I watched this in a theater when I was seven or eight. The MPAA rating system was very different in those days. The movie was rated G in spite of Dean Martin talking with a stewardess about flying to Sweden for an abortion. And there was the bomb of course. The first in a wave of big disaster movies with all-star casts.
Jean Seberg looking very conservative as the airline's head customer relations agent who is sleeping with married airport manager Burt Lancaster.
The movie is surprisingly pro-divorce. Van Heflin plays a down-on-his-luck demolitions expert and psychiatric outpatient. He's going to kill himself and blow up a plane full of people so his absurdly devoted wife (Maureen Stapleton) can collect on his flight insurance. Before he leaves for the airport, she tells him that she married him for better or worse implying she would never leave him, thinking she was such a good wife when she was actually driving him to an early grave and endangering scores of airline passengers. More explicitly, Burt Lancaster and his wife (Dana Wynter) agree to end their marriage for the sake of the children. Dean Martin's wife (Barbara Hale) knows her husband is a swinger but thinks if she sweats it out long enough, he'll stop doing that and come back to her. She sees him walk right past her in the end heading for the hospital with his injured pregnant stewardess girlfriend.
Helen Hayes as a cute old lady who sneaks onto planes without a ticket. I always took the old women Robert Hayes sits next to in Airplane! to be a reference to her.
It looked like a movie from 1970, everything nicely lit, realistic but not enough to fool anyone. Do they make big movie soap operas anymore?
Free on Tubi.
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