Airport is a 1970 film which tells the story of an airport manager trying to keep his Midwest airport open during a snowstorm, whilst a bomber plots to blow up an airplane (a Boeing 707 in this movie).
Although it had a complex plot, Airport paved the way for the disaster movie genre and established many of the conventions for that genre.
It stars Burt Lancaster as Mel Bakersfeld, Dean Martin as Vernon Demerest, Jean Seberg as Tanya Livingston, Jacqueline Bisset as Gwen Meighton, George Kennedy as Joe Patroni, Helen Hayes as Mrs. Quansett, Van Heflin as D. O. Guerrero, Maureen Stapleton as Mrs. Guerrero, Barry Nelson, Dana Wynter , Lloyd Nolan as the head of Customs, Barbara Hale and Gary Collins as the third officer of Flight 2, Mr. Jordan.
The movie was adapted by George Seaton from the novel of the same name by Arthur Hailey. It was directed by Seaton and Henry Hathaway.
It won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Helen Hayes), and was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Maureen Stapleton), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design (Edith Head), Best Film Editing, Best Music, Original Score, Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
Several sequels were made, the first of which, Airport 1975 (1974), was a big-budget blockbuster featuring an all-star cast, including Charlton Heston, Karen Black, Gloria Swanson (who played herself in her last big-screen appearance), Myrna Loy, Linda Blair, Helen Reddy, George Kennedy, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.. This film featured the passengers and crew of a Boeing 747, and the events following a mid-air collision with a light aircraft. The pilots are killed or incapacitated and the stewardess (Black) has to fly the aircraft until a pilot (Heston) is put aboard in flight using a mid-air transfer from a fast helicopter. This movie, directed by Jack Smight , fell firmly into the blockbuster disaster movie category at the height of the genre's heyday, and established many of the "standard" plot devices and motifs that were later widely mocked in the Airplane! series. The movie has dated badly, and in particular its blatant sexism stands out as notably cringe-worthy from a modern perspective.
A further follow up, Airport '77 (1977), pushed the suspension of disbelief to ever more bizarre levels, in this case a 747 which crashes in the Atlantic and sinks, trapping everyone on board under water. Again, a notable cast - Jack Lemmon, Lee Grant, Brenda Vaccaro, Olivia de Havilland, James Stewart, Christopher Lee, Kathleen Quinlan and of course George Kennedy - the only actor to appear in all four movies of the series. This sequel is generally considered the best of the sequels, even if it is the least technically accurate from an aviation perspective.
The final episode of the series was The Concorde: Airport '79 (1979), which was the last and widely considered poorest effort of the series. The cast was not as stellar as the previous movies - Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, Alain Delon, Sylvia Kristel, and Charo starred, as well as George Kennedy. The film did less well than the others, and the disaster movie era was winding to a close by this time. In a chilling coincidence, many of the flying sequences in this movie use the Air France Concorde F-BTSC which crashed in Paris in July 2000 killing all on board.
The final death-knell of the entire genre was the release of the first of the spoof series Airplane! the following year.
During the 1980s occasional reports surfaced that another Airport film was in the planning stages, but nothing materialized.
External links
- Internet Movie Database entries:
