Airport

Airport (1970)

Runtime: 137 minutes

Directed by: George Seaton... and Henry Hathaway; the latter directed a few outdoor scenes

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, George Kennedy, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seburg, Helen Hayes

From: Universal

While this is a movie I mainly watched due to it being related to something else I plan on seeing soon, I have all four movies in this series on DVD (purchased for dirt cheap at a used store) and will eventually see all of those on my portable Blu-ray player. As a little kid I actually saw The Concorde... Airport '79 but I'll talk about it when that is revisited later in the year. Based on a best-selling novel, this was nominated for Best Picture which does seem a little silly, although Helen Hayes winning an Oscar for her role I won't carp about as her nice old lady character who happens to be a charming gal that is a stowaway on flights so she can visit her daughter cross-country... it was the most memorable character.

This shows one long night at an airport in Illinois where Burt Lancaster is the general manager and what a thankless job it is. Almost everyone he deals with has their own complaints, and because the hours are irregular his life at home is in shambles. There's a snowstorm that has a plane stuck on a runway... oh, and because Van Heflin (playing a character w/ the surname Guerrero... that's actually addressed and it is not as preposterous as it first sounds) is struggling w/ his mental health and can't hold a job, he wants to become a SUICIDE BOMBER so when he blows up a plane his wife can get the insurance money. Yeah, the movie also addresses how that plan wouldn't have worked anyhow.

For all the melodrama present-Dean Martin is openly having an affair w/ Jacqueline Bisset-the actual drama surrounding the bombing attempt was captivating to me as that was well-done, including the practical effects. This series always had tremendous casts so the lineup here definitely helped: Lancaster, Martin, Hayes, Jean Seberg, Bisset, Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Lloyd Nolan and Barry Nelson, all of their talents helped elevate this material. The movie spawned an entire subgenre of the disaster film-such movies were around for decades but this was such a box office success, the decade was filled with theatrical and even television movies that ranged from worthwhile (The Towering Inferno) to dreck (The Swarm-shudders) which had all-star casts. Some of them were even like this movie in featuring multiple middle-aged men having mistresses young enough to be their daughters.

I know I would love for such a thing to return this decade-big budget blockbusters that has a cavalcade of high-priced talents-yet I get why it wouldn't happen for a variety of reasons. It'd be nice, as among other things I also crave a return of several different split screen effects like we got here, rather than have that subgenre be astoundingly stupid schlock like Moonfall apparently was...