As far as decades go, the 1970s were a pretty miserable time for the United States. From the country’s humiliating exit from Viet Nam through the Watergate scandal and OPEC embargo, to stagflation, economic “malaise,” disco, leisure suits, and the Iranian hostage crisis, the years between 1970 and 1979 were, on the whole, rather depressing. Even America’s national pastime suffered embarassment and disgrace.
Given the zeitgeist of the seventies, it’s probably no coincidence that the disastrous decade coincided with the golden age of the disaster film. Movies about the masses facing impending doom ruled at the box office. Just a quick survey of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) turns up more than two dozen such films from award-winning box-office successes like Earthquake (1974), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974), to less well-known yarns The Cassandra Crossing (1976), City on Fire (1979), made-for TV “thrillers” Heat Wave! (1974), The Day the Earth Moved (1974), Flood! (1976), and one infamous “B-movie” flop.
Among the many disaster films that graced the silver screen, movies about airplanes were particularly prominent. Much of the reason had to with the immense success of the decade’s first smash hit, Airport (1970) which pulled in a then whopping $45 million in receipts. Airport’s success led to a string of lesser sequels: Airport 1975, Airport ‘77, and the abysmal The Concorde: Airport 1979. By decade’s end, airplane disaster flicks had become so familiar that they invited parody in the smash 1980 spoof Airplane!
Ironically, just as Hollywood studios began to subject airplane disaster films to ridicule, Soviet film makers took their first stab at the sub-genre. The fruit of their labor was Air Crew (Экипаж) — a 1979 Mosfil’m production released the following year.
