The scenes you’ll never see in an inflight movie

Censorship is alive and well on in-flight movies. It goes without saying that films involving plane crashes or hijacking will not be screened.

The famous scene in the Oscar-winning Rain Man (1988) in which Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant and his brother, Tom Cruise, discuss which airline has a spotless record as far as crashes are concerned – the answer is Qantas – was eliminated from copies of the film shown in the air, reportedly even on Qantas flights.

Back when we were able to enjoy long-haul flights to destinations all over the world, we took it for granted that movies and other in-flight entertainment would be available to alleviate the boredom. But for many years this was not the case.

The first in-flight movie was screened in 1921 on Aeromarine Airways, an amphibian aircraft that flew around the city of Chicago screening a locally made production, Howdy Chicago, to its small number of passengers. Four years later, in 1925, Imperial Airways screened the silent epic The Lost World on a flight between London (Croydon Airport) and Paris. But it was not until the 1960s that in-flight movies became a regular part of the flying experience.

In 1961, Inflight Motion Pictures designed a 16mm projector that could be mounted horizontally in the roof of the cabin and which was able to carry an entire feature film. TWA was the first to embrace this new technology and screened the glossy but vapid Lana Turner melodrama, By Love Possessed, as its initial in-flight presentation.

My first in-flight movie experience came on July 20, 1966, when I flew on American Airlines from Los Angeles to New York. The film was a comedic western, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, which starred Henry Fonda and Joanne Woodward. You had to pay for the privilege of watching it – or, rather, you paid for the earphones so that you could hear it – but the result was most disappointing. The colour film was shown in black and white on what was effectively a tiny TV screen, and the spectacular scenery over which we were flying provided better entertainment than the movie.

As time went by the presentation of in-flight movies became more sophisticated, but for film-lovers there was a catch: the movies were invariably “modified”, as indeed they still are today. These modifications take two forms. One involves adjusting the size of the frame so that a widescreen film fits into a smaller format, effectively removing the edges of the image; this is not as problematic today as it was formerly as individual screens have become wider.

The other modification involves the removal of coarse language and the reduction or elimination of violence and sexual scenes. Censorship is alive and well on in-flight movies.

It goes without saying that films that involve plane crashes or hijacking will not be screened on planes. The famous scene in the Oscar-winning Rain Man (1988) in which Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant and his brother, Tom Cruise, discuss which airline has a spotless record as far as crashes are concerned – the answer is Qantas – was eliminated from copies of the film shown in the air, reportedly even on Qantas flights.

Though watching movies on a plane undoubtedly helps pass the time, it’s not the best way to appreciate them; there are too many distractions for one thing. One particularly frustrating example in my experience occurred on a Pan-American flight from Hong Kong to Jakarta on October 13, 1973. The movie was Oklahoma Crude, an action adventure with George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway which was directed by Stanley Kramer. Maybe there was a tail wind, or maybe the timing went awry but the flight reached its destination and the passengers disembarked while the climax of the movie was still unspooling.

For 20 years – 1983-2003 – I worked as a film reviewer for the celebrated American trade paper Variety. During this period I became the only Variety reviewer to cover a film that had its world premiere on a plane. The film was Better Late Than Never (1982), a comedy starring David Niven – in his penultimate role – and Maggie Smith. The director was Bryan Forbes, who had made outstanding films early in his career – Whistle Down the Wind (1961) and Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1963) among them. But this film had been shelved by its distributor, Warner Bros, and had not opened in any cinemas, which was particularly sad given the fact that Niven had died on July 29, 1983. I was flying on a Pan-American from Los Angeles to Sydney on September 16 that year when this unreleased film was screened.

My review, written in the slang for which Variety was famous, read in part: “It’s not surprising that Warner Bros has not released this production which seems to have gone direct to the airline movie circuit. Tepid Bryan Forbes pic is lumbered with a familiar plot, limp script, routine direction and tired performances ... Pic develops sans surprises ... it’s hackneyed material lacking anything in the way of genuine comedy ... It’s sad to see Niven struggling to breathe life into such substandard material ... The film contains several plugs for Pan-American, so it seems only too appropriate that this screening was caught on a Pan-Am trans-Pacific flight.”

The unusual circumstances in which a film involving major talent was reviewed was a matter for amused commentary from my editor in New York. No in-flight movie has been reviewed by Variety since.

If and when most of us are able to fly overseas again there will be plenty of in-flight entertainment to keep us occupied.

I’m looking forward to that.