I can’t find this movie anywhere, so shout-out to the incredible Temple of Schlock for all they’ve posted.
The 3-D softcore film The Stewardesses became the sixth highest-grossing film of 1971 and one of the most successful independent movies of all time. More importantly, it briefly revived the format by proving 3-D could actually make money for low-budget filmmakers. The original film itself is nothing to write home about. Still, its sequel—shot in Stereovision 3-D and released under a kaleidoscope of titles like International Stewardesses, Supersonic Stewardesses, Jet Set and Mr. Howard’s Crazy Airline—is said to be an unadulterated disaster.
The plot, such as it is, rounds up twelve of the most qualified stewardesses from Global Airlines for a grueling three-week promotional world tour aboard the prototype Condor SST supersonic jet. Global’s parent company, Hillman Industries, is financially tangled up with the plane’s British manufacturer. Enter Henry Hillman, an eccentric, reclusive Howard Hughes clone (first spotted wearing sunglasses and stuffing his face with McDonald’s takeout in a bunker penthouse) who has bet the farm on the Condor. To dodge a hostile takeover at the next shareholder meeting, Hillman needs to pre-sell fleets of this supersonic bird to global airlines.
Of course, all of this corporate window-dressing is just an excuse to showcase pretty young women wandering around Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Athens, Bombay, and Hong Kong via sub-Super-8 travelogue footage, or wiggling on hotel beds in horribly lit, dreary sex scenes.
Behind the scenes, the production history is an absolute mess of cost-cutting, legal confusion, and unwatchable formatting. Following The Stewardesses, creators Chris Condon and Allan Silliphant sank a million dollars into an all-commuter airline and left post-production to distributor Louis K. Sher. Sher let a third party butcher the editing and released prints in a botched above-and-below 3-D format using the Mortimer Marks system. The vertical parallax was so horribly misaligned that audiences literally couldn’t watch it without getting sick. Decades of botched re-releases (The Stewardesses, Part II, SST, Airline!, Jet Set) turned this project into what many think is an ongoing cinematic hoax.
Of the girls in this who made more than just this, we can point to Peggy Church (The Mermaid, Prison Girls); Carona Faoro (Panorama Blue); Kathryn Holcomb (the former wife of Bruce Boxleitner and current wife of Ian Oglivy; she used the name Kitty Holcomb here and soon moved into mainstream TV acting); and Dalana Bissonnette (who also did adult work as Kathy Foster, Claire Crumpet and Kay White).
Silliphant would make one more 3D softcore movie, The Surfer Girls.
