By Scott Ross
Airport (1970) When it comes to certain things in life, initial impressions made at an early age can, however undiscriminating they may seem to you later, carry through succeeding decades with very little change. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find this especially true of books, music and movies; while there is much I once loved I can no longer abide, I still retain a peculiar sort of fondness for other items that seems to defy my adult sense of taste and aesthetics. This movie, first encountered on commercial television when I was 12, is one of those things. I liked it enough then to check out Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel from the local library, to read it eagerly and to see the movie a second time when it aired again a year or two later. I recently re-read the book, to judge the quality of Hailey’s writing and to check my memory of it, and although it is by no means what anyone would call literary fiction the novel, except when it occasionally veers off into tangential matters no reader can be expected to care about such as the extramarital escapades of the airport manager’s social-climbing bitch of a wife, is thoroughly engaging, with (for the most part) well-delineated characters, very good dialogue and, particularly as regards the airport manager’s thoughts, interesting digressions about the past and future of commercial aviation. That virtually none of the improvements the man sees as essential have come to pass in the 55 years since Airport was researched and written, and that much has gotten worse, is telling. There were hijackings then, and the threat of terror — the disaster in Airport is precipitated by a deranged would-be suicide setting off a bomb on board a jumbo jet — at least in 1968 one didn’t wonder daily when some cheaply-executed Boeing behemoth was going to come crashing down out of the sky or which company whistler-blower was next scheduled for suicide.
Some of the dialogue, when spoken by actors, is risible, and Seberg’s upswept, 45-year-old’s hairstyle is horrible on a beautiful 30 year old actress, but even at this remove I confess I don’t quite understand why so much opprobrium was heaped on the head of the picture by the serious critics of 1970. (Perhaps because it was produced by Ross Hunter? Not that they mattered; Airport was the most profitable movie of its year.) Part of my continued fondness for this glorified soap-opera is likely tied to gradual attrition: With the exception of Jacqueline Bisset, all of the major actors in Airport have since joined the majority. This matters less in movies released before you were born, or at any rate before you were aware of them. We accept that when we’re watching, say, a Bogart picture, that he’s long dead, but with movie actors we knew in our youth it’s a different story. They were living presences to us once, and knowing they’re no longer around to make more movies carries a frisson of involuntary nostalgia when we see them again in their prime, or in their most identifiable roles. With Airport these losses include Burt Lancaster (as the airport manager), Dean Martin (the senior pilot, sarcastic brother-in-law to Lancaster and the father of Bisset’s unborn child), Jean Seberg (Lancaster’s unrequited inamorata), George Kennedy (the TWA master mechanic), Helen Hayes (the comic stowaway), Van Heflin (the suicide), Maureen Stapleton (his anxious wife), Lloyd Nolan (customs), Jessie Royce Landis (a would-be customs cheat) and Whit Bissell (the oboist in the seat next to Hayes). Other, less stellar, presences include Barry Nelson as the stricken flight’s designated pilot, Dana Wynter as the bitch-wife (softened slightly for the movie but still appallingly social-climbing), Barbara Hale as Martin’s marginalized helpmeet and Peter Turgeon as the passenger everyone wants to slap but only the priest on board gets to. On his movie blog, Ken Anderson identifies a number of other familiar faces playing the Rome flight’s passengers including Pat Priest (the second Marilyn on “The Munsters”) as the woman sitting behind Hayes, Marion Ross and Sandra Gould (the replacement Gladys Kravitz of “Bewitched”), neither of whom has a line to speak between them, and Virginia Grey as the mother of the annoying, bespectacled adolescent know-it-all played by Lou Wagner, nearly 30 at the time but due to his diminutive size and youthful voice perennially cast as a teenager. (Two years earlier he was Lucius, the young chimpanzee skeptical about the older generations in Planet of the Apes.)
Wagner’s character is one of the writer-director George Seaton’s least felicitous additions to his adaptation screenplay, along with the tear in the ceiling of the fuselage which threatens to give way before the forced landing can be achieved. The gaping hole in its side wasn’t jeopardy enough? Fortunately, Seaton dropped the sub-plot concerning the airport manager’s younger brother, a flight controller who’s suffered a nervous collapse and is preparing for his own death. It works on the page — the phrase shrieked by a panic-stricken little girl about to die in a preventable accident, lodged in the controller’s memory, has stuck with me for decades as well — but would have been one subplot too many in the movie. Considering its age, and the limitations of motion picture technology in 1970, the effects shots in Airport (back-projection and models) are quite good, and never, as is so often the case with 1960s movies, embarrassing. Although some of the snow sequences pretty obviously involved process work, I was especially taken this time around by the shots of the Rome plane rising above the clouds and into the starry night sky, and amused to remember how this sequence inspired the opening gag in the hilarious 1980 spoof Airplane!
Seaton’s direction is square, as might be expected, and there are times when if you lived through those years you might be reminded of a widescreen Universal Movie of the Week, yet its Technicolor/Todd-AO images are also occasionally creative, and even witty, especially Seaton’s use of the then-new split-screen techniques. These were, famously, introduced at Expo ’67 in Montreal, along with the nearly overwhelming, Walt Disney-produced “Circle Vision” show Canada ’67. My family was there, and I certainly remember that 360-degree exhibition, if not the elaborate split-screen picture We Are Young, although I’m sure I saw that too. (I was six-and-a-half and easily tired from walking that huge concourse, so a lot has leached from my memory of the event.) The new split-screen technique was immediately grabbed up by Hollywood filmmakers, notably John Frankenheimer (Grand Prix) and Norman Jewison (The Thomas Crown Affair) and for things like the “Brady Bunch” opening but I don’t recall a more complex application of the process than Seaton and his cinematographer Ernest Laszlo used for Airport. When Lancaster calls home we see him on the left side of the wide screen; as his teenage daughter answers the telephone she appears in the top center. After chatting with her briefly he asks to speak to his younger child (the then-ubiquitous Lisa Gerritsen), who pops up in the bottom center, then to his wife, who then appears on the left side of the screen. What I like especially about this is that it permits the viewers to decide where they want to look, on which actor to focus their attention. By contrast, the standard, by-the-numbers set-up, which involves a cut to the person being spoken to and then back to the original speaker, not only makes your decision for you but is dull to boot.
Airport wasn’t the first so-called “disaster movie” to involve air travel. Hailey himself wrote a play for Canadian television in 1956 called “Flight into Danger” (adapted as the movie Zero Hour! a year later) whose ptomaine poisoning plot was lifted by Abrahams, Zucker and Zucker for Airplane! Going further back, the James Stewart No Highway in the Sky (1951) and the John Wayne The High and the Mighty (1954) predate Hailey’s projects, and we may stretch the “disaster movie” designation to include The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well. Airport was, however, the most influential such picture, eventually spawning three increasingly inane sequels and inspiring The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, When Time Ran Out… and, alas, the horrendous Earthquake. One of the qualities — and it is a quality — of Airport is that, unlike so many, busier, action movies of the decades since, it doesn’t feel it has to bang around ginning up new shocks and chases and explosions every 20 minutes, which of course now is considered its greatest detriment. One flight jeopardized by a bomb? That’s it? The rest is talk, and (ugh) characters? Bo-ring! Well, when the people are as interesting as Lancaster, Martin, Seberg, Bisset, Hayes, Heflin and Stapleton, you don’t need to ratchet up the terror quotient. Yes, one can observe that Hayes (looking, at 70, more like 80) is giving out with cute-old-lady shtick, but she’s also genuinely funny, and sly; as with the figure in the book, the movie’s Ada Quonsett knows she’s playing a game, and enjoys it enormously.* Hayes isn’t, like Stapleton, entirely real. Stapleton’s Inez Guerrero is heartbreaking; Hayes’ Mrs. Quonsett is a nip of brandy.
For a nearly lifelong aficionado of film music, one of the most fascinating aspects of Airport to me is Alfred Newman’s score, his last. Some of the music is not only dated now but was dated then: Dialogue sequences over-scored with either romantic or melodramatic strains, souped-up in modish lounge arrangements: The Mancini sound without Mancini’s gift for it. Much of this is foolish, and the work of someone who didn’t seem to understand that moviemaking had surpassed those old ideas of narrative accompaniment. Movie music was going to go in weird directions in the 1970s, and this is one of the last of the big, older-style, symphonic scores to be heard for a while, at least in American movies. Not that Newman isn’t still capable of surprises: His theme for Inez Guerrero is nearly as moving as Stapleton’s performance, but his main title makes me smile with real pleasure, not merely for its driving through-line but due to the composer’s inspired use of percussion beneath it and, near the end, Latinesque brass and woodwinds above it. In Hailey’s book, and in the movie made from it, the phalanx of snowplows and related vehicles in use on the runways is referred to by airport personnel as The Conga Line. Newman picked up on that and, wittily, added the concept to his music.
Old-style or new, there’s something to be said for a composer with a genuine sense of humor.
*It was profitable shtick as well: The role got Hayes a Supporting Actress Oscar.
Text copyright 2020 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 