Airport

The 1970s were the start of the disaster movie craze. Audience members got a taste for seeing big-named stars teamed up and put in some sort of peril, often with many of them being dispatched in unique ways throughout the course of the film; there was an appeal that we still get on occasion today, though the genre has mostly fallen out of fashion. Movies like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake pulled together large ensemble casts and slowly ratcheted up the tension while pruning the cast down, satisfying some primal urge the masses had with seeing our favorite stars dispatched unceremoniously. This sub-genre of film officially gained a following with Airport, a movie whose influence can be seen in other classics and non-classics alike. Films like Airplane! and Die Hard 2 have clear influences from Airport, though Airplane!’s primary source of inspiration comes from another aerial disaster film, 1957’s Zero Hour.

The weakness of this genre is that, by having so many stars cast in these pictures, shortcuts have to be made in order to give them all stories other than a generic person in distress. This is not like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World where all these people are here for cameos, they are here to have their own stories amongst the overall narrative. What inevitably results from this is that none of it is particularly deep and most of it is cliché. But the human drama isn’t really the focus of these films, anyway. The focus is the disaster and how these people will or will not get out of it. When we watch The Towering Inferno, we are not wondering about the interpersonal lives of those up above the flames; we are worrying about how they will escape the dangers that are gradually creeping up on them. There will inevitably be a character or two that gets treated better than that, such as Gene Hackman’s Reverend Scott in The Poseidon Adventure, but mostly they’re just added body count populated by recognizable faces. 

The dangers that face our cast of characters here are twofold. There is a severe winter storm hitting Chicago, threatening to shut down the fictional Lincoln International Airport. This is causing planes to be stuck in the heavy drifts of snow and delaying departures. On top of this, disgruntled former military demolitions man and failed contractor D. O. Guerrero (Van Heflin, in his final screen appearance) has decided that the only way he can support his family is to take out a large insurance policy on himself and then blow himself up onboard a plane headed for Rome, ensuring the policy will take care of his wife in his absence. Once the plane is finally able to take off, it’s only a matter of time before he triggers the bomb in his briefcase, ensuring he and everyone else on the plane will be killed in the blast. 

Meanwhile, Airport manager Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is working overtime again trying to keep the airport open. This pension for working long hours has caused strain on his marriage, and his wife is looking for a divorce. The head of customer relations, Tanya Livingston (Jean Seberg), holds a candle for him, but he has never strayed from his marriage, though he feels the same for her. He comes to a realization that there is no more love in his marriage and that for some time he has been making excuses to stay away from home, which has only exacerbated their marital woes. 

Bakersfeld’s brother-in-law, Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), is a pilot and the checkride captain for the flight to Rome. Though he is married, he is having an affair with the chief stewardess, Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset), which has resulted in her pregnancy. She has no delusions of him leaving his wife for her and is struggling with whether she should keep the baby, have an abortion, or give it up for adoption. Meanwhile, Ada Quonsett (Helen Hayes), an elderly woman who has figured out ways to stowaway on board flights and has made a habit of it, using the free flights to visit her daughter often in New York. When she is eventually busted, she gives security the slip and sneaks aboard the flight to Rome, ending up sitting next to Guerrero and his briefcase of explosives. 

There are a few other stories thrown into the mix, such as the hard-headed chief mechanic, Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), fighting with everyone over how to get a plane in a snowdrift blocking a critical runway unstuck, or the head of the U.S. Customs Service, Harry (Lloyd Nolan), who can tell when someone is being shady just by looking at them. There are also the wives of Mel, Vernon, and Guerrero, too. These are mostly stock characters, though, there to advance the plot or provide motivations for actions. This is not a film that lives on the complexities of the characters; there just isn’t enough time to do that with so many named characters. 

What’s surprising, and a little bit disappointing, is that this film is mostly set-up and very little actual disaster. Unlike, say, The Poseidon Adventure, where the majority of the film is the characters going from one dangerous situation to another, the actual flight and the peril in the skies make up only about forty minutes of the total runtime, and next to no one actually dies. This is atypical for this kind of film. But what it does do, it does well. It builds up the tension early on, letting us think for a while that this is going to be a film about navigating the heavy storms hitting Chicago. Only later do we learn about Guerrero and his plan. 

This film is a product of its time, too. Those who frequent airports will know that most of what we see here would no longer be possible. TSA has changed in the years since 9/11, and people sneaking aboard or even accessing the terminal without prior authorization is not this easy. Neither is carrying in a briefcase filled with explosives. What we have here is a detailed look at how airlines and airline security worked in a simpler time. This is fairly accurate to how it was in the day and is now a time capsule to a time when people weren’t so cautious when it came to air traffic safety.

While the details are terrific and the tension in the sky is done well, the characters are this film’s weak point. I already mentioned earlier how it has to play in broad brushstrokes to give all these named actors sufficient screentime. That makes for the first half of this film feeling very much like a soap opera, complete with gratuitous affairs and marital drama. The film is a bit flippant when it comes to giving us reasons to care about Vernon and Gwen’s story in particular, except that they are played by Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bissett, two actors with a built in audience. When she first tells him she is pregnant, his first response is to suggest someone he knows overseas who does abortions. This is supposed to be one of our heroes, and he comes across as sleazy and callous. Later, we will come around a little to his character, but only once he is faced with a calamity. 

Mel isn’t much better. While he isn’t actively cheating on his wife, he is neglecting her. We get little of their home life and thus cannot make any educated judgment on his actions; instead, we have to go off what the film does show us, and that doesn’t fare well on his part. He’s a man with a wife and kids, yet he goes out of his way to avoid them in favor of work, turning down a much better-paying job that would allow him to be home more often. More insight would be helpful here, but this film is not about the characters, not really. It’s about setting up the danger in the sky while trying to avoid keeping the characters too generic.

This film may have kicked off the 70s disaster film genre, but it is not amongst the best of those films. It set the template that allowed other films to improve on it. Still, there is a lot of good stuff to be found here. The actors are doing their best with underwritten characters, and the effects are great, even if it is obvious that Chicago was not really being besieged with a blizzard at the time of filming. There are also some pretty good humorous moments, such as the know-it-all kid on the flight who questions Vernon about why the plane is suddenly turning around and heading back, only to get a rambling, gobbledygook response back. Ada’s explanations as to how she manages to sneak onto so many flights, as well as how she finally got caught, are equally hilarious. Helen Hayes was so good in this, in fact, that she was the only one who walked away from this winning an Oscar for it. There is nothing particularly wrong with this film in general; it just doesn’t represent the best this genre has to offer, especially if you’re going in hoping for a body count. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Ross Hunter

Best Supporting Actress: Helen Hayes (won)

Best Supporting Actress: Maureen Stapleton

Best Screenplay - Based on Material from Another Medium: George Seaton

Best Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen, E. Preston Ames, Jack D. Moore, and Mickey S. Michaels

Best Cinematography: Ernest Laszlo

Best Costume Design: Edith Head

Best Film Editing: Stuart Gilmore

Best Original Score: Alfred Newman

Best Sound: Ronald Pierce and David H. Moriarty

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Release Date: March 5, 1970

Running Time: 137 Minutes

Rated PG

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Barry Nelson, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter, and Barbara Hale

Directed by: George Seaton