Hollywood Continues To Pay Its Dues To The Granddaddy Of The Modern Disaster Movie
The disaster movie as we know it began with 1970’s Airport.
Although the origins of the disaster movie, like many other film genres, trace back to the earliest days of cinema itself — via movies like In Night and Ice (Germany, 1912), The End of the World (Denmark, 1916), Deluge (U.S., 1935), and the proto-airline thriller The High and the Mighty (U.S., 1954) — the modern disaster movie as we know it came of age in 1970 with Airport, released 55 years ago this week.
Based on a best-selling 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey, Airport solidified the template for the disaster genre by featuring an all-star cast, a slick, high-gloss production (the film was adapted and directed by George Seaton, best known for the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street), and a narrative that intertwined the lives and problems of its many characters with a calamity that directly affects all of them. The screen ensemble was a literal cavalcade of then-stars, including Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Helen Hayes, Jean Seberg, Van Heflin, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, Barry Nelson, and Lloyd Nolan.
Set at Chicago’s (fictional) Lincoln International Airport, the film concerns the efforts of the facility’s manager, Mel Bakersfield (Lancaster), to deal with several crises at once, including a heavy snowstorm, an airliner stuck on a runway, local protests over the airport’s noise pollution, and his own failing marriage. But the biggest catastrophe of all looms in the background for most of the film: an unstable former Army munitions expert named D.O. Guerrero (Helfin), desperate to rescue his wife from poverty, hides a bomb in a suitcase and plans to detonate it over the Atlantic on a Trans Global Airlines flight to Rome, thus ensuring his wife collects on a $225,000 insurance policy he takes out just before boarding.
The funny thing about Airport is that for most of its 137-minute running time, it’s more of a soap opera than a disaster movie. Just about all the major characters are hopelessly horny: Lancaster contemplates an affair with TGA passenger relations manager Tanya Livingston (Seberg), while the married co-captain of the Rome flight, Vernon Demarest (Martin), learns that he’s impregnated his longtime mistress, stewardess Gwen Meighen (Bisset). Even TGA’s head of maintenance, Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), at first refuses to return to the airport on his night off after he and his wife bundle their kids off to a friend’s house and settle down to whatever passed for “Netflix and chill” back in 1970.
Eventually, however, Guerrero’s plan takes center stage, and the sequence in which a passenger’s badly-timed emergence from a lavatory leads to the bomb going off is undeniably gripping, as is the film’s final 20 minutes in which Demarest and co-captain Harris (Nelson) attempt to land the gravely damaged craft while the crew on the ground struggle to clear the runway for them. It was this aspect of the otherwise hokey narrative that drove audiences to theaters, with Airport earning $37.7 million in its initial release — the equivalent of more than $300 million today — and eventually raking in $128 million worldwide.
That kind of success led to a string of successors and imitators, including three Airport sequels (Airport ’75, Airport ’77, and The Concorde…Airport ‘79), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), fellow Best Picture nominee The Towering Inferno (1974), The Hindenburg (1975), The Cassandra Crossing (1976), and a slew of others. The big difference was that in almost all of these, the catastrophe kicks off well within the first 20-30 minutes of the movie, putting things like character development even more to the side while the scenes of destruction and chaos come to the forefront.
Charlton Heston in Airport.
The genre petered out by 1980, when the spoof Airplane! grossed more at the box office than several later efforts like Meteor and When Time Ran Out. But the increasing sophistication of visual effects and Hollywood’s fascination with nostalgia brought it back in the 1990s, as films like Twister (1995), Dante’s Peak (1995), Volcano (1997), Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998), and the biggest of them all, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), largely kept the same blueprint as the films of the ‘70s but revitalized it with bigger budgets and more impressive mayhem, to often solid and sometimes stratospheric box office results. The trend has continued on and off since then with films like The Core (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), San Andreas (2015), Geostorm (2017), and Twisters (2024).
This all begs the question: why do we like watching movie stars, ocean liners, airplanes, skyscrapers, and even whole cities getting squashed on the big screen? Like the horror film, disaster movies allow us to deal with calamity, tragedy, the unknowable turns of life, and, of course, our own mortality from the safety of a multiplex seat or living room couch. Watching it happen to others allows us to exorcise our fears of it happening to us. As Wheeler M. Dixon, author of Disaster and Memory, told the BBC: “People go to disaster movies to prove to themselves that they can go through the worst possible experience but somehow they’re immortal.” With new fires sprouting up around the world seemingly every day, we may again need the likes of Airport and its descendants to help us believe we can still land the plane.
