‘Propeller One-Way Night Coach’ Review: John Travolta’s Nostalgia Trip

Did you ever wonder what kind of films the art director Sal Romano (Bryan Batt) from Mad Men would have gone on to make after he left Sterling Cooper? Well, perhaps they might have been a bit like Propeller One-Way Night Coach, a febrile, immaculately period-accurate tribute to the glamour of air travel in 1962.

Only an hour long and rather charming, if more than a bit bizarre with its intrusive narration, this dose of nostalgia — John Travolta‘s directorial debut (he also wrote, produces and appears in it) — obsesses over wallpaper design and aircraft livery almost as much as its sweet protagonist, aviation-obsessed 10-year-old Jeff (Clark Shotwell). The story is nothing more and nothing less than a travelogue following Jeff flying cross-country for the first time with his soignée if somewhat Manhattan-sozzled mother Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett), from New York City’s Idlewild to Los Angeles, making several stops en route. With such a short running time it’s hard to imagine this will ever take flight as a theatrical release, but the Apple-backed project will generate clicks once it hits the internet.

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

Just to underscore how personal this is, Travolta has cast a number of his own family members in supporting roles, which somehow makes the project feel even more benignly self-indulgent, like a birthday present the director is giving to himself. But it’s genuinely sweet that daughter Ella Bleu Travolta plays a stewardess and sisters Margaret and Ellen play another passenger and Jeff’s grandmother, respectively, while other roles are taken by Ann Travolta, Sam Travolta and Joey Travolta — all of them game to play along as John reveals what a massive aviation nerd he was as a kid. Siblings can be so sneaky.

Kudos to Travolta, though, for casting such an endearing young man to play Jeff. A newcomer who has performed in summer stock and cabaret, Shotwell has cool-cat naturalness on screen while still being convincing as a little boy, awed by the vehicles he’s getting to board for the first time. While most of the time the voiceover narration (spoken, of course, by the director himself) gives an excessively detailed blow-by-blow of what’s going on at nearly every moment in Jeff’s head — describing his delight with a sleeping berth or disappointment to be offered yet another tray of chicken Cordon Bleu — there’s a credible match between Shotwell’s affect and Travolta’s words, suggesting a shared interiority. For all his sophisticated understanding of airplane design, Jeff is also a naïf who doesn’t quite understand what his mother is up to when she puts him in a hotel room during a stopover so she can slip out for a nightcap. A nightcap in a room just down the hall that might be occupied by a married man she met on the plane.  

Those split levels of child and adult consciousness give the film a certain piquancy, a little gap where drama can spark in a story where almost nothing really happens except a kid takes a plane ride, or several plane rides, with his mom. The emotional climaxes are the moments he realizes they’re getting upgraded to first class and going to fly on a real 707 jet plane for the last leg of the journey, as opposed to the slower, propeller-powered vehicle of the title.

Some might quibble that the film would have benefited from a bit more insight into Helen, perhaps offering an explanation of why she’s a single parent, or some credibility to her own and Jeff’s claim that she’s a good enough actor that this trip to Hollywood is warranted. It doesn’t help that Jeff keeps overhyping her reputation to strangers, telling everyone he meets that she’s going to be in a film with Paul Newman.

But like the little white lies of children, this not-quite-a-feature is basically harmless, a wallow in nostalgia so innocuous that it’s hard to begrudge its aviation-crazed creator with connections sufficient to indulge his whim — right down to choosing some egregiously on-the-nose period tunes like Frank Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ and ‘The Girl From Ipanema.’