Airport '77 (1977)

The 3rd Airport film tries for something different - rather than a terror in the air, the 747 ends up beneath the waters, so it becomes a terror beneath the sea sort of tale. The fault lies with a trio of thieves, secretly led by the first officer (Robert Foxworth; the other two are played by Monte Markham & Michael Pataki). The airplane is a special luxury private plane owned by James Stewart and the thieves are after some of his rare paintings. They kill the guard, clobber the captain (Jack Lemmon) and knock out the passengers with gas. The crooked 1st officer then changes course, but he ends up clipping  an oil derrick and the airplane hits the water. Brenda Vaccaro plays Stewart's aide, head stewardess and the captain's love interest; other employees are Darren McGavin and, as the on-board bartender, Robert Hooks; passengers include Lee Grant & Christopher Lee as an unhappy rich couple; Joseph Cotten & Olivia de Havilland as reunited old friends; young Kathleen Quinlan, who gets interested in blind singer Tom Sullivan; James Booth; Pamela Bellwood as Stewart's estranged daughter, there with her son; M. Emmet Walsh as a doctor (actually a vet); Arlene Golonka; and Gil Gerard (as Grant's secret lover) a couple of years before he became famous as Buck Rogers on TV. On the outside, George Kennedy is back as Patroni, assisting in rescue efforts.
Lemmon was cast against type as the lead hero; he was always in comedies or dramas, never in action thrillers, but he lends a realistic note to his pilot role. Lee Grant is probably most memorable as the shrewish lush of a wife whom Chris Lee can't wait to get away from, even if it means drowning (eerily similar to the Heston-Gardner relationship in Earthquake); she complains and moans - loudly - at every turn, prompting Lemmon to tell her to shut it more than once and for Vaccaro to actually get physical about it.  Chris Lee was most famous as Dracula at the time and McGavin had finished playing Kolchak a couple of years before. This was Kennedy's most brief role in the Airport franchise, little more than a cameo. It's a pretty good cast all around for this type of fare, but the crisis becomes rather limiting by its very nature, stuck underwater inside the airplane, in gloomy surroundings. There are a couple of clumsy plot points: no one on the oil rig noticed that they were hit by the airplane, so the search rescue checks in the wrong area; all the passengers start to wake up as the plane hits the water, so the plan of the criminals seemed to have unraveled anyway, as they would have to deal with all the awakened passengers even if there was no crash. The sci-fi aspect involves the very unlikely proposition of the airplane staying in one piece after striking the ocean and remaining airtight under the waters. It's also very interesting how all the 'right' people die in the climactic action; there's a last minute bit of tension as Lemmon & Vaccaro are the last to exit and may not make it. BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10
Air Trivia: as with several films of that time, such as Earthquake and Two Minute Warning, a longer TV version of this film was aired, containing many cut scenes; these are detailed in the Wikipedia article on this film; Chris Lemmon has a tiny role as a radioman
Star Trek TOS actor alert: actor Pataki is still best known as the hostile Klingon Korax in the famous episode The Trouble With Tribbles; also in a brief role is Charles Macauley as an admiral; he showed up in 2 TOS episodes - Return of the Archons & Wolf in the Fold