Propeller One-Way Night Coach review – John Travolta family plane fantasy is a short-haul joyride

Travolta directs and narrates this 60-minute adaptation of his own short story about a boy who dreams of being a pilot John Travolta’s directorial debut turns out to be a rather charmingly quirky and distinctively peculiar novella-sized bedtime story. It is an hour-long novelty feature commissioned by Apple TV, with lovingly detailed but innocent Mad Men 1960s period production design, and narrated throughout by Travolta itself. That’s an indulgence you have to get used to – but if Alec Baldwin was doing it, you might almost think this was a Wes Anderson movie. It is in fact based on Travolta’s own children’s book about his love of planes: an autobiographical tale about Jeff, an eight-year-old boy, weirdly resembling the kid in the spoof classic Airplane!, who gets to overhear some pretty ripe adult conversation in a plane cockpit. Jeff becomes entranced with aviation in 1962 after taking an all-night flight to LA with his cocktail-quaffing divorced mum on an impossibly glamorous TWA propeller plane, a “one-way night coach” already attaining its own kind of retro prestige by virtue of the jet plane’s recent invention. Clark Shotwell plays Jeff; Kelly Eviston-Quinnet