Perhaps it's a reaction to the WGA strike, but all of a sudden I am seeing a whole bunch of older movies on Netflix again. Last week I saw that they had 1970s Airport and its sequels, and I figured they would make decent dumb entertainment for a lazy Saturday afternoon.
They aren't great films, but definitely met the decent dumb entertainment criteria. The only one I had seen was the one from 1979 that took place on a supersonic Concorde, and I saw it at night on TV in a roadside hotel while traveling with my parents in the 80s. The airport movies were the kinds of movies shown on TV I grew up with, but the one I actually saw multiple times was Airplane!, a hilarious spoof of the genre. I laughed at the jokes, but didn't get that the sick kid and stewardess flying the plane were direct calls to Airport 75.
It's weird getting to known entertainment first through its spoofs, something that used to happen to me a lot when I first red MAD magazine as a kid. In a weird way, it's liberating. My expectations were already low, and it was fun to find the things that the parodists referenced. Because I am a cinema nerd, I became fascinated as I watched these films with their part in film history.
I have an especially weird fascination with Hollywood's attempts to revive its lost relevance due to the rise of television and changing cultural values in the 1960s. Ultimately the way forward was to give the so-called "movie brats" the keys to the kingdom, a very well-documented story. The conventional narrative says that the era of "New Hollywood" ended when Jaws and Star Wars (made by a couple of movie brats) showed that the blockbuster could be Tinseltown's salvation, putting an end to the daring film-making of the early 1970s.
While much of this narrative is true, I think the Airport movies show that blockbusters were already a thing before Jaws, but in a kind of pre-historic form in need of evolution, a celluloid trilobite, if you will. 1970s Airport was one of the first films to ever top $100 million in domestic box office. It also spawned numerous sequels, just like modern blockbusters.
The trilobite status of the first one is obvious in so many ways. The heroes are all film stars of the last generation (Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, and George Kennedy) and so is the villain (Van Heflin.) The film stars the great Jean Seberg, but in a secretary role where she is not given much to do. Similarly, Jacqueline Bisset ends up being the damsel in distress when Heflin's bomb blows a hole in the back of the plane. Absolutely nothing dates the film more than Dean Martin's rogueish Brat Pack act, which feels as out of place as singing "That's Amore" at a love-in.
Unlike future blockbusters, the plot gets very soapy. It's less about the action and more about whether Burt Lancaster is going to divorce his shrewish wife, who is reasonably tired of him sacrificing his time to managing the airport. The film techniques are also very much in keeping with mainstream film-making of the late 60s, the kind soon to be swept aside in New Hollywood. The sets are pristine and the lighting so bright that you can see every corner of every room. The camera is pretty stationary, too. The use of split screens is the one nod to newer film-making styles.
While it looks very old fashioned compared to the type of stuff Friedkin, Bogdanovich, Rafelson, Coppola etc were putting out at the time, from the point of view of 2023 I can say it's some of the most gorgeous cinematography of that particular late studio system style. People at the time certainly liked it, and much of the response was literally "they don't make them like this anymore!" There was a craving out there for big crowd-pleasing movies, the kind of thing TV (especially then) could not provide.
Airport 1975 (actually released in 1974) also had high production values, but it's also clear why Jaws and Star Wars would blow movies like this off of the screen. The special effects are really clunky, especially when the jet airliner gets hit by a small prop plane and a stewardess played by Karen Black has to take over. The scene when Charlton Heston, the ultimate sweaty token of Old Hollywood masculinity, gets helicoptered in is similarly laughable. Speaking of laughs, few come from the creaky, groan-worthy bouts of comic relief (with Jerry Stiller's drunk salesman the one exception.)
Airport 1975 followed the formula of other prehistoric blockbusters like The Towering Inferno by packing the cast full of bygone stars that might get older audience members off of the couch and back in the theater. For example, Gloria Swanson shows up playing herself in her last film role. Karen Black is the only New Hollywood mainstay, and this film wastes her manifest talents as an actor.
Beyond all of this, the Airport films like other prehistoric "disaster movie" blockbusters echo the downbeat themes of failure and disillusionment that permeated American society after the end of the 1960s. In Airport, Burt Lancaster has to fight against airport owners who are unwilling to finance necessary improvements. In the Towering Inferno, a new skyscraper catches fire, and in the Poseidon Adventure. a modern ocean liner sinks. The jet liner, once a symbol of advanced modern life, is shown to be fragile and a site of anxiety and fear. Star Wars had such an impact in part due to its optimism, of a human being heroically triumphing over the forces of evil in a "galaxy far away" not beset by our own problems.
Star Wars would Airport movies look like the film equivalent of a horse and buggy in their own time. As more and more people begin to tire of CGI spectacles and Marvel's tiresome march of one blockbuster after the other, it's good to watch some prehistoric blockbusters and enjoy big popcorn entertainment still mired in the conventions of Old Hollywood.
