Mercedes McCambridge in "The Concorde... Airport '79"
Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at 12:15PM Tim here. Now we come to the sad part of our centennial tribute to Mercedes McCambridge. For like so many movie stars, her career ended with a damp fizzle, not with any last triumphs. Worse yet, her career started rolling to a close in the 1970s, when Hollywood hit upon its most degrading scheme ever for what to do with its old legends and workhorses: stuff them into the enormous ensembles of tacky disaster films. At its most prestigious, this phenomenon resulted in Fred Astaire getting his solitary career Oscar nomination for The Towering Inferno. At its least prestigious, you have living legends Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, and Fred MacMurray in a death race to see who can embarrass themselves the worst in The Swarm.
Or, for that matter, you have McCambridge herself, grossly misused and discarded in The Concorde... Airport '79. It's the fourth and final film in the rather dimwitted Airport franchise, which had once upon a time been kinder to its storied old troupers: 1970's Best Picture nominee Airport, the film that essentially got the disaster movie cycle rolling, netted Helen Hayes her second Oscar. But those days were long gone by the time McCambridge was called up to squander her talents along with the rest of a distressingly high-quality cast, including Alain Delon, Cicely Tyson, and David Warner. [More...]
Indeed, while McCambridge's role is barely present, she's neither the most conspicuously wasted figure ('70s camp icon Charo is present just long enough to be chased off a plane), nor the most despicably ill-used (the great Bergman muse Bibi Andersson is dragged in for two cringeworthy scenes to make bedroom eyes at a puffy George Kennedy, the reliable stalwart of the franchise), nor the most humiliating (Martha Raye plays a character whose solitary defining trait is a bladder control problem).
Make no mistake, though, McCambridge is not being challenged even slightly, and the filmmakers don't have a clue what to do with her.
She's an adjunct to a third-tier plot: she's the imperious gymnastics coach to a Soviet Olympic hopeful (Andrea Marcovicci) secretly in love with an American reporter (John Davidson), and they're all part of the assorted background color stuffed onto the Concorde for a flight to Moscow. By the time the plane takes off, McCambridge has suffered the same fate as pretty much every other ensemble member who isn't playing one of the cockpit crew, popping up in the background of shots to look alarmed when the film's director calls out "you just heard a banging noise".
Given the almost indescribably low demands of the part, McCambridge puts in as much effort as anybody else we ever see onscreen: in a film with Swedes playing Parisians and New Yorkers playing Russians, she's the only person in a film obsessed with Détente-era political tensions to actually speak with a Russian accent. But there's a firm upper limit to how much subtlety and depth of personality one can invest into a performance tallying up three minutes of total screentime if I am being wildly generous in my estimate, and with more reaction shots than lines of dialogue.
This shot is the nearest she gets to a close-up in the film. She doesn't say a word and fails to notice while the guy sits down.
There's nothing pleasant to derive from this little story, other than the ice-cold knowledge that Hollywood is awfully good at ignoring and devouring the screen legends who have served it well. McCambridge had one last film (the totally obscure 1982 horror film Echoes, also the final screen credit for fellow Supporting Actress Oscar winner Gale Sondergaard), and a handful of TV appearances before the industry disposed of her entirely, but Airport '79 is the last time she'd crop up in something even mildly prestigious that implied the producers had some sense that she was a respectable name.
The film itself is at least a campy marvel, a so-bad-it's-hilarious film that Universal ended up rebranding as a comedy during its initial run, the year before the beloved spoof Airplane! The ungainly, thudding lines of exposition, desperate stabs at raising stakes – the Concorde has to make a death-defying emergency landing at two different points in the film – and the over-the-top plot, in which an industrialist & arms dealer tries to blow up the plane mid-flight, so his reporter girlfriend can't tattle on him to the world newsmedia when she arrives in Moscow, all contribute to making this easily the worst film in its series. No small feat given that Airport '77 operated from the can't-win proposition, "what if we made The Poseidon Adventure, but with a plane?" But that's no comfort to those of us who've gathered here now to see the final major motion picture featuring Mercedes McCambridge, and instead end up with a callous reminder of how merciless the youth-obsessed machinations of the culture industry can be.
Related Reading:
McCambridge in Giant (1956)
McCambridge in All the King's Men (1949)
The High and the Mighty (1952) - the birth of those all star disaster epics
Reader Comments (12)
Tim, thank you for this entertaining piece. The disaster genre is a sentimental touchstone from when I was a kid, and even then you could tell that there were very few really great ones, with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno miles ahead of the rest. And TTI is a very good movie: sleek, entertaining, old-fashioned Hollywood showmanship at its best. Still, the first two Airport sequels are nothing to sneeze at--'75 has a lot of fun camp value, and '77 actually has a pretty decent story and a lot of suspense. But the Concorde--well, less said the better. It's an atrocity. The special effects were taken out of somebody's ass.
Should have done a right up about her work in the Excorcist. What would have been interesting also would be to listen to some of her radio work, since that seems to be where she achieved most of her fame.
When Avery Schreiber appears above the line in the credits...
Not exactly sterling drama, but one of McCambridge's later appearances that I appreciated was her guest star spot on an episode of "Charlie's Angels", playing a wheelchair-bound, aging actress at a spa whose friend, also a retired actress, has been murdered and whose memoirs manuscript has gone missing. They knew what they had in McCambridge and gave her a lot of choice, memorable lines, and when the reveals start to come, she plays it for all it's worth.
I remember the first time I saw this I was seven years old. I liked it so much I longed for the clock to turn back so that I could see it again. Remember, I was seven.
Nice piece on her work in a horrible movie. Airport '77 was no prize but at least it had Lee Grant consuming scenery left and right to keep the audience entertained, this one wasn't as lucky.
It's a shame Mercedes didn't have a more distinguished film career but between her preference for the stage and her very rocky, and quite tragic, private life it seemed to have curtailed her opportunities. As well as Crawford's efforts to blackball her after Johnny Guitar.
Wait, are you not going to visit Johnny Guitar? (Or even The Exorcist?) This fun series seems incomplete without it!
James -- we were supposed to have a piece on Johnny Guitar. Not sure what happened to it! :) but we did cover the movie quite recently . As for Exorcist we figured we'd skip it since it had lots of coverage.
That is the worst movie in a terrible series
While sick and not wanting anything too challenging to watch, and while also experiencing some moments of nostalgia, I viewed the 4 Airport movies a couple of weeks ago. The first one holds up pretty well, thanks to supporting performances by Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, and especially Maureen Stapleton. There were enough moments of humour and suspense to make it entertaining.
Airport 1975 wasn't as bad as I remembered it, but hardly good either. Fast forwarding through Helen Reddy singing definitely improves it. Karen Black's odd performance keeps it interesting and offsets Charlton Heston's dramatic jaw clenching.
Airport '77 has its good points. However improbable it is, the cast does really well with the material they've been given. This one and the first film are the only ones worth watching.
The Concorde - Airport '79 is truly awful. The movie flies against any logic. I hope the paycheque was worth it for the great Cicely Tyson, because her presence in a nothing role defies any other explanation. As for McCambridge, it's also a nothing role, although she handles it professionally. She has such a strong screen presence, it's really unfortunate that she could not find supporting film roles later in her career that would have given her enough to really work with and make an impression.
Pieces on Johnny Guitar and The Exorcist should be included. Especially since the focus of the pieces would be McCambridge performances. Especially read some interesting tidbits on William Frekin getting McCambridge to perform as well as the screen credit she demanded after the completion of the film.
Mercesdes did do a lot of theater after her film career ended and had a successful tour with Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers.