Dean Martin – Movie Musings

Disaster awaits in the sky in this ridiculous soap that is less exciting than Airplane!

Director: George Seaton

Cast: Burt Lancaster (Mel Bakersfied), Dean Martin (Captain Vernon Demerest), Jean Seberg (Tanya Livingston), Jacqueline Bisset (Gwen Meighen), George Kennedy (Joe Patroni), Helen Hayes (Ada Quonsett), Van Heflin (DO Guerrero), Maureen Stapleton (Inez Guerrero), Barry Nelson (Captain Anson Harris), Dana Wynter (Cindy Bakersfeld), Lloyd Nolan (Harry Standish), Barbara Hale (Sarah Demarest), Gary Collins (Cy Jordan)

A busy Chicago airport in the middle of a snowstorm. Workaholic Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) doesn’t have time to prop up his failing marriage to his humourless wife: he’s got to keep the flights moving, clear the runways and solve the problems other people can’t. He’s not dissimilar to his brother-in-law Vernon Demerest (Dean Martin), who hasn’t got time for his plain-Jane wife at home when he’s got a flight to Rome to run and a saintly pregnant air hostess girlfriend Gwen (Jacqueline Bisset), to deal with. Tensions will come to a head when depressed former construction worker Guerrero (Van Heflin) joins Demerest’s flight, planning to blow himself up so his wife can profit from his life insurance. Disaster awaits!

“A piece of junk”. That was Burt Lancaster’s pithy review of this box-office smash that was garlanded with no fewer than ten Oscar nominations. He’s pretty much spot on. Airport is a dreadful picture, a puffed-up, wooden soap opera that never takes flight, stapled together with a brief disaster plotline that only really kicks in during the final act of the film and is solved with relative ease. Other than that, it’s all hands to the pumps to coat the film in soapy suds, which can be stirred up by the strips of wooden dialogue that fall from the actors’ mouths.

Seaton adapted the script from a popular low-brow novel, though it feels as if precious little effort went into it. It’s corny, predictable dialogue does very little to freshen up the bog-standard domestic drama we’re watching in a novel setting. Both lead actors juggle loveless marriages with far prettier (and much younger) girlfriends. Those girlfriends – Jean Seberg for Burt and Jacqueline Bisset for Dean – play thankless roles, happily accepting of their place as no more than a potential bit-on-the-side and very respectful of the fact that the job damn it is the most important thing.

The film bends over backwards so that we find Burt and Dean admirable, despite the fact that objectively their behaviour is awful. Burt treats his home like a stopover, barely sees his kids and seems affronted that his wife objects he doesn’t attend her important charity functions and doesn’t want the cushy job he’s being offered by her father. Just in case we sympathise with her, she’s a cold, frigid, mean and demanding shrew who – just to put the tin lid on it – is carrying on behind Burt’s back. We, meanwhile, applaud Burt for showing restraint around the besotted Jean Seberg, merely kissing, hugging and chatting with her about how he’d love to but he can’t because of the kids at home damn it!

He looks like a prince though compared to Dean. Only in the 1970s surely would we be expected to find it admirable that a pregnant girlfriend happily takes all the blame – the contraceptive pills made her fat and she knows the deal – begs her boyfriend not to leave his wife and then urges him to not worry about her. Dean’s wife doesn’t even seem that bad, other than the fact she’s a mumsy type who can’t hold a candle to Bisset’s sensuality. That sensuality is overpowering for Dean, who at one point pleads with her to stay in their hotel room because the taxi “can wait another 15 minutes”. Like a gentleman his reaction to finding out Bisset is pregnant, is to offer to fly her to Norway for a classy abortion (rather than the backstreet offerings at home?).

This soapy nonsense, with its stink of Mad Men-ish sexual politics (where men are hard-working, hard-playing types, and women accept that when they age out, he has the right to look elsewhere) is counterbalanced by some laboriously-pleased-with-itself looks at airport operations. Baggage handling. Customer check-in. Customs control checks. Airport maintenance. All get trotted through with a curious eye by Seaton. Just enough to make parts of the film feel briefly like a dull fly-on-the-wall drama rather than a turgid soap.

Soap is where its heart is though. Helen Hayes won an Oscar for a crowd-pleasing turn (from which she wrings the maximum amount of charm) as a seemingly sweet old woman who is in fact an expert stowaway. Van Heflin and Maureen Stapleton play with maximum commitment (Stapleton in particular goes for it as if this was an O’Neil play rather than trash) a married couple whose finances are in the doldrums, leading the husband to take drastic steps.

It’s all marshalled together with a personality-free lack of pizzaz by Seaton, who simply points the camera and lets the actors go through their paces, with a few shots of humour here and there. There are some interesting split-screen effects, but that’s about the last touch of invention in the piece. It’s mostly played with po-faced seriousness – something that feels almost impossible to take seriously today, seeing as the structure, tone and airport observational style of the film was spoofed so successfully in Airplane (a much better film than this on every single level, from humour, to drama even to tension – how damning is that, that a pisstake is a more exciting disaster thriller?)

It smashed the box office in 1970 and got nominated for Best Picture. But its dryness, dullness and lack of pace mean it has hardly been watched since. Although it can claim to be the first all-star disaster movie, it’s not even fit to lace the flippers of The Poseidon Adventure, which far more successfully kickstarted the cliches that would become standard for the genre (and is a tonne more fun as well as being a disaster movie – this has a disaster epilogue at best). An overlong, soapy, dull mess.

John Wayne, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan are supremely unbothered by danger in Hawks’ High Noon riposte, Rio Bravo

Director: Howard Hawks

Cast: John Wayne (Sheriff John T Chance), Dean Martin (Dude), Ricky Nelson (Colorado), Angie Dickinson (Feathers), Walter Brennan (Stumpy), Ward Bond (Pat Wheeler), John Russell (Nathan Burdette), Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez (Carlos Robante), Estelita Rodrigues (Consuelo Robante), Claude Akins (Joe Burdette)

When they saw High Noon Hawks and Wayne were unimpressed. Who was this sissy cry-baby, blubbing in his office, begging all and sundry to join him in an impending gunfight with an outraged gang? This wasn’t the West they knew. How un-American was that? So, heads went together and they came up with their counterpoint: Rio Bravo, where the Duke does the right thing, locks up the bad man, is supremely unruffled by threats of violence from his gang, turns down offers of help from across the town (he doesn’t need to worry, they all help anyway) and even finds time for an unfazed, late-night jail-room sing-along with his deputies. Take that Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman!

The Duke is John T Chance, a grizzled, experienced sheriff, still in-his-prime, who arrests the brother of Nathan Burdette (John Russell) after he shoots an unarmed man in a bar brawl. When Nathan demands his release – or there will be hell to pay – Chance relies on the men he can trust: old-timer Stumpy (Walter Brennan), recovering alcoholic former-deputy Dude (Dean Martin) and (eventually) plucky young gunslinger Colorado (Ricky Nelson). The three simply have to wait for the Marshalls to arrive and take Burdette away – but will the Burdette’s strike first? On top of which, Chance’s eye is caught by the widow of a cheating gambler, Feathers (Angie Dickinson) – does he also have time for a bit of love?

Rio Bravo is possibly one of the most “shooting-the-breeze” films ever made – even though the general air of manly cool is punctuated by the odd gun-fight. Wayne and his gang are far too cool, confident and quick on the draw to ever be that worried about the approaching threat of the Burdette family – not that you can blame them, since Hawks spends only the minimum amount of time fleshing them out. Instead, the film is a chronicle of a few days where they hole-up and basically shoot-the-breeze – their banter carrying over to exchanging bon-mots during the final gunfight (“You took two shots!” “I didn’t take the wind into account”). It’s the sort of unfazed cool against the odds that you can see has carried across to a whole host of modern action and superhero films, heroes who are so confident in their skills they crack wise even under fire.

Rio Bravo is directed at a gentle pace but complete assurance by Hawks. It occasionally has a feel of settling down and watching a relaxed after-show party, with a group of actors so comfortable in each other’s company, that they simply filmed themselves having a whale of a time. Wayne marshals the whole thing on screen with authority and confident precision: the part is far from a stretch, but he hits the beats with a naturalness that really works, from a fatherly mix of encouragement and disappointment in Dude’s slow turnaround from his drunken collapse, to a crusty flirtatiousness with Feathers (Angie Dickinson at her most radiant here).

The film is full of delightful little moments that pop-up with a perfectly judged regularity. Colorado and Feathers save Chance’s bacon with a perfectly timed flower-pot through the window, matched with Colorado’s pitch-perfect shooting skills. Dude judges exactly the location of sharp-shooter through the drops of blood on a full beer-glass (a lovely image from Hawks). Chance and Colorado confront a card cheat. Chance is so cool under fire, that pinned with two guns on his back in a small room, he never once feels like he thinks there is any real danger.

Either side of these events, the film is full of a sublime lackadaisical charm, as our heroes riff off each other, never once letting events get too heavy. You couldn’t cast Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson without having them break into song – so of course, they do just that in a late-night sing-along. It seems to be about blocking out the sound of Degüello, the cut-throat Mexican song that plays non-stop outside the town overnight, warning them of the perils to come. But really it’s just because we are watching three blokes chilling and simply too cool to be that flustered by scare-tactics. (The Degüello here, by-the-way, was composed by High Noon’s composer Dimitri Tiomkin – another one in the eye for that film).

Wayne’s charges all do a fine job on screen, with Dean Martin in particular fitting the role like a glove and bringing a wonderful sense of sixties brashness as well as a surprisingly affecting struggle with alcohol. Ricky Nelson does his duty when pushed. Walter Brennan wheezes and cackles as only he can. Angie Dickinson is wonderfully vibrant and sexy – surely, with those tights, she’s too much for even the Duke to handle?

Duty is what it is all about, and these are men’s-men who knuckle down and get on with it rather than complain. People may offer to help, but only those qualified will do so (two of them rock-up to help at the final gunfight anyway). That film’s concluding shoot-out is rousing, dramatic and literally explosive. Hawks shoots it all with assured skill – the film’s long silent opening, is a wordless delight of reaction, implication and careful character development (Chance and Dude are wordlessly, but perfectly, established).

Rio Bravo is one of those films people has have their “favourite” – and that might be because it’s laid-back, fun and invites you to join on it. It’s free of pretension and shows you the sort of men you’d like to be, going about effortlessly the sort of things you’d like to do. No wonder people love it so much.