ReWatch: Airport

• Written and Directed by George Seaton
• May 5, 1970
• Based on Arthur Hailey’s 1968 novel Airport

A story about the intertwining lives of airplane and airport personnel and one fateful snowy night. Sounds romantic.

Airport is a classic of the disaster genre. It has all one would expect in the big budget, star power movies that made the genre so special. There’s comedy. There’s drama. There’s plenty of soap opera. It is nothing deep but not every movie has to be deep. Sometimes you need some delectable junk with the goal being to entertain.

This marks George Kennedy’s first appearance as Joe Patroni. He would return in the three following films as the character whose position varied based on the needs of the story. He is the only character to show in all of them. Kennedy is absolutely fantastic in the part and often scene stealing. Then again George Kennedy was a great actor whose major flaw was when he took a job to pay the bills he took some really bad jobs. But even in those he polished up what were often turds.

Besides Kennedy the film stars Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Jacqueline Bisset, Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Barry Nelson, Lloyd Nolan, Dana Wynter and Barbara Hale. Quite a packed cast but this was done in a day and age when studios and directors had a better idea how to handle packed casts.

The actors showed up to tell their character’s story and not to have the limelight shined on them. Nobody gets unnecessary screentime or superfluous dialogue. And though it is a large cast, it doesn’t feel large. That’s because they managed the screen time of each individual appropriately.

I love how her the two philanderers of Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin) and Mel Bakersfield (Burt Lancaster) get framed as good guys. Then again, it goes with the territory of the disaster genre of the time. Both are cheating on their wives with coworkers yet both never really get framed as scumbags. And that includes Demerest’s wife Sarah (Barbara Hale) who is well aware of what’s going on. She’s just desperately hoping that someday he’ll come home to her and stop cheating. Never a moment where she gets angry.

Bakersfield’s cheating might be a bit more understandable. His wife Cindy (Dana Wynter) is not a pleasant human being and her dislike for her husband is clear. I wanted to cheat on her and maybe even divorce her and she’s not even a real character! Yet when they start talking divorce she improbably softens with the unintended indication being divorce was her whole goal. Like Mel she had a steady sidepiece.

Lancaster called Airport one of the biggest pieces of junk ever made. That might be a bit severe. It is not the greatest thing ever but far from being the biggest piece of junk. If he went into this expecting art he clearly did not understand the job. Airport is all melodrama and two-dimensional characters which is what these movies are.

Helen “First Lady of American Theatre” Hayes as Ada Quonsett is perhaps the most entertaining. Ada is an elderly woman who has made it her pastime to be a stowaway. She clearly had fun in the part and that translated to the audience. Just entertaining in how every line the character uttered was rubbing the other’s face in the fact that she could sneak onto any flight going anywhere with incredible ease.

Demerest, a captain on Trans Global Airlines Flight 2 as well as Bakersfield’s brother-in-law, is having an affair with stewardess Gwen Meighen (Jacqueline Bisset) who is now pregnant with his love child. They do a tap dance around the topic of abortion and out of wedlock birth before Demerest decides to dump the wife and run off with the sidepiece. Basically the discussion falls on the side of pro-life here. I’m not sure if you could get that kind of discussion today with that kind of an answer.

Airport takes itself seriously without taking itself too seriously. This fits right in with the likes of The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure or any other number of classics from the heyday of the genre. A little cheesy and a little hammy and certainly melodramatic and never self-serious.

This is just big screen fun. Entertainment of the high-quality guilty pleasure variety and powered by an all-star cast in a script and a presentation that doesn’t really have any dead spots. This tackles multiple storylines that interconnect and diverge and connect again. Each one gets a beginning, middle, and end along with most receiving a relatively happy endings when possible. Though even the actions of wannabe bomber D. O. Guerrero (Van Heflin in his final film performance) gets excused because of an implied mental illness and his overall personal situation.

Airport is a classic film that deservedly kicked off many imitators. Entertaining and exciting and never dull. If you want to see some great actors or a classic bit of disaster film then you can’t go wrong here.