I first saw and reviewed Airport about five years ago, and rated it a 69 (nice), a mid-level ***, describing it somewhat dismissively:
“It’s a mixture of soap opera, docudrama, and disaster film, set over the course of one night at a fictional airport near Chicago where bad weather, friction with local homeowners, various personal dramas, and a suicidal bomber (Van Heflin) are woven together, the result being, if not outstanding entertainment, a decent slice of old-fashioned Hollywood cheese.
The personal dramas are fairly drab, and the disaster aspect only really comes into play in the third act (though when it does, it’s engaging), but the sequences showing the quotidian details of running an airport remain pretty compelling. And when the cast is composed of Lancaster, Jean Seberg, Dean Martin (at the time, Ebert quipped, “You know as well as I that no plane piloted by Dean Martin ever crashed”), Helen Hayes, Heflin, Maureen Stapleton, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, and more, you can watch the people even when the material sags.”
But since then, I’ve gone back to it several times, and each time I’ve appreciated it a bit more. I’ll never think of it as a great film, or even a very good one, but as a piece of slick entertainment, an all-star showcase, and even as a disaster thriller, it’s quite watchable and even rewatchable, especially if you have a taste for this brand of…well, “cheese” might seem harsh, but it’s reasonably apt.
At the time, it was a mammoth hit, grossing $100 million (as of this writing, equivalent to $668 million in today’s money), and earning a whopping 10 Oscar nominations—which, as is my wont, I’ll use as a means of further analyzing the film. In reverse order from how I do my own awards, they were:
- Best Sound: It gets the sounds of the planes and the bustle at the airport itself (clearly based on O’Hare) fairly well. And the explosion and subsequent semi-decompression during the climax sound pretty good. But it lost to Patton and there’s no arguing that.
- Best Score: Possibly the most deserved of the nominations. I actually really love Alfred Newman’s score, especially the opening-credits theme, which is classy and exciting in that slick late 60s/early 70s manner (see below). It lost to Love Story, which…eh?
- Best Costume Design: This one’s pretty baffling. There’s nothing really notable about the costumes; they’re just a lot of contemporary clothes, a few flight attendant uniforms, and a few pilot uniforms. But they were designed by Edith Head, who was earning her 32nd nomination, so that explains why. Cromwell won the Oscar, a much better choice.
- Best Art Direction-Set Decoration: Much of the film was apparently shot in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, so I’m not honestly sure where the real locations ended and the straight-up sets began, but I have a fondness for that kitschy mid-century commercial aesthetic, which you get more than a bit of here (those green curtains!), and the airplane itself, which I do believe was mainly a set, looks perfectly fine. And the rundown home of the Guerreros is solidly done. Still…the Academy really flipped for this movie, didn’t they? (It lost this Oscar to Patton, which is a slightly odd choice since that film doesn’t really have memorable sets.)
- Best Film Editing: It’s not brilliantly edited, but at 136 minutes it doesn’t drag much, and it does a solid job balancing the large cast of characters and keeping the various storylines clear. It also has some nifty split-screen effects (also very kitschy, also appreciated by myself), my favorite being Dean Martin on one side of the screen checking out Jacqueline Bisset on the other, even though they’re in separate locations. That said, I wouldn’t have nominated it myself, and its loss to Patton is quite reasonable (though Thelma Schoonmaker’s work on Woodstock would’ve been a cool choice).
- Best Cinematography: Nah. It’s pretty blandly shot—a lot of Universal films from this period were, looking like glorified television films more than anything else. I mean, everything’s properly framed and all, but the split-screens achieve more interesting compositions than the shots themselves. Oddly, both it and Patton lost this to Ryan’s Daughter, which makes sense (David Lean’s films always looked amazing), but it’s interesting that a film considered a notorious letdown at the time beat two big hits, one of which won Best Picture.
- Best Supporting Actress – Maureen Stapleton: She plays Inez Guerrero, the wife of Dominic Guerrero (Van Heflin), who plans to set off a bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight so she and their children can collect on the life insurance policy he just purchased. At first she’s the long-suffering but sympathetic wife—she treats Dominic almost more like a son than a husband—but then, as she begins to discover what’s going on, she first descends into a catatonic state before painfully revealing that Dominic lost his last job because some dynamite had gone missing. The last we see of her, she’s in tears, apologizing to the passengers of the plane (which, Ebert correctly predicts, didn’t crash) for what Dominic did. It’s a solid enough performance, if a bit too hammy to really devastate you; she actually won the Globe (in a tie with Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces) and was nominated for the BAFTA, but lost the Oscar to…
- Best Supporting Actress – Helen Hayes (WON): Hayes plays Ada Quonsett, and if the name wasn’t a tip-off, she’s something of the comic relief here. She’s a little old lady who likes using various ruses to stow away on flights, and when she’s caught and asked to explain herself, she explains her methods quite cheerfully and openly. (As she’s escorted away, there’s a bassoon-heavy musical theme to let you know she’s supposed to be a charming old rascal.) Later she sneaks onto the same plane Guerrero is planning to blow up…and gets the seat next to him. When the airport authorities realize what’s going on, they ask her to take part in a scheme to get the bomb out of Guerrero’s possession (it’s in a briefcase on his lap). She agrees and is faux-threatened with prosecution for her stowing away, to which she puts on a big show of crying and carrying on, throwing her arms around Guerrero and distracting him long enough for the suitcase to be (temporarily) secured. At the end, she’s basically given free reign to fly where she likes on the airline’s dime, and she wistfully quips “You know, it was much more fun the other way.” It’s a cute little turn by a renowned veteran, and I get her winning. She’s not so amazing that she needed to win, but she was an acceptable choice.
- Best Adapted Screenplay: It’s a pretty soapy, corny script, based on what I’m guessing was not a great novel (Arthur Hailey’s books were big sellers, but it’s not like anyone goes back to them), but I guess it gets the job done. There are a lot of clichés on hand: the workaholic hero with a dying marriage, the widowed co-worker he’s clearly got a thing for and vice versa, the mad bomber, the stowaway, the philandering playboy pilot, the stewardess he gets pregnant (who wants to keep it), the cranky passenger, the stuffy bureaucrat, the wily old security guard, and of course, the salt-of-the-earth maverick mechanic. (And the more I think about it, the more clichéd archetypes come to mind.) But they’re all handled in such a way as to be reliably entertaining. And I do like one bit of dialogue, when Martin, trying to conceal the truth from the passengers, throws off a teenage prodigy (who can tell they’ve turned around by looking at the stars) with a bit of deftly delivered gobbledygook:
Due to a setsel wind, DISTOR’s vectored us into a 360-tunsus [?] of slow air traffic. Now we’ll maintain this borton hold until we get a fortamagnus clearance from Malnaks.
This is how the subtitles on the DVD transcribe it
- And it does a good job at showing the nuts and bolts of commercial aviation. But when I tell you that it lost the Oscar to M*A*S*H, I don’t think anyone on Earth will cry foul.
- Best Picture: Well, it’s not exactly a film that should be nominated. Is it solid entertainment? Certainly. But is it great entertainment or great filmmaking? No, not really. It’s the kind of all-star blockbuster they don’t really make anymore, some would say for good reason (Judith Crist infamously called it “the best film of 1944”), and between the stars, the entertainment factor, and the fact that it was a huge hit, I totally get the nomination. But the you consider some of the films that were Oscar-nominated and left out of Picture: Women in Love, Fellini Satyricon, Little Big Man, Lovers and Other Strangers, My Night at Maud’s, Woodstock, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and I Never Sang for My Father. You might not consider all of these great or Oscar-caliber films, but certainly at least one of them was probably worthier of the nomination. And it’s also annoying that it was producer Ross Hunter’s only Best Picture nomination, when he’d produced truly great films like All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life in previous years. All that said, it’s far from the least worthy nominee I’ve ever seen. But there’s no question that it deserved to lose to Patton.
I’d like to note a couple of the nominations it didn’t get. Perhaps most surprising is the lack of a Supporting Actor nomination for George Kennedy as the aforementioned maverick mechanic, Joe Patroni. He was nominated for a Globe, had won an Oscar three years previously (for Cool Hand Luke), and Patroni was a popular enough character to appear in all three sequels (by the time of the infamous The Concorde … Airport ‘79 he’s a pilot). It’s not a brilliant performance, but he’s entertaining in the way George Kennedy so often was.
And then there’s the lack of a Best Director nomination for George Seaton. Again, solely on merit the nomination wouldn’t have been especially deserved; the direction is fine, but there’s nothing especially notable about it. But Seaton (who was at least nominated for the script) was a veteran screenwriter and director with two Oscars to his name, albeit both for writing (Miracle on 34th Street and The Country Girl). The only directing nomination he ever received was for The Country Girl; despite also getting a Picture nomination, Miracle—an established classic from the get-go—wasn’t nominated in that category either.
And if the direction isn’t incredibly notable, its efficiency, professionalism, and the way it handles some pretty harrowing moments and heavy drama without losing that sense of slick entertainment (while at the same time not coming off as exploitative) are all key to it working as well as it does and its huge commercial success—and, in the end, its rewatchability. And if they were going to recognize it so heavily, they might have at least recognized the man at the wheel of the whole affair. (That Henry Hathaway is believed to have directed some of the exterior scenes may have also hurt Seaton’s chances.)
Lastly, in what was a pretty thin year for special effects, it’s a touch surprising that the various effects here—especially the shots of the plane in flight and the whole explosion-decompression sequence—weren’t nominated as well. Instead, the Pearl Harbor scenes in Tora! Tora! Tora! won, with Patton’s own battle scenes being the only other nominee.
Unlike some comparably flawed films which I feel a great affection for and return to often (Nutty Professor II and Putney Swope especially), I don’t have quite the same love for Airport. And yet I find it an easy film to come back to, the reason why summed up best by Leslie Halliwell in his three-star (high for him) review:
Glossy, undeniably entertaining, all-star version of a popular novel, with cardboard characters skillfully deployed in Hollywood’s very best style.
Halliwell’s Film Guide, 5th Edition
That might not be enough for everyone, but for me, it’ll certainly do in the right mood. And it helped kick off the disaster cycle which gave us, among others, two even better films I’ll see about reviewing in the near future: The Towering Inferno and Juggernaut.
Score: 71
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