blanche-2 If only all we had to fear today were hijackers.As any film about an airplane made before 9/11, Skyjacked is badly dated but it's a real kick.The plane wasn't full, first class was nearly empty - when was the last time anyone saw that? People entered and left the cockpit as though it was the Holiday Inn.There was both a bomb and gun on board inside a carry-on satchel.None of the carry-on baggage was screened.People were smoking.Roosevelt Grier could fit in a seat.The story itself concerns a soldier from Crazytown (James Brolin) who hijacks the plane to take him to Moscow where he expects some sort of decoration for his service. Charlton Heston is the pilot. There are three people in the cockpit, which is a practice I recommend for all airlines now that a pilot left one cockpit and couldn't get back in.Yvette Mimeux and Leslie Uggams are two of the flight attendants; Mimeux had a hot romance with the married pilot and is now engaged to the copilot.Mariette Hartley plays a woman about to give birth.Susan Dey is a hippie and a good suspect for leaving lipstick notes on the bathroom mirror.It's a typical airplane story. There were some very exciting moments, particularly when the plane attempted to land in Alaska. There were some dumb moments: why Heston had to suggest the passengers deplane -- he was in the cockpit with James Brolin - the flight attendants, one would have thought, could have come up with that themselves. He also had to tell Yvette Mimiuex in code to deploy the chute and get the passengers out. Again, they couldn't have figured that out? Some parts of this were quite entertaining, and it's certainly worth seeing to look at old airline procedures. Flying was a lot simpler. And I wonder if it's any safer now.Lots of familiar TV faces from the '70s and '80s besides those mentioned: Nicholas Hammond, who is still working, the late Claude Akins, Ken Swofford, now retired; the late Ross Elliott, Newhart's John Fiedler, and Magnum's John Hillerman, now retired. And two stars of the classic era of films: Walter Pidgeon, 75 then, and Jeanne Crain in her last film. If anyone is wondering, Jeanne Crain at 47 was still beautiful.

Pipesofpeace Had this been made by Universal Studios instead of MGM, they might well have called it AIRPORT '72, so closely does it follow the template of that popular disaster movie series; it even casts Charlton Heston as a pilot two years prior to his playing a similar role in AIRPORT 1975. The film introduces us to the personal lives of several passengers, including a U.S. Senator (Walter Pidgeon), a jazz cellist (football legend Roosevelt Grier), a smart-mouthed teenage girl (Susan Dey from The Partridge Family), and a very pregnant lady (Mariette Hartley, who used to do those cute Polaroid commercials with James Garner)who probably shouldn't be flying to begin with at this late stage. There's also an unusually twitchy Vietnam vet on board (hammily played by James Brolin) which should remove all doubt as to who is leaving scary notes on the bathroom mirror and threatening to blow up the plane if his demand to be flown to Moscow isn't met. Yvette Mimieux and Leslie Uggams appear as two of the best-looking flight attendants in aviation history (they were called stewardesses back then, but then again that was a time when you could also smoke openly on a commercial airplane.) TV's Claude Akins shows up in the control tower, essentially playing George Kennedy. This sounds pretty ridiculous, and in some ways it is, but director John Guillermin (The Blue Max, The Towering Inferno) keeps up a brisk pace and makes this quite watchable, for what it is.

ferbs54 A tough day on the job for Global Air pilot Hank O'Hara: First, he learns that his ex-mistress will be playing head stewardess on his Flight 502 to Minneapolis. Then, en route, he discovers a lipstick-scrawled warning that there is a bomber on board and that he must divert to Anchorage, Alaska. And later, after making a landing there during a zero-visibility thunderstorm, he is compelled to continue the mad bomber's odyssey by flying into the restricted airspace of Mother Russia! Anyway, that is the setup of 1972's "Skyjacked," an entertaining affair released during the early '70s craze for airport/disaster flicks. A handsome-looking picture with a roster of great actors playing essentially one-dimensional, underdeveloped types, it nevertheless moves along nicely and is more than competently directed by John Guillermin.Now, as to the identity of that mad bomber, which isn't revealed until the film's midpoint, we have the following list of first-class suspects: There's the increasingly rabid and pie-eyed Vietnam vet, played by James Brolin; a jazz cellist, played by former L.A. Rams defensive lineman Rosey (here, "Roosevelt") Grier; an older couple relocating to Minneapolis (Ross Elliott and, in her final screen role, the still-beautiful Jeanne Crain, who sadly doesn't get more than six lines of dialogue in the entire film!); a pretty young girl (Susan Dey, in her first film, herself flying high on the success of her wildly popular TV program "The Partridge Family"); a U.S. senator (Walter Pidgeon) on a mysterious mission for the president; and the seemingly inevitable woman going into labor while in flight (Mariette Hartley, whose delivery strikes the viewer as the easiest one ever filmed; I swear that I've had more difficult bowel movements!). Rounding out this cast, by the way, are Yvette Mimieux as the head stewardess (that WAS the correct term back then!), Leslie Uggams as another stewardess (her "Screw you!" may be the picture's single best line), Claude Akins and John Fiedler as air traffic controllers, and, oh, as Capt. O'Hara, Charlton Heston, an old hand at bringing his people safely to the promised land. All are just fine, especially Chuck and Brolin, whose characters are the only ones here with anything resembling depth.As might be expected, "Skyjacked" begins with a light tone but eventually turns surprisingly grim, especially when the Boeing 707 enters Soviet airspace. To the film's credit, the Russians here are shown in a very positive light, and the sight of one of their fighter jets waggling its wings in farewell before it zooms off may be the picture's most touching moment. Modern-day viewers may marvel at the ease with which our whackadoodle bomber brings guns and hand grenades aboard an airplane, not to mention the in-flight smoking (even by the captain!) and the ordering of a Bloody Mary by a very pregnant woman, but let's remember, after all, that these WERE the good ol' days of 1972. In all, "Skyjacked" is nothing demanding and nothing artful, but it sure is fun. I originally watched this film on a brain-dead Friday night after a long, hard week of work, and found that it fit the bill perfectly....

Rodrigo Amaro "Skyjacked" is another disaster movie from the 1970's but the main difference is that the casting is not so famous and the story doesn't take too much time to happen. Charlton Heston plays the captain of an airplane dealing with a risky passenger and his bomb. Following the model of "Airport" in its plot this movie also has the background of some of the characters but it was added during the flight in some weak flashbacks. That was good because the major audience gets easily bored with the long beginning of "Airport" whose airplane took almost an hour to take off. Here the airplane gets up in the air in five minutes and most of the characters were already presented. It had a great beginning but was trapped with a poor ending. Once again the kidnapper of the plane dies and everyone is saved just like in "Airport". By the way I think that in every movie involving airplanes hijacked the hijackers are killed (except for the woman in "Passenger 57" who was arrested). But at least the movie created a certain intrigue in not telling who was the hijacker. Threats starts to appear in the bathroom, then a paper telling to land in some place in Alaska, and then we find out who is. One thing that bothered me is that it was only a lunatic war veteran (played by James Brolin) who wanted take the plane to Moscow for nothing. The good thing is the casting who has a fine performance of Heston (playing the heroic captain), Brolin has some good moments, Susan Dey (in her first film), veteran actor Walter Pidgeon (plays a senator), Roosevelt Grier (the friendly black guy carrying the cello who sits next to the hijacker) and Yvette Mimieux. And of course the funny exaggerations of the story: There's a pregnant woman in her last months of pregnancy on the flight; the senator smoking calmly on the plane after the disaster started; the excessive close-up shots showing a lipstick in the beginning of the movie (this is explained later throughout the movie); and some other moments. Nothing so laughable but funny anyway. Entertaining and enjoyable to any aviation buff. 7/10