Welcome to another Oscar Film Journal entry here at Enuffa.com!
While perusing Netflix the other day I stumbled across one of the 1970 Best Picture nominees, the star-studded disaster drama Airport, featuring Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, and Helen Hayes. Based on a 1968 Arthur Hailey novel, the film takes place all in one 24-hour period during a crippling snowstorm at a fictional Chicago airport and involves multiple story threads playing out both on the ground and in the air.
Lancaster's character is the airport manager Mel Bakersfield, whose wife is on the verge of leaving him because he's married to his job. His brother-in-law Vernon Demerest (Martin) is a pilot on an ill-fated flight set for Rome. Jean Seberg plays Tanya Livingston, Mel's coworker in charge of customer relations, with whom Mel has palpable romantic tension. Bisset is stewardess Gwen Meighan, with whom Vernon is having an affair. There are too many secondary characters to list, so I'll stop there, but the plot is set in motion when a blizzard forces Mel to work late (much to his wife's objections) to coordinate the clearing of the airport's two runways. As it turns out, Vernon's flight to Rome includes a passenger who plans to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean so his wife can collect on a life insurance policy he's taken out. These two main threads are woven with smaller ones involving an elderly woman who serially stows away on planes, a pain-in-the-ass passenger who constantly complains about customer service, an unexpected pregnancy, and an airport Commissioner who's considering shutting down one of the runways due to customer complaints.
Airport was a massive box office attraction in 1970, pulling in $128 million worldwide on a budget of $10 mil. It garnered a staggering nine Oscar nominations as well, and spawned three sequels throughout the 70s, all of which were hits. But is it any good?
Well, yes and no. As an old-school piece of melodramatic spectacle I was entertained by it. The performances work, particularly Helen Hayes as the elderly stowaway and Maureen Stapleton as the bomber's wife (both earned Best Supporting Actress nods and Hayes won Airport's only Oscar), as well as George Kennedy as the airport's affable chief mechanic. The story threads are all very standard TV-quality fare but they kept me mildly interested. Dramatically the strongest material concerns the bomber and how that situation is resolved, though there isn't much suspense about whether or not our beloved characters will escape with their lives.
Tonally this film feels much older than 1970, like an early 60s popcorn film. The dialogue is hammy and while it deals somewhat frankly with subjects like suicide and abortion, the scripting sounds very mid-century Hollywood. Even the cinematography makes Airport look like it was made a decade earlier, with harsh, bright TV lighting and mostly traditional shot composition. The visual effects of the plane in flight also look pretty clunky; we're obviously looking at a model airplane, and not a very large-scale one at that. At a time when maverick filmmakers were taking the industry by storm it's strange that such a safe, conventional movie like this got so much Oscar recognition. Maybe it was a last gasp kind of thing before films like The French Connection and The Godfather turned the ceremony on its ear?
Airport is certainly not without its charm; Lancaster and Seberg have good chemistry, the scenes on the plane are well-executed if predictable, and Helen Hayes is a fun eccentric. But there isn't much substance either. It's a popcorn movie that somehow punched way above its weight class during awards season.
I give the film **1/2 out of ****.
No comments:
Post a Comment