AirportIn the early 1970s transport really wasn't safe in the movies. Planes, of course, crashed, but don't knock it - there's drama there, too. In this grandaddy of disaster flicks, Burt Lancaster is an airport supervisor in a fictitious Chicago terminus. There's a blizzard and all sorts of people are hanging round waiting for doom to strike. Helen Hayes is a lovable old stowaway (and earned herself an Oscar for it), Dean Martin is a too handsome pilot and Van Heflin is a mad bomber.
Sure, the sheer accumulation of disasters threatens to tip this over into outright melodrama, but for all the hokey moments ("I'm like a lot of men," says Lancaster's pilot. "A bigamist. Married to a woman and a job") it's still a gripping soap opera.
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