BITE-SIZED: Airport (George Seaton, 1970)

 As the staff of Lincoln International Airport in Chicago try to keep the operation running during a blizzard, they are confronted with a new problem - a passenger has boarded a plane with a bomb and is determined to detonate it.

While it is retrospectively treated as the inauguration of the seventies run of disaster movies, 1970’s Airport is more of a drama about the inner workings of an airport - with a third act disaster to bring all the various plot threads together.

With Alfred Newman’s score, the colour and style of photography (including the use of splitscreens) anchor the film to an earlier era.

In other ways, the film acts as a transition of time: Jacquline Bissett’s flight attendant  wants an abortion; Burt Lancaster and Dana Wynter consider a divorce; Lancaster argues with the local community about expanding the airport for larger aircraft.

Even the disaster - a passenger with a bomb in a briefcase - feels of its time (the sixties and seventies saw a large number of hijackings).

When the bomb goes off, the movie kicks up a few gears, but the action is largely contained to the cabin, which has the effect of maintaining the film’s intimate, slightly televisual aesthetic.

The movie ends with our heroes, Martin and Lancaster, finally ending their marriages. In Lancaster’s case, it feels like a mercy killing; the dissolution of Martin’s marriage is slightly more implied - the last time we see him he is escorting his girlfriend off the plane while his confused wife looks on.

 

This ending is Airport’s final statement, contextualising the air plane crash as a single incident in a broader soap opera of messy professional and personal drama.

While modestly entertaining (Helen Hayes has fun as an elderly woman who likes to sneak onto planes without a ticket), the original Airport works best as a museum piece, a snapshot of its time, than an entertaining movie in its own right.