While The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno are rightly considered the mack daddies of the disaster movie genre, essentially creating the building blocks of an entire new breed of movie while ironically destroying everything in sight. However, before the Poseidon rolled over on New Years Eve and before the Glass Tower caught alight, there was one disaster flick that preceeded them all that acted as a prototype for virtually everything that came next.
That movie was Airport and it crammed its hefty run time with with all the stars, sprawling plots and melodrama it could muster in order try and maximise the tension that comes with a major Airport getting fucked over on a very snowy night. However, is there any way a movie such as this can manage to sustain any sort of sustained, drama in a world where 1980’s Airplane exists, or is every single outlandish twist and po-faced line reading now just a breeding ground for unintentional laughter?
Well, the rather simple answer proves to be this: can’t it be both?
The Lincoln International Airport in Chicago isn’t exactly having the greatest time of it at the moment as driving snow is slowing everything down to a crawl, but the straw that seems to almost break the camel’s back is when the crew of a taxiing 707 misjudge decide to cut a corner and promptly get their plane stuck in a snow drift which closes down yet another runway. This is just yet another layer of stress on the shoulders of hard-nosed Airport manager Mel Bakersfeld who is already seeing the endless rigours of his job inflicting an irreparable toll on his marriage and while customer relations agent Tanya Livingston tries to soothe him, they soon both find out they’re in for a long night.
As boorish mechanic Joe Patroni is brought in to help oversee the digging out of the 707, tensions rise between Bakersfeld and his swaggering, pilot brother-in-law, Vernon Demerest as they butt heads about how the plane should be dealt with. However, Demerest has problems of his own as we soon find out that not only has he been having an affair with his chief stewardess, Gwen Meighen, but she informs him that she’s now pregnant with his child and plans to keep it.
Among all this melodrama is elderly opportunistic widow, Ada Quonsett, who gets her kicks wandering onto various flights in order to randomly fly for free in order to routinely visit family in other cities, but while Tanya tries to keep this unrepentant biddy under wraps, a far more worrying problem is currently filling out insurance forms to put a tragic plan into action. Former demolitions expert D.O. Guerrero has a lot of mental health issues and not a,lot of prospects, so he’s cooked up a plan to blow himself up over the Atlantic in order to make sure his family finally has the money they’re so sorely lacking and the flight he chooses just happens to be the one that Vern and Gwen are working.
Bakersfeld better have some serious relaxation techniques handy, because he’s going to fucking need them after this night is through.
As you can probably tell by my synopsis, one thing Airport certainly isn’t lacking is an overabundance of plot as the movie comes equipped with a script that has a 707 full of characters who all interweave and interconnect as varying levels of drama continously keep poking them with melodramatic sticks. However, it may ammuse you to find that all this interpersonal drama and more zig zagging plots than an entire phase of the MCU turns out to be the main focus of a film that seems so dead set on laying down the tension that comes with managing a major airport, it takes its sweet time actually installing any actual disaster at all. Now, while the idea of watching a 137 minute disaster prototype that doesn’t pull the trigger on any mortal danger for a whole hour and a half may sound like settling down to watch an alternate version of Die Hard II where the flight of John McLean’s wife’s actually touches down in DC without any terrorists whatsoever, Airport actually manages to hold your attention despite often taking the long way around the narrative barn. Yes, the filmmakers seems to be under the belief that watching stewardesses give almost the full plane safety demonstration without a single edit is vital to the film (Michael Bay would have a conniption), but the raft of scenery chewing actors the movie lines up makes the rather meandering tone weirdly soothing, even if everyone involved is practically pulling their hair out with inner tension so thick, you could chew it like taffy.
Leading the charge of no-bullshit, stand-up males is Burt Lancaster who manages to weather each and every twist, be it professional or personal, with the same virtuous attitude, even when his shrewish wife elects to come all the way to his beleaguered place of work during a blizzard in order to berate him in person. Simply put, he’s portrayed as an overworked rock – but then so is almost every other main male character: Dean Martin’s bed hopping pilot may be a bit of a prick and is deliberating whether to convince is girlfriend (a plucky Jacqueline Bisset) to abort their child, but when the chips are down, he’ll risk his life for his ungrateful passengers in a second and eventual Airport stalwart George Kennedy (he ultimately was the only actor to appear in all four) loudly troubleshoots while chewing on unlit cigars bigger than John Holmes’ dick.
In comparison, the women in the cast are mostly demure shoulders to cry on, demure baby makers, or both with Jean Seberg in particular hanging on Lancaster’s every word in the hopes that he ditch his wife, however, in the midst of all this “traditional” femininity, Helen Hayes’ elderly, plane jumping, agent of chaos proves to be something of a major highlight as she nonchalantly defrauds major airlines as a hobby and somehow works her way to the centre of the story despite really just being glorified comic relief.
Ah yes, humour. There’s quite a lot of laughs to be found while watching Airport, but if I’m being generous, I’d say only about 20% of them are intentional as it’s 70s charms and the expert skewering of an entire genre by Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker’s near perfect Airplane means that a lot of the more serious moments are more likely to garner screams of laughter rather than screams of fear. In fact, the scene where Dean Martin tries to unsuccessfully console and talk down the desperate bomber may actually be the most accidently hilarious six minutes of cinema I’ve actually watched all year as it teeters over the line between gripping drama and magnificently staged farce.
However, don’t let some unintentional scoffing of dated material put you off. Airport, despite its hugely entertainly flaws, proves to be tremendously entertaining whether you find it raucously funny or emotionally gripping – which is quite the compliment considering the movie often has a pace that suggest that it’s stuck in a snowdrift and not a paralysed 707. However, for a plot that gleefully and carefully takes each of its characters and gradually turns up the melodrama, it’s worth booking a ticket with Airport.
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