Airport (1970)

The first of the Airport films (followed by  3 sequels) and also the major box office hit which ushered in the disaster film cycle of the seventies. These films are less   outlandish of all the disaster films in that the events are more likely to happen in real life and the scale of the disaster is smaller, confined to one airplane. In fact, the moment in veers into unlikely territory is when that bomb explodes on the airplane; rather than signaling the death of all the passengers - as it would in real life - it merely sets up the remaining film as a tense hour of getting the people to safety on the ground. That's what all the subsequent disaster films were about - saving as many people as possible, so that the audience feels some relief at the end.
Burt Lancaster plays the airport's overworked general manager; he has problems with his marriage due to the workload. It doesn't help that his assistant, the public relations lady (Jean Seberg), is a knockout. Dean Martin is a colorful pilot - I don't think I would want ol' Dino to be the pilot of an airliner which I booked passage on (maybe this was all an in-joke in regard to Dean's rep as a boozer).  Dean's secret girlfriend is played by Jacqueline Bisset, one of the stewardesses. George Kennedy plays the now-famous Patroni, the head mechanic or something; his role varied in the later Airport films; he would show up in all the sequels - his character had a fairly exciting life, going by all these films. Van Heflin plays the suicidal guy who brings a bomb aboard. And Helen Hayes won the Oscar for her portrayal of the old lady who likes to stowaway aboard planes. Her scenes, with the other characters reacting off her and later using her in a game attempt to get that bomb, are the most entertaining. Many other scenes are kind of a drag and colorless, while others are too much the soap opera. BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10