Missiles, Media, and Mile-High Melodrama

Read Time:5 Minute, 31 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
The Concorde… Airport '79 (4KUHD)
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Genre: Drama, Adventure, Action, Thriller
Year Released: 1979, Kino Lorber 4K 2025
Runtime: 1h 53m
Director(s): David Lowell Rich
Writer(s): Arthur Hailey, Jennings Lang, Eric Roth
Cast: Alain Delon, Robert Wagner, George Kennedy, Susan Blakely, Sylvia Kristel, Eddie Albert, Bibi Andersson, Charo, John Davidson, Martha Raye, Cicely Tyson, David Warner
Where to Watch: available September 30, 2025, pre-order your copy here: www.kinolorber.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: The fourth entry swaps survival chaos for white-knuckle emotion. THE CONCORDE… AIRPORT ’79 isn’t shy about what it wants to be: a glossy, globe-trotting thriller that straps you into an icon of aviation and keeps yanking the yoke. The plot is simple and loud. A jet-setting TV reporter carries information that could expose a powerful ex-lover; he responds with sabotage, missiles, and one wildly public attempt after another to ensure the story never sees the light of day. It’s pulp in a tailored suit—lean on nuance, heavy on spectacle.

What differentiates this chapter from its predecessors is its unabashed embrace of the dramatic. The Concorde is not a setting; it’s the star attraction, a silver dart built to be photographed and asked to do things that test both physics and your tolerance for daring. The movie treats aerobatics as character beats: evasive maneuvers become punchlines, and “can we actually pull this off?” is less about plausibility than pacing. Every ten minutes, it feels like a new carnival ride snaps into motion—missile dodge, mechanical treachery, mayday improvisation—each sequenced to keep eyes widening rather than hearts sinking.

Against that backdrop, the ensemble is a curated buffet of personalities. George Kennedy’s Joe Patroni graduates from franchise talisman to co-captain, the sort of square-jawed presence that makes you believe muscle memory is a flight qualification. Alain Delon plays the French counterpart with coolness; he reads as someone who’s logged as many hours charming diplomats as touching down in crosswinds. Susan Blakely shoulders the reporter role with a directness that suits the film’s tempo—no time for grand speeches, just forward motion. Robert Wagner supplies the chill in the air: polished, image-conscious, and willing to outsource violence rather than get his hands dirty. Around them, a gallery of supporting characters that double as control—warmth from Eddie Albert, poise from Bibi Andersson, comedy from Charo and Martha Raye, a hardness from Cicely Tyson, and a dry edge from David Warner.

The movie’s visuals are surface-driven, and that’s not an insult; it’s a creative choice. The camera loves the plane—the sleek nose, the flight deck, the choreography of switches and throttles—and it understands the satisfaction of watching procedures executed under pressure. It also loves performance: the raised eyebrow before a risky decision, the pause that sells “this is insane, but we’re doing it,” the half-smile between pilots that says trust is a muscle you build at Mach speeds.

Where it stumbles is where the franchise consistently struggles: tone management and character depth. The danger is omnipresent but rarely oppressive; it’s staged to thrill rather than to haunt. That makes the film lighter on dread and heavier on momentum, which is the right call for a Concorde showcase but limits payoff. The villainy is generic—corporate malfeasance rendered as assassination attempts—and the morality is clean enough to read from the back row. You won’t need a program to tell who’s good or bad, and you won’t need tissues either.

As a franchise capper, it clarifies what these films had been drifting toward—away from the original’s airport-procedural textures and toward airborne spectacle. The cast-as-attraction model remains, but now it’s paired with a vehicle that invites excess. On that level, the movie becomes a curious time capsule of late-’70s studio showmanship, featuring an international flavor, news-media framing, and a belief that speed itself is a story. If AIRPORT ’77 was tension by pressure and waterlogged logistics, this is tension by velocity and public audacity.

Looking at the 4K presentation, this is exactly the kind of title that benefits from a clean, high-contrast pass, with metallic sheen on the fuselage, cockpit instruments galore, the tactile feel of switches and flight surfaces, and sharper detail in the airborne views. The included new commentary track provides the kind of context that pairs well with a movie built on big swings (and misses)—including production choices, franchise deep dives, and the specific ways a supersonic airliner dictated shot design.

THE CONCORDE… AIRPORT ’79 isn’t subtle and doesn’t want to be. It’s an air-show thriller painted in primary colors: fast, glossy, and always angling for the next crowd-pleaser. If you come for character study, you’ll find fragments. If you come for spectacle, you’ll get an all-you-can-eat pass—complete with headline-chasing villainy, and pilots who treat the stratosphere like a playground they happen to know better than anyone else. On those terms, the movie crosses the finish line exactly as intended: not with grace, but with swagger.

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]

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