AIRPORT (1970) **1/2 License to taxi? Is that a real
qualification? Also, Dean Martin said that Burt Lancaster has a
penguin butt. It's not great art but, for all its willfully modern
trappings, it's good old-fashioned entertainment. You can't, pardon
the pun, keep a monstrosity like this in the air for 137 minutes
without doing something right. Much of the credit has to go to the
Arthur Hailey plot, he entertained us and somehow made his absurd
characters reek of hyper-realism. I mean, it's nuts if you think
about it-a plane with a mad bomber on board can't land because
another plane is stuck in the snow on the runway, the bomb blows up
knocking out the stewardess that the pilot knocked up, meanwhile
below the airport manager's marriage with the pilot's sister is
breaking up and he's starting a new romance with his personal
assistant, all of whom are trying to catch stowaway Helen Hayes (who
received an Oscar, definitely not the first one for being cute, but
one of the elder actresses to receive the honour for that reason,
incidentally there were something like 10 Oscar nominations in all).
Actually Ms. Hayes is probably the most attractive female in the
cast, criminal charges should have been filed for the awful
hairdo/dye and makeup job they have poor Jacqueline Bisset running
around in, and then to get nearly decapitated by the exploding
bathroom door to boot...the things those poor girls have to do to
become leading ladies! In a cast of all-stars and near all-stars
Maureen Stapleton does the best job, but George Kennedy has the best
lines as the genius mechanic Joe Patroni who smokes cigars and kisses
airplanes. When is an airplane not an airplane? Well, in the shots
of this one flying, for example (no Special Effects nomination).
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