Airport

Annotation for KRRR! 2023 by Radomír D. Kokeš

The 1970 film Airport combined two disparate phenomena so powerfully and convincingly that it significantly influenced popular Hollywood cinema throughout the decade. And what phenomena?

On the one hand, the novels of Arthur Hailey, a native English author who spent his youth in the RAF. After all, his flying experience came in handy both with Flight Into Danger, his first successful project, and with his career-defining novel Airport. But while Flight into Danger is a straightforward suspense story, it was Airport and the slightly earlier Hotel that came up with the techniques that made Hailey such a successful writer.

Firstly, it is a careful reconstruction, in great detail and with a keen eye for the procedural everyday, of a particular professional environment - one that has to face both ordinary and unexpected challenges. Secondly, it is the emphasis on a large cast of important characters, some of whom are more characterised than others, but each of whom offers a different insight into the world we are discovering. It's a web of individuals and their small stories against the backdrop of larger stories, often emphasizing different passages of time.

In Airport, however, he has combined this formula with another important technique that does not otherwise appear so much in his work: the prepared and then developed motif of imminent disaster, where the ordinary airport officials, along with trivial problems and love troubles, have to cope with an unexpected threat in the form of a bomber on board a civilian flight.

And this brings me to the second phenomenon whose renaissance the film adaptation of Airport de facto initiated: the disaster movie. Of course, Airport is far from the first disaster film in history, but it certainly had the greatest impact. In fact, it was practically an innovation of the tradition of the good old adventure film in attractive settings through a theme clearly established by a series of thrilling deadlines.

The film not only spawned a number of loose sequels or variations, but above all it focused the attention of the then somewhat clueless Hollywood system on disaster themes. Ideally, those that most closely resembled the Haileyan model of storytelling, i.e. a large cast of characters, parallel sub-stories, and a central threat commanding the viewer's attention at a higher level.

In doing so, Airport picked up on another trend, familiar, for example, from the big-budget war films of the 1960s, which proved to resonate better in the case of disaster films than elsewhere. This was the casting of pop culture stars in smaller and larger roles, thereby enhancing the appeal of the film while easily focusing the audience's attention on relatively minor characters with minor backstories.

As easily forgotten as it is in the shadow of the emerging New Hollywood generation, disaster films were among one of the most important genre trends of the 1970s. And they owe this not only to the excellent The Glass Hell (1974), but especially to the similarly ageless Airport - perhaps because disaster in his case is only one element of a jagged and rich narrative.