THE PLOT:
When a heavy snowstorm leads an incoming flight crew to misjudge their landing at Chicago's fictitious Lincoln Airport, the 707 ends up stuck half in and half out of an airport runway. Workaholic airport manager Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is forced to close the runway until the plane can be cleared, further straining his efforts to keep his airport open during the storm. Despite the best efforts of chief mechanic Patroni (George Kennedy), the plane stubbornly resists attempts to move it.
Bakersfeld's night only gets worse from there. His wife (Dana Wynter) is threatening divorce. Tanya Livingston (Jean Seberg), the customer relations official whose company he far prefers to his wife's, is considering a transfer. The airport's Board of Commissioners is fielding noise complaints from homes near the airport, and is actively discussing his termination - which his pilot brother-in-law, Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), actively encourages.
Then the unthinkable happens. A troubled, out-of-work veteran (Van Heflin) has bought a ticket on the Rome flight. His intent? To set off a bomb on the plane so that his wife (Maureen Stapleton) can collect on his insurance. When the bomb goes off in midair, the plane holds together - but Demerest and the plane's captain (Barry Nelson) must nurse the crippled aircraft back to Lincoln. And if the runway isn't cleared by the time they get there, Demerest is grimly certain there is no chance of landing the plane safely!
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| Airport manager Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) shares a moment with Tanya Livingston (Jean Seberg) |
CHARACTERS:
Mel Bakersfeld: The only Airport movie in which the main character is not the pilot. Burt Lancaster would later describe the movie as a "piece of junk" that he did in order to finance independent projects that actually interested him. But while this may be a paycheck performance, he does a thoroughly professional job. Bakersfeld isn't a character of enormous depth, and no one will call this one of Lancaster's best performances - but he plays his scenes with authority and his screen presence anchors the film effectively.
Vernon Demerest: Dean Martin would later name this as one of his favorite roles, yet his performance is much less convincing than Lancaster's. He isn't actively bad, save for a subplot that puts him in a cringe-inducing romance with much younger flight attendant Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset). He's at his worst in these moments, but at his best when the pilot is dealing directly with the Third Act crisis. Still, of the principle actors, he is the one whose character feels particularly false - and unintentional comedy ensues every time he berates Bakersfeld for being a "penguin" (which I'm assuming is Dean Martin-speak for "suit").
Tanya Livingston: As with most of the cast, Jean Seberg does a thoroughly professional job, selling her character as a competent administrator. Oddly, while the age gap between Lancaster and Seberg isn't much less than the one between Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bisset, their relationship doesn't jar to quite the same extent - perhaps because the two characters seem closer to being equals, or perhaps because their romance is a slow-boil flirtation rather than an actively sexual one.
Gwen: While the Gwen/Demerest relationship is difficult to buy into, Bisset's performance is much better overall than Dean Martin's. As the airport makes the flight crew aware of the bomber, Gwen plays an active role in locating him, allowing the actress some very good scenes. The subplot involving her pregnancy, however, is tedious melodrama that the overlong film would have been better served jettisoning.
Patroni: George Kennedy's Patroni was the only character to appear in all four Airport movies. By the series' end, Kennedy's career had taken a downturn to "B" movies; but at the time this film was made, he was a relatively recent Oscar winner whose name boosted the film's considerable pedigree. His Patroni is an extremely broad blue collar caricature, chomping cigars and argues with pilots over airplane capabilities (he's right in every case, of course). He could easily come across as a cartoon, but Kennedy gives it his all, providing probably the movie's best performance - and certainly its most committed one.
Supporting Cast: More notable names dot the supporting cast. Helen Hayes won an Oscar for her performance as a crafty stowaway. Perry Mason's Barbara Hale pops up as Dean Martin's wife, who puts up with his serial infidelities because "someday he'll come home for some other reason than to just change his clothes." Van Heflin, as the bomber, delivers his final bigscreen performance (though he did make a couple more television films), and gives a performance so twitchy and nervous that you wonder that anyone actually allowed him on the plane to begin with. Maureen Stapleton, as his wife, gets an overwrought moment at the film's climax that is probably meant to be heartrending, but ends up being unintentionally hilarious.
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| Not quite film history's least convincing screen couple... But they're in the running. |
THOUGHTS:
Airport is generally credited as kicking off the 1970s disaster movie craze, establishing the base formula of an all-star cast navigating a situation that would seem to mean certain death. It is certainly not the first disaster movie (not by a long shot). In fact, it's really not a disaster movie at all, given that the bomb subplot only takes focus in the movies' final third. But audiences responded to the formula, and blockbusters throughout the decade that followed - from The Poseidon Adventure to The Towering Inferno to this film's own sequels - would retain the basics, only emphasizing the action/adventure elements over the interpersonal drama.
Airport has been described as "Grand Hotel at an airport," and that's probably a more accurate description of it. Most of the action takes place at... well, the airport, with Lancaster's character the fulcrum on which all the other plots turn. This is old-school Hollywood gloss, a soap opera with big name actors, and is best approached with that in mind.
It is also a bit of a time capsule, reflecting the mores of its age. Two of the three male leads are married, but are engaged in affairs or flirtations with much younger women - and in both cases, the mistresses are portrayed more sympathetically than the wives. But while the movie has a relaxed attitude toward infidelity, it takes a sharply conservative turn on the issue of abortion, with (too) much of the Dean Martin/Jacqueline Bisset subplot devoted to anti-abortion speechifying. The male characters also generally speak to and about women in a way that... has not aged well.
And yet: While many modern reviews point out the sexism of the dialogue, very few of them note a sharp counterpoint: namely, that every major female character in this movie is both intelligent and competent. Jean Seberg's Tanya Livingston actively listens to a customs officer's concerns about the passenger who ends up being the bomber, and verifies enough circumstantial evidence to warrant bringing the matter to the airport manager's attention. Bisset's Gwen is able to spot the bomber, and enlists the help of Helen Hayes' quick-thinking stowaway to try to stop him - an attempt that would have been successful, save for the intervention of a meddling idiot. In fact, the movie has only one genuinely incompetent major character: Livingston's bumbling subordinate (John Findlater) - a male.
Of course, the other major area in which this reflects a very different time is with regard to the airport itself. There are no metal detectors. Customs agents only search luggage if they have probable suspicion. A stowaway can rush onto a plane during boarding by claiming to be returning her son's wallet. By modern standards, all of this is utterly implausible (some of it probably was at the time).
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| A stowaway (Helen Hayes) prepares to connive herself away from her escort and onto the plane. |
OVERALL:
It's hard to argue with Burt Lancaster's characterization of Airport as "junk" - but it's fun junk, put together with style and polish. It's easy to mock or roll your eyes at parts of the film. Then again, both disaster movie and bigscreen soap opera are subgenres that more or less parody themselves.
Fifty years on, there is no question this movie is a relic (I haven't even mentioned the early '70s split screen moments). But in a way, it's all the more enjoyable for that. It's clearly about twenty minutes longer than it should be, but it remains a good watch - both for its artificially heightened drama and for its unintended straight-faced silliness.
Overall Rating: 7/10.
Followed by: Airport 1975
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