At the Cannes premiere of “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” the first movie written and directed by John Travolta (it’s only an hour long, and drops on Apple on May 29), Travolta was introduced with a 10-minute montage of his film work — the sort of thing that sounds very standard, though this had to be one of the greatest movie-star montages I’ve ever seen. It had the benefit of amazing music (“Stayin’ Alive,” “You’re the One That I Want”), but watching Travolta in his ’70s heyday, and in his ’90s second heyday, you realized, quite simply, that he’s one of the most electric stars of the last half century. The montage cued you to a dozen movies you were suddenly dying to see again.
Travolta then came out on stage, wearing a beret and a trim geometric beard (a look that seemed like a beatnik nod to Samuel L. Jackson), and the audience was rapturous in its appreciation. When the movie started, all that good feeling carried over to it. In this case, however, the “We love you, John!” emotional spillover seemed notably appropriate, since “Propeller One-Way Night Coach,” while little more than a slim and winning facsimile of a movie, is rooted in the power of affection.
Based on Travolta’s 1997 children’s novel of the same name, the movie is his fictionalized childhood memoir, the slightly tall tale of an 8-year-old boy named Jeff who, in 1962, takes his first plane trip. It’s a TWA flight from the East Coast to California that stops in more cities than an Amtrak trek. (Did planes really used to do this? I guess so.) Our young hero loves the adventure of being on an airplane for the first time. But what he loves just as much — and what the movie, in a way, is about — is the trappings of the “Mad Men”/space-age era, which it views as a lost paradise.
