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Show Movie Review 'Airport' provides suspense and escape " ... naot.rlih attemot of the mainten- It is ..... last-ditch attempt of the maintenance mainten-ance supervisor to blast the aircraft air-craft out by its own jet-power is intense and dramatic. "Airport" is not "deep" cinema. It is loaded with acfio ePl to the entert cape-excitement cause it iS removedbut2. able, a realistic fiction, is Playing at Century a J' The remainder of the film is concerned with the flight of the crippled plane back to the airport, where maintenance crews are still working away trying to get the first plane off the runway. The BY JANE COTTRELL Entertainment Writer "Airport" is a film taken from a novel of the same name, written by Arthur Hailey, author of "Hotel." The movie version of "Airport" is suspenseful, escape-type escape-type entertainment. Though by no means intellectually intellectu-ally challenging, "Airport" is exciting. ex-citing. A couple of aircraft- centered cen-tered events provide bases for the action: First, a 707 jetliner lands, misses the taxiway and ends up blocking a main runway, complicating compli-cating the situation at an airport already crippled by snow. The resulting state of emergency suffices to keep airport manager Burt Lancaster from going home to his wife and daughters, and at this point the human drama begins to unfold: Manager Bakersfield would really rather not go home under any circumstances, and only does so "for the children's sake." Bakersfield and his Girl Friday, played by Jean Seberg, motor down the runway to the bogged-down bogged-down aircraft. After this they are shown in action in various situations situa-tions which may or may not be representative of what airport management personnel do with their time. Among the complications are a little old lady (Helen Hayes) who has cultivated the illegal art of stowing away on commercial flights, a quarrelsome pilot (Dean Martin) who is on the outs with Bakersfield, and a maintenance supervisor (George Kennedy) who's essential to the operation of digging out the snowed-down airliner, air-liner, but who gets stuck in traffic traf-fic on his way to the terminal. As the human elements take shape, the action continues: A former mental patient (Van Hef-lin) Hef-lin) boards a flight for Rome with a bomb tidily packed in his attache at-tache case. This complication is duly detected and there are some wild scenes aboard the plane as the crew makes an attempt to confiscate the case. The attempt fails, however, and the bomber explodes his cache of dynamite not-so-quietly in one of the johns, blowing a hole in the fuselarge large enough for his portly frame to pass through in the ensuing decompression. Cinematic Cine-matic justice . . . |
