John Travolta has been a pilot for decades. He owns multiple aircraft, logs flight hours, and wrote a children’s book about his love of aviation in 1997. Propeller: One-Way Night Coach adapts that book for the screen. Directed by Travolta himself, it’s easy to see how much this story means to him.
The film follows an 8-year-old and his mother on a propeller flight from New York to Hollywood in 1962, back when cross-country air travel involved multiple stops and overnight layovers. It’s an atmospheric setup, and there’s a real sense of wonder in seeing the journey through a child’s eyes, while glimpses of the mother’s private life suggest a more complicated story unfolding just out of reach. At one stopover, she quietly leaves Jeff in a hotel room so she can go out for a drink with a man she met on the flight. Moments like that made me curious about the film hiding beneath the surface. Unfortunately, it never quite gets there.
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