Airport - 1970

Yes and no, meaning it was nice to watch but now that I've seen it I have no desire to watch it again. The plot is simple: we're in Chicago, with a very bad weather, lots of snow creating problems at the airport. A plane has trouble landing, or something, anyway the plane is now stuck on the main runway, n.29. Airport manager Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) does everything he can to keep the airport open, and calls specialist Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) to help remove the plane. When a suicidal passenger boards Flight 2 to Rome, they manage to deduce his plans but not in time; they can't stop him and he blows his bomb inside the lavatory: he dies, obviously, and stewardess Gwen (Jacqueline Bisset) is badly injured. The two pilots try to bring the Boeing 707 back, since all the nearest airports are closed. Patroni manages to free runway 29 just in time for it to land safely. Many injured but nobody else dies. The end.
It was not a disaster movie, at least for nowadays standards, because there is only a little hoe and only the 'bad guy' dies, and most of all because there was no tension, no mystery, no oh-my-gosh-what-happens-now moments, it was very predictable, but at the same time it was very well made and with some good actors. Problem was, I found the characters and their personal problems quite boring, not all that interesting. There's Mel with his moaning wife Cindy (Dana Wynter) who goes on and on about him being always at work, always putting his family in second place (they have two daughters);  customer relations agent Miss Livingston (Jean Seberg) is in love with him, but there's nothing between them only because he's married. As soon as his wife tells him she's leaving him, he asks Miss Livingston to go to her house... wow how he cares about his family, huh? He never had time before, now he calls in sick to stay with her... looks to me like he was simply being a coward, acting in order to make her leave, making it all easy for him...
Mrs Quonsett (a great Helen Hayes) is an old lady who always travels without regular tickets. This stowaway story is the funny bit of the film :-)
Pilot Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin) is married to Mel's sister Sarah (Barbara Hale) but the two men don't get along. Mel can't understand Sarah's feelings, but she tells him that all of Vernon's little affairs always end, that he always comes back because it's useful to him to be married to her, so his 'flirts' know it and don't expect him to marry them. This time, though, Vernon's affair is with stewardess Gwen, and she's pregnant. This, combined to the fact that she's badly injured, make it so that when they land he doesn't even see his worried wife, all of his attention is for poor Gwen.
Btw, did they really have to choose actors with such age differences? Martin was 53 and Bisset was 26, Lancaster was 57 and Seberg was 32. I don't have a problem with age difference on principle, but here I don't like it, because the girls look very young and the men look very old, but pretending they're not!
I thought Maureen Stapleton was great, really, a small role but very impressive. She played Mrs Guerrero, the wife of the Demolition expert D.O.Guerrero (Van Heflin) that, with a history of mental illness due to the war, and desperate for money, paid 7 dollars fifty for a life insurance of 225.000 $ that he wanted to leave to his wife. Absurd thing was when the captain said aloud that his insurance was no more valid, so he didn't have to detonate his bomb, and the other passengers started to cry, but as soon as the captain told them to calm down they did and sat in silence.. wow. I thought, unreal but peaceful, without people shouting in panic. It lasted a few seconds, then 'real' came back with a stupid guy shouting at Guerrero when he was about to surrender, scaring him away and making him blow it. Now, this stupid guy is the only believable thing in this movie.