Propeller One-Way Night Coach movie review: John Travolta’s directorial debut is a strange but endearing take on mid-century modern nostalgia

Have you ever wondered what kind of movies art director Sal Romano (Brian Batt) made? mad men Would he have continued working after Sterling Cooper left? Well, maybe they were a bit similar One-way night coacha frenetic and utterly accurate tribute to the magic of air travel in 1962.

Just an hour long and somewhat charming, if more than a little strange for its intrusive narrative, this dose of nostalgia – John Travolta’s directorial debut (he also wrote, produced and appeared in it) – is obsessed with wallpaper design and the shape of airplanes almost as much as its lovely, aviation-obsessed 10-year-old protagonist, Jeff (Clark Shotwell). The story is nothing more and nothing less than a journey story that follows Jeff as he flies cross-country for the first time with his girlfriend, Helen (Kelly Eviston Quinette), from Idyllwild, New York City, to Los Angeles, making several stops on the way. With such a short lead time, it’s hard to imagine that this will be released as a theatrical release, but the Apple-backed project will generate clicks once it hits the internet.

Introducing the film on stage at Cannes, where it premiered in official selection (out of competition), veteran actor and new director Travolta emphasized several times that this was a very personal story for him, one adapted from his novella of the same name. In fact, in his press notes, he invokes memories of his first experience of air travel as a touchstone here, informing his decision to direct because “I was the only one who could portray my reality at that time in my life.”

Just to underscore how personal this is, Travolta has cast a number of his family members in supporting roles, which somehow makes the project seem a little more self-indulgent, like a birthday present the director is giving himself. But it’s really sweet that daughter Ella Bleu Travolta plays a stewardess and sisters Margaret and Elaine play another passenger and Jeff’s grandmother, respectively, while Anne Travolta, Sam Travolta and Joey Travolta play the other roles – all playing alongside each other as John reveals how much he loved flying as a child. Siblings can be very sneaky.

However, I congratulate Travolta on casting this likable young man to play Jeff. A newcomer who has performed in summer stock and amusement parks, Shotwell has a cool feline naturalness on screen while still convincingly being a young child, terrified by the vehicles he takes on for the first time. While the voice-over narration (spoken by the director himself, of course) mostly provides hyperbolic details of what’s going on at almost every moment in Jeff’s head — describing his delight at a bed to sleep in or his disappointment at being offered another tray of chicken cordon bleu — there’s a credible correspondence between Shotwell’s influence and Travolta’s words, suggesting a shared interiority. Despite his sophisticated understanding of aircraft design, Jeff is also naive and doesn’t quite understand what his mother is doing when she puts him in a hotel room during a layover so she can go out for a nightcap. A sleeping cup in a room down the hall probably occupied by a married man she met on the plane.

These split levels of child and adult consciousness give the film a certain character, a small gap where drama can be sparked in a story in which almost nothing happens except a child takes a plane trip, or several plane trips, with his mother. The emotional climax is the moments when he realizes that they have been upgraded to first class and will be traveling on a real 707 jet on the final leg of the flight, as opposed to the slower, propeller-driven car of the title.

Some might object that the film would have benefited from a bit more of a look at Helen, perhaps providing an explanation as to why she’s a single mother, or some credence to her and Jeff’s claim that she’s a good enough actress to make this trip to Hollywood justified. It doesn’t help that Jeff continues to hype her reputation to strangers, telling everyone he meets that she’s going to be in a movie with Paul Newman.

But like children’s little white lies, this perfectly innocuous feature is essentially harmless, and is steeped in nostalgia to such an innocuous extent that it’s hard to envy its aviation-obsessed creator with enough connections to satisfy his whims — right down to selecting such scandalous tunes as Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” and “The Girl From Ipanema.”