What on earth was John Travolta thinking with this dreadful vanity project?
What on earth was John Travolta thinking with this dreadful vanity project?
Robbie CollinSat, May 16, 2026 at 9:57 AM UTC
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John Travolta at Cannes Film Festival with his daughter Ella Bleu Travolta, who stars in his directorial debut Propeller One-Way Night Coach - Dominique Charriau
It is normal to be bored by dreadful films, or even annoyed by them. But I don’t believe I have ever felt as sorry for one as I do John Travolta’s directorial debut, the viewing of which is like watching a toddler walk into a lamp post.
Travolta has adapted his 1997 children’s novel which recounts one of the actor’s formative experiences: an overnight multi-stop flight he took with his mother from New York to Los Angeles in December 1962, and from which his lifelong love of aviation presumably sprung. From the awful title font on, Propeller One-Way Night Coach is extraordinarily bad – though the making of it also clearly means a lot to Travolta, who gets to relive and share this happy passage of his childhood with the world at large. Is it a film for children? Families? Vintage plane-spotters? One suspects it is in fact a film made for the amusement of one person only, who also happens to be the person making it.
Clark Shotwell plays the young Travolta, here called Jeff, and Kelly Eviston-Quinnett his mother Helen: meanwhile Travolta himself performs the narration, in which an older Jeff recalls the trip in often punishing detail. At best, the voice-over is wistful if meandering; at worst it keeps zig-zagging off into gibberish. Memorable passages include Jeff referring to the Holocaust (which, astoundingly, comes up twice) as “The Nazi event”, as well as the following reaction to seeing a toy aeroplane in the Trans World Airlines souvenir shop: “Life at this moment was so good that it was just hard to recover from.”
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There are would-be-comic asides about smoking and the cockpit door being left unlocked, encounters with some eccentric fellow passengers, as well as lots of lingering shots of lavish in-flight catering, including glistening inch-thick slices of chateaubriand carved on the trolley, and an odd running joke about chicken cordon bleu. The young Jeff is of course also bewitched by the air hostesses – one of whom, Doris, is played by Ella Bleu Travolta, the director’s daughter.
Travolta makes a cameo towards the end of the film as one of the pilots
Another (Olga Hoffman) takes such a shine to the little tyke and his mother that she upgrades them both to first class, gratis, before having them transferred onto an even more glamorous Boeing 707 jet for the last leg of the trip. This is the sort of exhilarating drama Propeller One-Way Night Coach keeps throwing at you: someone is lovely to young Jeff, and then the old Jeff rambles for a bit about how great it was. We keep hearing that life simply can’t get any better, then Doris lets him lie down in one of the first class beds for a bit and lo, a new existential pinnacle is somehow reached.
The film’s heavy-handedly naive tone does create some interesting effects: there is a jolt of surrealist horror towards the end when Travolta makes a twinkling on-screen cameo as the 707’s pilot, only to start talking in exactly the same voice – tone, tempo and all – as eight-year-old Jeff’s internal monologue. Then after 60 minutes it’s suddenly over, at which point you’re just grateful the two didn’t book a return ticket.
Screening at Cannes Film Festival. On Apple TV from May 29
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
