It's perfectly normal to be bored by terrible movies, or even irritated by them. But I don't think I've ever felt as sorry for a film as I did for John Travolta's directorial debut, which felt like watching a toddler crash into a lamppost.
Travolta adapted his 1997 children's novel into a film about one of the most important events in the actor's life: a multi-stop overnight flight from New York to Los Angeles in December 1962, which arguably marked the beginning of his lifelong love of aviation. Starting with the horrific font of the title, «One-way night bus with a propeller» — is an incredibly bad film, though the process of making it obviously means a lot to Travolta, who gets the chance to relive and share this happy period of his childhood with the world. Is this a film for kids? For families? For vintage airplane enthusiasts? One might assume that it's actually a film made for the entertainment of just one person, who, coincidentally, is its creator.
Clark Shotwell plays the young Travolta, here named Jeff, and Kelly Eviston-Quinnett is his mother, Helen; meanwhile, Travolta himself provides narration, in which the older Jeff recalls the trip in often excruciating detail. At best, the voiceover is wistful and somewhat disjointed; at worst, it repeatedly descends into nonsense. Memorable passages include Jeff's reference to the Holocaust (which, surprisingly, is mentioned twice) as a "Nazi event," and the following reaction to a toy airplane in the Trans World Airlines gift shop: "Life was so good at that point, it was hard to recover from.".
The film features humorous asides about smoking and the unlocked cockpit door, encounters with eccentric fellow passengers, and numerous drawn-out shots of the luxurious in-flight catering, including gleaming, thick slices of Chateaubriand cut right on the trolley and a bizarre, recurring joke about chicken cordon bleu. Young Jeff is, of course, captivated by the flight attendants, one of whom, Doris, is played by Ella Bleu Travolta, the director's daughter.
Travolta makes a cameo appearance near the end of the film as one of the pilots.
Another passenger (Olga Hoffman) became so attached to the baby and his mother that she upgraded them to first class for free and then transferred them to an even more luxurious Boeing 707 for the final leg of the journey. This is the same gripping drama. the plot that "One-Way Night Bus" constantly throws at you« Someone has a sweet chat with young Jeff, and then old Jeff rambles on for a bit about how wonderful everything was. We all hear how life couldn't be better, then Doris lets him lie down for a while on one of the first-class beds, and somehow a new existential high is reached.
The film's naive, somewhat crude tone creates several interesting effects: near the end, there's a burst of surreal horror when Travolta appears on screen as a Boeing 707 pilot and immediately begins speaking in exactly the same voice—tone, tempo, and all—as eight-year-old Jeff's inner monologue. Then, 60 minutes later, it all suddenly ends, and at that moment, you're simply grateful they didn't buy a return ticket.
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