Airport

A snowstorm paralyses an airport outside Chicago. One runway is closed, planes are waiting, the manager cannot go home and his wife wants a divorce. That same night a man boards the Rome flight carrying a bomb; he has just taken out insurance and wants to leave his family money. The plane takes off. The subject is not the disaster but how an institution works in a crisis. More than half of the film takes place on the ground: the tower, the maintenance crew, the snowploughs, the engineer trying to move a stuck aircraft off the runway. That accumulation of detail is the best thing about it. The form is built on a star cast and every character is given their own story. The narration tours them in turn; it looks overcrowded today, but the genre was shaped by this film. The source is Arthur Hailey's novel. It made a great deal of money and started the seventies disaster wave, with three sequels following. Helen Hayes won the supporting actress Oscar at seventy as a stowaway. Ten years later the parody Airplane! took aim largely at this film's conventions. Burt Lancaster plays the manager, Dean Martin the pilot and George Kennedy the maintenance chief. George Seaton directs. Who it is for: viewers who like classical disaster films and large-ensemble narratives. Who it is not for: anyone expecting high-tempo suspense; the film is long and barely leaves the ground in its first hour.