You can thank this movie for all the other disaster movies. Get a bunch of stars, pre-faded and fading, and put them together in a big, easily identifiable and relatable place. Then give them a bunch of intersecting, melodramatic plotlines to kill time until catastrophe strikes. This film differs from later disaster films a little bit by not really showcasing any impressive special effects. We have a blizzard (painted sawdust) and a mad bomber (Van Heflin), but around that we have about two hours of people doing airporty stuff like struggling to get all the snow off the runways, catching stowaways on flights (how quaint), greasing local politicians' palms for a planned airport expansion, carrying on affairs and conceiving little bastard babies, and oh yeah flying planes. I have to disagree with star Burt Lancaster who called the film "the worst piece of junk ever made" because there are by far worse films; it is a bit shocking that this is one of the most successful movies of all time, but at least modern viewers can enjoy it ironically and/or historically across a time-chasm of 40 years. Like a PSA or a TV Christmas Special, this is the kind of schlock that improves with age.
And I mean quaint! I said quaint earlier right? The airport of 1970 is almost unrecognizable in some aspects. Who is this woman sitting at a booth? Oh she's selling life insurance of course. You pay in cash. Somebody even uses coins. And they notice an on-boarding passenger acting suspicious with his suitcase, but they just sorta shrug. 'He's leaving the country, not entering, so let Italy worry about that shit' at least one character thinks, although a few others are more proactive and safety-conscious. Speaking of Italy, they announce the Chicago to Rome flight in English first and then in Italian; talk about exotic! There's even a little old lady that sneaks on planes all the time and nobody notices because she's little and old.
In fact, the exotic factor might be a big part of this movie's success, just like some of the other biggest hits of all time. Popular commercial air travel was still relatively new, and still carried a mystique of danger and adventure. Considering the stowaway subplot, it seems the differences between air travel and ship travel were not as well defined yet. There's definitely one big reason that air travel was still considered fancy to the average American audience member: $$$. During one scene, a passenger complains that he got stale peanuts after shelling out "475 bucks" for his ticket. Holy shit, that's a lot of 1970 dollars right there, almost 2700 dollars today. No wonder flying was reserved for fat-cat tycoons, glamorous movie stars, and archaeology professors.
The film, it's stowaway subplot, the old stowaway herself, and the actress playing the stowaway, Helen Hayes, are fascinating relics. Hayes is quite a piece of work. She had been acting in films since 1917 (!) and won an Academy Award (!) for this part, and it's not hard to see why: You can't help but love her! She just wants to travel around the country and happens to have no money. It's like Leo in Catch Me If You Can. Who could be mad at a kid who wanted to sneak around the country for free? It's not like you really endanger anyone when you pose as a pilot/attorney/doctor.
The other disaster movies that followed in the wake of this film usually amped up the disaster quotient. This film is really supposed to be about all the goings-on on a bustling big city airport, which just happen to include a mad bomber in addition to plenty of other shit. The Airport sequels increasingly focused on the disaster element with entries featuring mid-air collisions, planes trapped under the sea, and Robert Wagner repeatedly trying to blow up the Concorde; the later entries also managed to snag Charlton Heston, a mainstay of disaster movies, and other aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart.
Dean Martin plays a pilot who always looks drunk and is considering the treatment that shall not be named for the stewardess he knocked up. George Kennedy appears in every single entry, rising and falling in the ranks of the fictional Trans Global Airlines, and is probably, after nostalgia or camp, the other best thing about the movie. He is one of the actors firmly on the 'not ashamed to be here' side and delivers a fun performance; he's the brash chief mechanic Joe Patroni, a sarcastic lout who mouths off to his bosses and who compares the stiff handling of a plane on the icy runway to a 'drunken dinosaur.'
~ Other disaster films used threats like a burning building, a burning city, a hurricane, a volcano, a blimp, a sniper, a capsized ocean liner, a theme park bomber, ship collisions, an earthquake, an airship, an avalanche, a train full of germs on a rickety bridge, and bees. My favorite is bees.
~ Christopher Lloyd is supposedly in this as 'diner patron' but I couldn't really tell if it was him or not. Part of me really wants to believe its him.
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| Hi I'm an airplane |
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