then amplifying that humor to a ludicrous degree. Take little Joey and his adventure in the cockpit. In Zero Hour! the captain turns to the youngster and says, “Joey, have you ever been in a cockpit before?” An innocent question, at first. But the odd gleam in the captain’s eyes as he asks the question, and the uncomfortable aura created as he puts his arm around Joey and argues that the boy be allowed to spend more time with the pilots, is downright creepy. No wonder that the geniuses behind Airplane! saw in this sequence the perfect spot for Peter Graves to take the awkwardness to new heights with his questions of gladiators, Turkish prisons, and naked men. I won’t ruin the fun by pointing out any other examples, but if you’ve seen Airplane! enough to know the lines by heart, Zero Hour! will make you laugh in ways it certainly never intended.

by Thomas Scalzo   on 10 Aug 2010 9:04 PM   Source: Turner Classic Movies broadcast