{"id":645942,"date":"2026-05-16T03:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T03:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/645942\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T03:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T03:15:08","slug":"propeller-one-way-night-coach-review-john-travoltas-winning-reverie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/645942\/","title":{"rendered":"Propeller One-Way Night Coach Review: John Travolta’s Winning Reverie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAt the Cannes premiere of \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach<\/a>,\u201d the first movie written and directed by John Travolta<\/a> (it\u2019s only an hour long, and drops on Apple on May 29), Travolta was introduced with a 10-minute montage of his film work \u2014 the sort of thing that sounds very standard, though this had to be one of the greatest movie-star montages I\u2019ve ever seen. It had the benefit of amazing music (\u201cStayin\u2019 Alive,\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re the One That I Want\u201d), but watching Travolta in his \u201970s heyday, and in his \u201990s second heyday, you realized, quite simply, that he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tTravolta 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 \u201cWe love you, John!\u201d emotional spillover seemed notably appropriate, since \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach,\u201d while little more than a slim and winning facsimile of a movie, is rooted in the power of affection.<\/p>\n

\n\tBased on Travolta\u2019s 1997 children\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 and what the movie, in a way, is about \u2014 is the trappings of the \u201cMad Men\u201d\/space-age era, which it views as a lost paradise.<\/p>\n

\n\tTravolta, basically reading his book out loud, narrates the entire film, and considering its anecdotal style (there\u2019s no pretense of a story; it\u2019s just the kid\u2019s diary of his trip), and what an all-American tyke Jeff is, you may be reminded of the movie version of \u201cA Christmas Story,\u201d which was also a heavily narrated memoir rooted in nostalgia for Americana. But that movie was full of snark and broad cartoon hijinks. (That\u2019s why I\u2019ve never cared for it.) \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach\u201d is sometimes funny in a light way, but it\u2019s mostly sincere. Travolta wants to share how much he loved being on that plane: the wide-eyed wonder of it all \u2014 and, underneath that, the feeling that he was protected. (That\u2019s the feeling 1962 could give you.)<\/p>\n

\n\tJeff (Clark Shotwell), an innocent full of curiosity, and his mother, Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett), a part-time professional actress and full-time tippling narcissist, are flying to California because Helen, who has done stage work, has decided she wants to make it in Hollywood. She\u2019s a 49-year-old flirt in a librarian\u2019s beehive who will beam adoringly at any unattached middle-aged man who has a decent job; between that and her Manhattans, she doesn\u2019t have too much attention to give to Jeff. Yet she\u2019s viewed, like everything else in the movie, with an adoration that is nearly transcendental. This, Travolta is saying, is what his mother (or some version of her) was, and he accepts it. He celebrates it.<\/p>\n

\n\tTravolta selected the film\u2019s music, which ranges from bossa nova to \u201cRhapsody in Blue.\u201d He sets the mood for this space-age tone poem with St\u00e9phane Grappelli\u2019s gently jaunty \u201cBallade,\u201d even though it came out in 1974, because it really does have that post-1950s Proustian Woody Allen vibe of mellow adventure. At Idlewild Airport, which had yet to be christened JFK, the film revels in the modernist trappings of the TWA terminal; in the comfort of the plane; even in the slight yuckiness of the airplane food \u2014 which is always chicken cordon bleu, a dish that makes Jeff go: I like fried chicken, I like cheese, but I don\u2019t necessarily want them together. Jeff meets the people on the plane, like the 10-foot-tall man, and the pilots (back then you could knock on the door and hang out with them), and, finally, the film\u2019s version of an 8-year-old\u2019s love object: a stewardess named Doris, played by Ella Bleu Travolta (the director\u2019s daughter), who might just be a star.<\/p>\n

\n\tJeff and Helen end up in first class, and on a real jet that flies at 33,000 feet and at 600 miles per hour. \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach\u201d always feels like a children\u2019s tale \u2014 Travolta\u2019s narration lends it a storybook innocence \u2014 but it\u2019s one that a lot of adults will likely consider checking out. It\u2019s kind of like a home movie with better sets, and the fact that we know it\u2019s Travolta telling his own story is part of its appeal. If \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach\u201d lets you know anything genuine, it\u2019s that Travolta, at an early age, looked around at his life and thought it was magical. That, in its way, is a gift, one that in movie after movie he has reflected back to his fans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the Cannes premiere of \u201cPropeller One-Way Night Coach,\u201d the first movie written and directed by John Travolta…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[32176,88,18981,206,252523],"class_list":["post-645942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-entertainment","tag-john-travolta","tag-movies","tag-propeller-one-way-night-coach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645942\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}