Beautiful, moving film.

A Brilliant Conflict

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

San Francisco International (SFI for the rest of this) follows what I've started calling a Love Boat style of plot development. You know – a movie or television show with an ensemble cast where each character has their own storyline that may or may not have anything to do with the other characters. One plot line is deadly serious, another is romantically charged, the next is played for laughs, and on and on it goes. I don't know where the Love Boat plot style first originated, but SFI follows this to a "T". The story lines in SFI include: a boy, upset over his parents divorce, climbs into an abandoned plane and takes off; a band of crooks robs a shipment of cash going through the airport; seeking additional funding for the airport, airport head honcho Jim Conrad (Pernell Roberts) fakes an emergency landing with a planeload of government officials; a businessman and a hippie get into an altercation; etc. But being a 70s made-for-TV movie, you know everything is going to work out fine in the end – not that you really care or anything.There are several reasons why SFI never made it to our television sets as a regular series. And chief among them as far as I'm concerned is Pernell Roberts. Being self-assured is one thing, but Roberts' character comes off as one of the smuggest in history. He's too unlikable to care about any of his problems and whether they get resolved or not. You can't build a series around a horses rear-end like Jim Conrad and expect anyone to watch.As with a lot of the "bad" movies I've been watching lately, I saw SFI courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And as far as a MST3K episode goes, SFI is a keeper. A laugh at every turn. If you're a fan of the show, do yourself a favor and seek it out. This one gets a 4/5 on my MST3K rating scale.

OK, so this movie and the subsequent series tanked...but it's brought many evenings of joy to us as cannon fodder for the rapier-like minds at MST3K, who hit this one over the 400- foot sign. It succeeds in a way its makers never intended...Pernell Roberts struts around "his" airport, annoying congressmen and local bureaucrats alike. Clu Gulagher mumbles and mutters his lines while trying to be the sheriff on the spread, though his thunder is stolen by the postal inspector. A Mr. Hunter inserts "Tab A" into this B-movie with a plot to steal either a million bucks or a crate of old magazines, I'm never sure which. Weaving through this plot (sic) is Davey, who stumbles through the action like Billy in the Family Circus. Will he find the radio? Will the plane land safely? Will we even remotely care? And who gets to ask David Hartman, "Why the long face?"Previous reviewers have been much too harsh -- this one should be viewed as a monument to all the things the 1970s brought us -- B movies, no Homeland Security checkpoints, planes with aisles as wide as city streets, three-martini lunches, and made-for-TV hippies...Having expectations just means disappointment in the end. Let it wash over you and laugh!

Boring. Befuddled. Blah. These are all adjectives that could be used to to describe this lame 70's pilot for a really crappy t.v. show. Like Stranded in Space, this loser show never got off the ground. Can't imagine why. Although, to give it credit where credit is due, Stranded in Space was actually better and more coherent than this dreadful yellowish mess.There's a lot of 70's b grade actors in this one, from Pernell Roberts to Tab Hunter to Clu Gullagher. Pernell plays the head of security at San Francisco International, and a more annoying, uptight, moralizing, ego-ridden jerk I haven't seen in a long time. That first scene, in which he scares the crap out of an entire plane load of people just so that he can teach a 'lesson' to some Congressman just leaves you shaking your head in disgust. Where's Homeland Security when you need them?The 'plot', such as it is, is totally incomprehensible. There are so many trailing off plot lines that you could have woven a sweater from them. There was something about some boxes, the wife of a pilot being kidnapped, a weenie kid somehow stealing a plane, a secretary being held hostage, and a weird little scene with Pete from MacGyver getting into a fist fight with a guitar toting hippie kid. None of it makes much sense, and the only closure is the kid being brought down safely(too bad, he was a really irritating kid). The film is so yellow that it looks like the 'before' pics of coffee stained dentures. Everybody is drably uninteresting, and the whole thing could be used as a sleep inducer. A total waste of time, even as an MST3K episode.

OK, here's how the movie works.There is the barest germ of an interesting detective story plot here to drive the movie: thieves use a kidnapping at the San Francisco Airport to serve as a distraction from their attempts to smuggle stuff into Mexico. Watching Pernell Roberts (the airport administrator), Clu Gulager (the airport security chief) and Van Johnson (a newspaper columnist who happens to be in the airport at the time) try to assemble the clues, figure out what's happening, and scramble to thwart the bad guys before the bad guys can 'get away with it'...is mildly diverting in the same way that the 'caper plots' from "Hawaii Five-O" used to be.But because this series pilot is supposed to be setting us up for a series similar to "The Grand Hotel", and not just a detective series, the filmmakers have to flesh things out with human interest and character tags. So we get Pernell's battle with the senators over modernizing the airport. We get a divorce subplot between Van Johnson and his wife which in turn generates an ABC after school special segment with son Davey, who is so upset by his parents' impending separation that he...um....gets into an unguarded plane on the tarmac and takes off. (What?????). And we also get a public service announcement subplot in which it is revealed that businessmen tend to be stuffy and prejudiced, while guitar playing hippies and airport security chiefs can relate to each other. Or something.The results are, well....watchable. All the actors here are competent in a made-for-TV way. Pernell Roberts' character is incredibly smug and self-important, but I think that was a deliberate choice by the director and the screenwriter - don't forget that "McGarrett", the hero of "Hawaii Five-O" (a very successful hit in the same era) was also arrogant and hard-nosed, and I think the writers were hoping to mimic that series success with a similar protagonist.But it's obvious that the makers of "SFI" spectacularly misjudged the drawing power of the airport setting in generating viewer interest, especially when they made the airport and everything in it muddy orange and brown. And the screenplay is pretty much stuck in 2nd gear for the duration of the film. You've never seen so much screen time devoted to actors giving each other meaningful glances in your life.Anyway, no one bought it, and the pilot sunk without a trace, to be revived by "Mystery Science Theater" over 30 years later. The MST coverage is mildly amusing (as always) and helps you pass the time until the pilot winds to its inevitable close and everyone lives happily ever after.