Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I almost certainly wouldn’t have known about this movie if it wasn’t for Airplane!, which is nominally a parody of the sequel Airport ’77 (but supposedly more directly riffing on the plot of Zero Hour). What I never understood is how movies about airplane disasters get titled after the airport, so I don’t know if I really know what I’m in for (Airplane but without the farce) or not.

After watching the movie:

At Lincoln Airport near Chicago, a terrible snowstorm goes from bad to worse when a 707 cuts their turn off of the main runway onto the taxiway short and gets stuck in a snowdrift off the tarmac, with tail still blocking the runway, forcing all flights onto the shorter, closer to angry neighborhoods secondary runway. The call comes in just as manager Mel Bakersfield is heading out to dinner reservations with his wife he never had time for, which he now has to cancel to deal with the crisis, bringing their marital problems to a head while his close working companion customer relations agent Tanya Livingston is debating whether to accept a transfer or pursue an affair with Mel. Mel’s sister Sarah is married to 707 pilot Vernon Demerest, who is both Mel’s loudest critic and openly having affairs with younger women all over, though stays married as an escape route when he gets into too much trouble with the girls. Vernon’s latest girl is the chief stewardess on his crew Gwen Meighen, who has just told him that she is pregnant, and he finds himself conflicted how to proceed. Airport security catches sweet old lady Ada Quonsett as a habitual stowaway on flights. Into this slightly elevated chaos enters D.O. Guerrero, an unemployed demolitions contractor with a history of mental illness whose last hope to provide for his wife is to get on a plane to Italy and blow himself up with a suitcase bomb for the insurance money. Meanwhile, miracle mechanic Joe Patroni and his crew fight to get the stuck plane out of the snow and open up Lincoln’s main runway.

I can certainly see how the drama on the airplane could have taken more focus later in the series, but I was a little impressed how much the writing made me care about the operations on the ground. The plane involved in the incident doesn’t even take off until over an hour into the movie because of how much drama is happening in and around the airport. Also there are something like a dozen significant characters and it takes a lot of time to introduce them all, because this is based on a novel and that means there is a lot of detail and nuance to chew on. Even after the plane takes off, it’s work on the ground that puts together the understanding of the situation in the air and relays it to the flight crew, and there’s still a lot of work on the ground to get them safely down.

There are a lot of phone and radio conversations in this movie, and I was struck by how much work and loving care went into stylizing them. In modern movies, people having phone conversations are just cut back and forth with one facing right and one facing left or maybe there’s a basic split screen where they are roughly facing each other. In action movies maybe they’re going about the exciting thing they’re otherwise doing and visually completely disconnected. But here, not only is this movie filled with crisp-bordered artful vignettes of various shapes, but I think just about every conversation is staged with the characters facing head-on to the camera, as if delivering monologues on a stage. I get the sense this kind of visual effect was just coming into its prime at the time and the director wanted to take full advantage, or at the very least, recognized that there were a lot of conversations between people who weren’t in the same room that had to be made interesting. But you never see talking heads in ovals or four-way crosses anymore and maybe we should bring that back. I’m getting tired of shaky-cam sequences of running and yelling into earpieces.

Bakersfield is not that memorable of a manager stuck between pilots, civilians, and bureaucrats, and I don’t really feel a lot of charisma in Dean Martin’s Vernon Demerest other than what’s brought to the role by being played by Dean Martin. Vernon and Gwen are neither of them that fantastic of characters (and Gwen is treated maybe more as a plot device for Vernon’s arc), but their story is at least more interesting than the broken marriage and affair happening on the ground in Bakersfield’s office. The real show-stealers are Petroni and Mrs. Quonsett. Any good character actor can make a salty, experienced mechanic who needs everyone around him to follow his orders or get out of the way likeable and I can see why he made it into all four Airport movies shoved into more and more inexplicable roles, but I was completely charmed by Helen Hayes’ sweet little old lady who will gleefully tell you all about how she’s been conning her way into free flights for years once it’s out on the table.

As the film considered the birth of the “disaster” genre of movies, it’s clear to see they didn’t really have a formula yet, or they were working with a different formula. This feels much more like a thriller than a disaster. As I said above, the plane the disaster happens on doesn’t even take off until halfway through the movie, and there’s maybe a little over half an hour of actually surviving through the disaster proper, even if it was slowly coming to this boiling point the whole time. This movie gets called out as brain-dead, but by today’s standards, it’s pretty smart and still exciting, an example of how movies can be fun and complex at the same time.