Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Airport - 1970

AIRPORT 1970 lecinemadreams.blogspot.com /2014/05/airport-1970.html

When I watch a movie like Airport—producer Ross “I gave the public what they wanted” Hunter’s arthritically oldfashioned, $10 million, all-star, big screen adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s ubiquitous 1968 bestseller—I’m reminded once again why the late '60s and '70s represent my absolute favorite era in American filmmaking.

The diversity of what was hitting the theaters was astounding! In 1970 alone we saw the release of complex, arty films like Puzzle of a Downfall Child , Nicolas Roeg’s experimental Performance, the underground films of Andy Warhol (Trash), big-budget acts of desperation like Myra Breckinridge,mainstream documentaries (Woodstock), the explosion in black cinema represented by Cotton Comes to Harlem, overblown musicals (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), the ground-breaking subject-matter of The Boys in the Band, the sexually subversive comedies Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Something for Everyone, important foreign entries like Le Boucher and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, forgotten oddities of the Dinah East stripe, Disney’s stick-in-a-time-warp family films (The Boatniks), and breakout independents like John Avildsen’s Joe. And in the middle of all this, a big, glossy, oldHollywood gasbag melodrama in the tradition of Grand Hotel meets The V.I.Ps…all in the same year!

Looking over the list of films cited above (representing merely the tip of the iceberg of what 1970 produced), I can scarcely get over what a broad array of films were released. As Hollywood blindly stumbled about in a struggle to conduct business-as-usual while trying to keep in step with changing public tastes, we movie-lovers reaped the benefit of their creative identity crisis. As I was just a kid at the time, I had no awareness of the "What a dramatic airport!" - Mel Brooks "High Anxiety" (1977) severe economic toll Hollywood’s growing pains were taking on the industry. All I knew was that you could look at the entertainment section of a newspaper (back when they could advertise X-rated and Grated films side by side) and be greeted by what then appeared to be the entire spectrum of human experience with all tastes and points of view were represented. This is precisely why I fell in love with movies, and I had no reason to believe that this wasn’t how it was always going to be.

What I'm hoping to achieve in detailing this brief and shining Camelot-esque moment in cinema history, is the granting of a kind of artistic clemency for myself. A nostalgic leniency, if you will, which begs one to take into account how, in my growing up in an atmosphere of democratic tolerance for films of all kinds, I was able to reconcile the glaring inconsistency—not to mention lapse in taste—behind being 12-years-old and having as my absolute top, top, favorite movies: Rosemary’s Baby, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Midnight Cowboy, …and Airport.

Yes, Airport. A movie whose clichés are piled higher than those snow drifts disabling a Boeing 707 in the middle of a 1/9

busy runway, and whose production values, dialogue, characters, and soap opera complications are all so cobwebby and old-fashioned, movie critic Judith Crist was inspired to dub Airport: “The best film of 1944.”

Nevertheless, Airport was THE film to see in 1970, and when I did, I went positively dotty over it. I thought it was one of those most exciting, action-packed, tension-filled movies I'd ever seen. I returned to the theater several times during its run to rewatch and relive it. I borrowed my mom's Reader's Digest "condensed" version of the novel (what was that condensed book thing all about, anyway), then, convinced the abridged version had cut out a lot of thensought-after smut, I checked out the complete novel from the library and re-read it. I even went out and purchased the soundtrack album...my first!...and wore it out (don't get me started on how off the geek Richter scale it is for a 12-year-old's first LP purchase to be Alfred Newman's by-turns spectacularly overcaffeinated/easy listening score for Airport). More frightening still, I played Airport with my toy model of a 747 Delta Airlines passenger jet by cramming a firecracker into a hole I'd dug into its side and lighting it. Yikes!

I'm not going to say Airport isn't still one of my favorite films, for I watch it often. But my enjoyment of it these days is strictly on par with why I repeatedly watch Valley of the Dolls, or The Oscar; which is to say I can never get my fill when it comes to overripe Hollywood cheese. Airport was a huge boxoffice hit and even garnered a whopping 10 Academy Award nominations, but honestly, watching it today, I don't think there are even five consecutive minutes of Airport that don't reduce me to paroxysms of laughter. And try as I might to access the me who once watched this movie unironically, I swear, it feels as if I'm hijacking someone else's memories

Burt Lancaster as Mel Bakersfeld

Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston

Dean Martin as Vernon Demerest

Jacqueline Bisset as Gwen Meighen

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM As both the first and least cartoonish of the four airport-themed films in Universal’s franchise, and the film which more or less kicked off the '70s “disaster film” craze; Airport looks, by way of comparison to the atrocities that 2/9

followed, much better than it actually is. It’s plot: seven, count ‘em, seven romantic and dramatic entanglements duke it out over a seven-hour period at a busy Midwestern airport plagued by blizzards, airport noise bellyachers, and bombers.

At this particular airport, dramatic tension and impending disaster is love’s co-pilot (infidelity—both real and the “lusting in my heart” variety—is practically a job requirement), while domestic discord and personal tragedy have to ride coach when compared to the hand-wringing first-class priority this airport gives to trying to make customers happy. This latter point is perhaps the one element that dates Airport the most.

I’ve seen Airport far too many times to be able to ascertain whether or not it still holds up as a viable suspense melodrama, but I can attest to it being a near non-stop parade of ugly, stiff-looking fashions culled from acres of drab polyblend synthetics; static, rigidly blocked scenes (the camera must have been nailed to the floor) with actors giving TV movie-level performances, and truly terrible dialogue. For example, oldschool he-man Joe Patroni still refers to women as “broads” and “dames.” And while preferable to today’s infatuation with the word “bitch,” I kinda thought that in the '70s atmosphere of Diary of a Mad Housewife, terms like broad and dame—the Rat Pack notwithstanding—had gone out with Ocean's Eleven. Also, another thing which places Airport squarely in another time and place is, in stark contrast to today’s films, Airport displays a rather quaint interest in the lives of the middle-aged.

Miss Helen Hays as Ada Quonsett

George Kennedy as Joe Patroni

Perhaps this is a by-product of the Maureen Stapleton as Inez Guerrero assembly-line professionalism of Airport's trained-in-the-studio-system production team; there's scarcely a soul involved in the making of this film younger than 50. Director/screenwriter George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, Teacher's Pet) genuinely fashions a pretty solid (and silly) entertainment from this faithful adaptation of Hailey's exhaustively researched novel, the laughs arising chiefly out of the drop-dead serious manner in which all this nonsense is delivered.

PERFORMANCES Not counting her dubbed walk-on as Miss Goodthighs in Casino Royale (1967), Airport was my first Jacqueline Bisset movie. And along with being bowled over by her beauty and "Pip pip, cheerio!" British accent, I remember being quite taken with the strength of her character. Gwen Meighen is no Ellen Ripley (Alien), but she was as close as one got to a liberated heroine in those days. Not only does she decide for herself what to do about her unplanned 3/9

pregnancy, but she's so fearless and take-charge under pressure.

This movie may have been made by a bunch of old men, but they are light years ahead of the curve in giving us a female character who "acts" in the face of danger, rather than shriek and collapse into hysterics. Universal contract player Katherine Ross was the original choice for the role and was subsequently put on suspension for turning it down (this she turns down, and says yes to The Swarm?). Bisset, having earlier stepped into the Mia Farrow role in Frank Sinatra's The Detective at the last minute, was used to being second-string.

While Bisset continues to dominate the film for me (she's practically the baby in the cast), over the years I've come to grow ever fonder of the laid-back performance of Dean Martin.

His popular variety show was still on the air when Airport came out, but I honestly didn't care for him much as a kid. These days I rank him as my all-time favorite male vocalist

Van Heflin as D.O Guerrero

Dana Wynter as Cindy Bakersfeld

Tanya has a heart-to-heart talk with her father A weird hallmark of old movies was the often huge age discrepancy between leading men and their onscreen love interests. The beautiful Jean Seberg was just 31 (although made to look like a well-preserved matron thanks to Ross Hunter's maiden aunt ideas of female beauty) to Lancaster's daddyish 56. Angie Dickinson was Ross Hunter's preferred choice for Tanya Livingston, Airport's head of customer relations and mooning love interest of married airport general mangerMel Bakersfeld, but Seberg was the one already under contract to Universal. Lancaster (who was a second choice after Gregory Peck) hated working on the film and there was no love lost between him and Seberg. Their lack of chemistry is palpable.

(my iPod is overflowing with his mellow crooning) and his screen appearances, which I once dismissed as being so casual as to be lazy, have actually aged rather well; coming across as appealingly natural and underplayed compared to the stiff formality of actors like Burt Lancaster.

In a film of questionable performances, it's odd that Helen Hayes' (sorry, Miss Helen Hayes') Oscar-winning turn as Ada Quonsett (described in the movie's trailer as "The mind-boggling, huggable perpetual stowaway!" ) is the one character I can barely abide (Kennedy's Joe Patroni runs a close second). Afflicted with a terminal case of the cutes and employing every little old lady cliche devised since the beginning of time, Hayes' is a hammy, vaudeville turn more in tune with a knee-slapping episode of The Andy Griffith Show than a major motion picture. But it's the kind of performance that wins Oscars (see: Margaret Rutherford in 1963s The V.I.Ps). While I like her very much in her scenes with Bisset (she gets slapped, after all), I really wouldn't have minded too much had her character been one of the airline's casualties. Oh, and in addition, I have to race for the mute button every time she appears onscreen 4/9

accompanied by her "adorable" cartoon-appropriate theme music. Both Shirley Booth and Claudette Colbert were

Gwen has a heart-to-heart with her father Well, technically speaking, chief stewardess Gwen Meighan is merely dropping the bomb (heh-heh) to her much-married lover, pilot captain Vernon Demerest, that she is pregnant. However, what with the 27-year age spread between Bisset and Martin (she was 25 to his 52) the above caption is may be just psychologically true. Incidentally, for all the coy verbiage, I can't imagine a G-rated film today containing such a levelheaded discussion about abortion without an outcry from the "How do I explain this to my kids?" set.

Is This Any Way To Run An Airline?

That tower of shrimp and heaping bowl of iced caviar passed without notice in 1970. When I saw Airport at a revival theater in the '80s, this shot got one of the film's biggest laughs. And for you youngsters, the caption is a reference to a series of National Airline commercials from the '60s in which a flight-attendant (Andrea Dromm from 1966s The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming ) asked and answered her own rhetorical question: "Is this any way to run an airline? You bet it is!"

Actress Virginia Grey (Ross Hunter's "lucky charm") appears as the mother of wisenheimer teen, Lou Wagner. Her skeptical-looking husband is played by Dick Weston

originally considered for the role but spared themselves the schtick.

Perhaps this reveals me to be the terrible person I probably am, but next to Bisset's stewardess (I know, I know...flight-attendant) my favorite character in Airport is actually Dana Wynter as Mel's fed-up, socialite wife, Cindy.

Even if it's only for the reason that she is so unrelentingly one-note and perpetually pissed-off , I find her character to be an absolute hoot! Not only does she begin every conversation at full-throttle harpy, but here's a woman who braves the city's worst blizzard in 30 years (in mink, yet) just to rip her husband a new asshole. She really should have been running that airport.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 5/9

The passing of time and post-9/11 changes in airline travel have contributed to Airport acquiring a layer of historical

Lloyd Nolan as Head of US Customs, Harry Standish waxes philosophically on the art of fraud detection: "First I look in their eyes...then the luggage." Kill me now.

I think my favorite scenes are those in which Bisset behaves more like the kind of flight-attendants we've grown accustomed to in modern air travel. She is terrifically authoritative and stern, and I love the reactions of the other passengers...they act as though rudeness hadn't been invented yet. Here, Whit Bissell (I Was a Teenage Werewolf ) tries to intercede in Bisset's elder-abuse of stowaway Helen Hayes. Meanwhile, hopeful bomb-toter Van Heflin tries to act as if nothing is happening. No matter what you might think of the movie as a whole, this latter segment of Airport is pretty bravura stuff. (The blond pictured between Bisset and Hayes is Pat Priest, the 2nd Marilyn on the hit TV show The Munsters)

Irish-descended Maureen Stapleton and Van Heflin perhaps looked like no one's idea of Hailey's Inez and Dominic Guerrero, but they give two of the more compelling performances in the film. Compelling or not, when I was a kid, all I remember about this scene was being preoccupied with Stapleton filling those sugar dispensers.

entertainment value it didn't have in 1970. Given that Airport has about the same fantasy-to-reality ratio of any glamorous Ross Hunter production, it's doubtful that the commercial airline experience was ever as stylish as presented here. But seeing as the screenplay follows Arthur Hailey's dedication to airline operation accuracy to an almost Dragnet-degree of tedious recitation of just the facts, ma'am; I think it gives a fairly close approximation of flying in the days when one could effortlessly sneak in and off of planes carrying homemade bombs and boarding passes in lieu of tickets.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS In all likelihood, my fascination with Airport was at least in part due to my taking my very first plane trip just a year before, in 1969. It was a flight from San Francisco to Maryland to visit my grandmother. I don't recall much about the flight itself other than the in-flight movie was Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, the whole experience was heady and

6/9

thrilling, and that the stewardess gave me a tiny pair of wings to pin to my sweater and a booklet of color-and-tear postcards which I've somehow managed to hold onto for all these years.

OK, the look she's giving this self-medicating nun (character actress Mary Jackson) is pretty hilarious.

Wives don't fare too well in Airport. Perry Mason 's Barbara Hale plays Sarah Demerest, the good-natured but long-suffering wife of philandering pilot, Dean Martin, and sister to Burt Lancaster.

Airport features many familiar TV faces among its cast of passengers, all of whom (according to the Ross Hunter hype machine) were given full character names and backstories for "realism."

1. Happy Day's Marion Ross, 2. Bewitched's Sandra Gould (Gladys Kravitz), 3. Everybody's favorite obnoxious passenger ( "Nuts to the man in 21D") Michael Stearns, 4. Face-slapping priest Jim Nolan, 5. Familiar face from practically every TV commercial ever made, Fred Holliday

7/9

In trying to figure out what it was about Airport that so captured my imagination back in 1970, I think that maybe among the many scaled-down, low-budget, character-based films rooted in realism that came out in the late '60s and '70s; Airport, in all it's old-fashioned glory, represented something different to me. Too young to be familiar with all the cliches and overworked plot devices, Airport was my first real all-star Hollywood blockbuster, and perhaps, like Ross Hunter himself, I was just hungry for a little taste of old-fashioned, escapist glamour. And while I wouldn't want a steady diet of it, when in the right mood and proper frame of mind, a bit of harmless fluff like Airport can be very, very satisfying.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES I got Barry Nelson's autograph when I went to see him at San Francisco's Orpheum Theater in 1977 where he was appearing with Liza Minnelli in the preBroadway tour of the musical, The Act (then titled, Shine It On).

"They don't call it the cockpit for nothing, honey!" - an actual line of dialogue from Airport '79

BONUS MATERIAL Gary Collins (c.) and Barry Nelson (r.) play second and first officers Cy Jordan and Anson Harris, respectively An in-depth, lavishlyillustrated article about Edith Head and the costume designs (and hairstyles, aka wigs) in Airport can be found at one my favorite movie blogs, Poseidon's Underworld Copyright Š Ken Anderson

8/9

"Remind me to send a thank you note to Mr. Boeing"

9/9