Jerry Stiller (1927-2020)

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L.A.
Joined: Thu May 28, 2009 7:33 am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Jerry Stiller (1927-2020)

#1 Post by L.A. » Mon May 11, 2020 5:34 am


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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Passages

#2 Post by colinr0380 » Mon May 11, 2020 8:08 am

L.A. wrote:
Mon May 11, 2020 5:34 am
Jerry Stiller.
He has a really good, but almost entirely passive, role in the most 1970s-styled out of all the films in the Airport series, Airport 1975! I'll copy my post on it to this thread:
Airport 1975

"What's that?" "Don't worry, its just an alarm"

Wow, this film is really 70s. Lots of eye searing colours and dodgy politics here! The first Airport still felt very much the tail end of the 1960s in style and muted colour scheme, but the opening of this really barrages the viewer with gaudy colours and flares. This (along with Zero Hour!) is probably what Airplane! was taking most of its cues from for its parody, and its slightly bizarre to see all of the Hare Krishnas wandering through the terminal or the guitar strumming nun playing for a sick child being played entirely straight! We also get a group of comics thrown in there (Jerry Stiller included, who sleeps through the entire flight, only being woken up for the final panicked disembarking!), and Sid Caesar too, which only works to up the schtick quotient even further!

The gender stuff here doesn't get much better than the first, and in a way is worse, as we get the pilots making appreciative comments about mini-skirted passengers in the terminal, or standing behind the stewardesses on an escalator and making advances on them. Both scenes involve the women enjoying the brief, wolf whistle-style lustful attention they're getting as they pass by! And while Karen Black's character should be celebrated for getting involved in the action, she's pretty regularly undermined by the film from Sid Caesar's one memorable line "The stewardess is flying the plane!?!?" to the flight controllers not wanting to overburden Black with too many instructions (which gets somewhat dealt with later on in the film as Black manages to fly over some mountains entirely on her own by using the snippets of knowledge that she has been provided with), to the most egregious example of Black moving some hanging wreckage only to drop it directly onto the radio panel, cutting the communications off for a while!

And lets not forget the expendable Latino flight engineer who basically is around to say "Ay, chica!" to one of the other stewardesses, who will then weep over his body and the loss of their deep and meaningful relationship later on.

Of course the ill child travelling for a desperately urgent kidney transplant is the craziest element here, and it was amusing to see the girl played by a post-Exorcist Linda Blair, clutching her favourite acoustic guitar like another child would do with a stuffed toy! Perhaps that is the reason for the intervention of the nun! Perhaps more than anything else this is about Linda Blair trying to atone for 'her' behaviour in The Exorcist and show that she is actually a loveable little girl at heart to the audiences who could not see her as anything other than a foul-mouthed Devil child! Maybe the cloyingly sentimental song by the nun to the rapturous attention of everyone on the plane is this film's form of an exorcism! Or at least a benediction for both the character and perhaps the actress herself!

But its still very silly! Its a weirdly religious film in that sense, in that although its not doing much preaching we have nuns and Hare Krishna's and Jewish stewardesses and kvetching comedians all crammed together in one small space! Not to mention everyone ending up in the centre of Mormonism!

There was also a lot of stuff that went over my head, such as everything to do with Myrna Loy's character ordering whiskey with a beer chaser, which keeps getting incredulously reported on as having ordered a Boilermaker by the other characters. Was that such a bad thing? Or an incredibly alcoholic-style thing to do? Or is it just meant to be bizarre and amusing that a little old lady is ordering such a thing? I couldn't exactly tell!

I'm also still not entirely sure as to whether Gloria Swanson actually knew she was in a film or not! Its one of those weird things where she is actually in the film playing herself (cue adoring crowds and a completely unnecessary piece of dialogue about how wonderful she looks for her age!), and then she just sits bundled up in a seat telling stories about the Golden Age of Hollywood for her memoirs! Its almost as if the filmmakers couldn't direct her, so just got her to come in and provide a few anecdotes, and then just cut it into the film! (She is credited as "And Gloria Swanson" here domino, in case you want more examples of that trend!)

The biggest laugh of the whole film though comes with the announcement that the airplane is going to have to make an unscheduled stop at Salt Lake City, something which causes appalled cries of disgust and dismay from the passengers! (And the needling of Myrna Loy that it is a 'dry state'!). I think that the passengers have more of an intense reaction of facing approaching inevitable and unavoidable horror to that announcement than they do to the light aircraft hitting the cockpit a scene or two later!

One interesting aspect of this film is that it is much more plane based than in the terminal this time. That's a subtle but important difference in that it shows where the filmmaker's intentions are lying (and suggests really that the title of Airport was only apt for the first film, and that "Airplane!" would have been better even before the parody got there first!). Here even many of the scenes with Charlton Heston and George Kennedy working out plans and putting them into action take place in other planes circling the stricken airliner, and while there are a few scenes on the ground the real emotional dramas are taking place amongst the passengers. Already in this second film its difficult to keep George Kennedy's Patroni character meaningful in the context of the film itself, though here it anticipates the Die Hard 2 trick of having Patroni's wife and son on the plane too. I think it is telling that we again get the wife of the guy who was flying the light aircraft and caused all the trouble by crashing it and killing himself, but here she is less used as a character in her own right than as a pawn that the slimy news guy has dragged over to the airport to 'confront' the airline with their aircraft having gotten in the way of a legitimate private airplane user! Once those obviously overblown claims have been (literally!) thrown out, the wife of the dead pilot is dismissed from the film too. (Weirdly that subplot seems to anticipate the fear of the news media in Die Hard 2 as well!)

That emphasis on the plane over the terminal does mean that there are some really impressive and beautiful establishing fly by shots of the aircraft in flight and zooming between mountains. Though there are just as many terrible back projection ones once we get inside the cabin or the cockpit too! This is the kind of film where just the logistics of putting coherent scenes together, and trying to tie together action going on inside and out of the plane, must have been a bit of a nightmare!

Its entertaining though if you are in the mood for something so self-serious its rather silly! There's also a weird moment at the end when the otherwise relatively calm and collect passengers suddenly start screaming and running about with arms flailing the moment that they are safe and on the ground. Surely the moment for blind terror was long past by that point! Or maybe everyone had just been cooped up on the plane for so long they were just desperate to dash around the runway for a while to stretch their legs?

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domino harvey
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: Passages

#3 Post by domino harvey » Mon May 11, 2020 2:16 pm

"SERENITY NOW!"

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FrauBlucher
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2013 8:28 pm
Location: Greenwich Village

Re: Passages

#4 Post by FrauBlucher » Mon May 11, 2020 2:49 pm


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whaleallright
Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:56 am

Re: Passages

#5 Post by whaleallright » Mon May 11, 2020 5:03 pm

They turn up as a couple on episodes of Tattletales, an old American game show that is routinely rebroadcast on the niche Buzzr channel....

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thirtyframesasecond
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:48 pm

Re: Passages

#6 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Tue May 12, 2020 1:31 pm

You want a piece of me? You got iiiiittttt!

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colinr0380
Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: Passages

#7 Post by colinr0380 » Tue May 12, 2020 3:00 pm

Isn't he also in the Zoolander (i.e. Ben Stiller's) series of films too?

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: Passages

#8 Post by knives » Tue May 12, 2020 3:05 pm

Yes. He plays the manager. He also has a great cameo in Heavyweights.

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