Propeller One-Way Night Coach
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 1 hour 1 minute
Stars: Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Clark Shotwell
Writer/Director: John Travolta
Streaming on Apple TV+
Fleeting as a dream, ephemeral as a treasured childhood memory, writer/director John Travolta’s Propeller One-Way Night Coach glides turbulence-free through its appointed one hour and one minute run time, fondly evoking the moment when the whine of propeller-driven airliners was about to be drowned out forever by the roar transcontinental jets.
Based on Travolta’s 1997 novella (and his own childhood experience), the story is told through the eyes of Jeff (Clark Shotwell), an 8-year-old New Jersey boy who is obsessed with the romance of air travel. Every night he lies in bed, gazing out his window, watching planes take off from nearby Newark Airport, wondering who is on them, where they’re going, and why they are flying so late at night (any resemblance between Clark and Garden State-born Travolta is absolutely, without question, intentional).
One day in 1962, Clark’s divorced, well-into-middle-age mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) announces she is going to pursue a long-shot acting career in Hollywood – which means mother and son are moving to Los Angeles. For Clark, whatever trepidation he may have regarding leaving his home and friends is immediately wiped away by the mere thought of setting foot on an airplane.
A woman of modest means, Mom can’t afford to fly nonstop on one of those sleek new Boeing 707 jets. Instead, she books two one-way tickets on an ancient Douglas DC-1, which TWA is now using for puddle-hopping transcontinental trips making stops in places like Dayton, St. Louis, and Denver on its way west.
For Jeff, so much the better: The more takeoffs and landings, the more visits to the cockpit, the more conversations with attentive stewardesses (We still get to use that term in this context!), the better.
You’ll search in vain for a conflict in Travolta’s cinematic memory play. The tale of Jeff’s odyssey is almost obsessively a child’s-eye affair: Adults tower over him (especially the “10-foot-tall man” he encounters on the first leg). When he’s not watching sparkling cities float by beneath a canopy of stars, Jeff’s walks down the aisle are strictly armrest-level expeditions of childlike discovery. (The only time Jeff gets to encounter grownups eye-to-eye is when a kind stewardess lifts him into a curtained bunk bed – unused for years since the DC-1 has been retired from overnight long-haul duty.)
“Well, nothing happens,” some people may complain, but those are the words of one who is hopelessly stuck in grownup mode. In Propeller, Travolta sweetly, patiently evokes that time in life when a walk down the street is an adventure; when that guy towering over you may well be 10 feet tall; when the physics of flying fade behind the wonder of finding yourself aloft.
I, for one, still seek out the window seats on airliners. I press my forehead to the oval window, watching the continent scroll by like an endless tapestry. I am about the same age as John Travolta (and, as a North Jersey kid, watched those same planes coming and going). Statistically speaking, when we were children virtually no one had ever seen the world from above the clouds.
I refuse to let go of the wonder. And it is gratifying to discover someone else feels the same way.
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