John Travolta's directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, is a charmingly quirky and distinctively peculiar novella-sized bedtime story. Commissioned by Apple TV, this hour-long novelty feature boasts lovingly detailed Mad Men 1960s period production design, narrated throughout by Travolta himself.
A Quirky Debut
Travolta's narration is an indulgence you have to get used to – but if Alec Baldwin were doing it, you might almost think this was a Wes Anderson movie. The film is based on Travolta's own children's book about his love of planes: an autobiographical tale about Jeff, an eight-year-old boy, who gets to overhear some pretty ripe adult conversation in a plane cockpit.
Plot Overview
Jeff becomes entranced with aviation in 1962 after taking an all-night flight to LA with his cocktail-quaffing divorced mum on an impossibly glamorous TWA propeller plane, a 'one-way night coach' already attaining retro prestige by virtue of the jet plane's recent invention. Clark Shotwell plays Jeff; Kelly Eviston-Quinnett plays his mum, and Ella Bleu Travolta, John's daughter, plays Doris, the 21-year-old stewardess who takes a kindly interest in Jeff. The film suggests she actually went on to marry him – quite the age-gap story, which perhaps needs a film of its own.
Jeff is saucer-eyed with excitement, while his mum is jazzed about the possibility of meeting a nice divorced man on the flight. Silver-fox types are ready to buy her a Manhattan, and she smokes on the plane in a way that was normal until much later than the 1960s.
A Sweet Diversion
Another type of movie – one with the feel of a John Cheever or Frank O'Hara story – would have contrasted Jeff's rapture with something delusional and compromised in his mum's love life or professional life: she is an actor headed for Hollywood in hopes of stardom. Yet when Jeff glimpses his mother coming out of someone's room during a hotel stopover, it is not supposed to constitute a loss of innocence. Jeff appears to know roughly what's happening and treats it with no more than a shrug.
Propeller One-Way Night Coach is a sweet, odd diversion – more eccentric, maybe, than Travolta intended. It screened at the Cannes film festival and is on Apple TV from 29 May.
