I treated myself to a viewing of Airport for my New Year's Eve activity. I love Airport (and Independence Day for similar reasons).
Airport is dated 1970, when I was 14. The world in Airport is absolutely how I think of "normal". The clothes and reasonable womens' shoes, the infrastructure, the smoking.
Both Airport and Independence Day are morality tales, with predictable broad outcomes. They are highly stylized story telling, and they don't ask you to think; they tell you what to think.
I finally figured out one of the biggest pleasures of Airport - there are women (plural) in the story, and they even have lines to speak, and they even speak to one another. A similar morality-tale movie is Ice Station Zebra, which doesn't have one whiff of a woman anywhere. ISZ was 1968. Guess which movie was nominated for Oscars. I think it was because ISZ showed real military submarines diving and surfacing many times.
Anyway - if you haven't seen Helen Hayes' turn as a stowaway, you are missing one of the great film pleasures. Edit - I just discovered that she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role - makes sense to me. :)
I noticed that many people in the film tended to fondle something similar in size to a cell phone. It was usually a notebook and pen, or a deck of cigarettes and matches.
Both Airport and Independence Day do a lot of story telling through clothing. In Independence Day we know a couple will reconcile because she begins to mimic his clothing choices - shapeless trousers, and plaid shirt over t-shirt.
In Airport it is Maureen Stapleton as the overwrought wife of the explosive-carrying man who most shows her circumstances by her dress. The couple are "down on their luck" and living in a meagre rooming house, with no money for rent and everything of value already pawned. When she comes home from work, she wears a kerchief on her head because this is the final days of the era where a respectable woman covered her head in public. She no longer has any hats (would have been pawnable), so she is reduced to wearing a square scarf folded in a triangle and tied under her chin. This is a sign of a woman who cannot afford hats. When she gets out to the airport she doesn't wear the scarf as a head covering, and her lack of a hat while she is wearing an outdoor coat and gloves is meant to show how low her financial circumstances have fallen. She is also wearing party-height heeled shoes, which are madly inappropriate for the weather, and which are meant to show that she has put on her best to be seen in public, whether or not they are appropriate to what she is doing. She also probably no longer has winter boots (see Jean Seberg's get up for following Burt Lancaster around in his car - beautiful coat-matching knee-high leather boots).
In a couple scenes there is a roomful of young women answering phone calls about whether or not the flights are on time. They mostly each have a computer-like box on their desks. This is to show how well-to-do the airline is. In 1975 I worked for an office that prided itself on having a computer. One. The function this machine performed was to allow a typist to enter the answers to a questionnaire. So, those boxes on the desks might have been linked to each other. In fact, I suspect the boxes in that set weren't even plugged in. However, it was common for businesses to have the typing pool, or the secretarial pool, which was a roomful of women in regimented rows, performing repetitive clerical tasks.
Another feature is the ubiquitous presence of nuns everywhere. It wasn't uncommon to see several in a crowd in most movies, and they always sprang into action during a crisis. The presence of young servicemen was also common, and they too sprang into action with muscles during a crisis. In Airport we don't even see anyone asking them to plug the hole caused by the explosion. We see them working and we know they were asked - and were trained ready to say "how high".
There are several common assumptions in movies of the Airport type. The men will have all served in World War II. This means they are able, without much conflict, to immediately start to grapple with a problem using the hierarchy of army rank. In this film, the men are mid-forties to mid-fifties, and they are the parents of the boomers, which means it's mid-life crisis greener pastures time.
Another assumption is that married women do not work in remunerated positions. Jean Seberg, as the widow Mrs. Livingston, is "permitted" to be working for her living because she does not have a husband. It was common in a lot of companies that women had to stop working as soon as they married. Poor women could work in poorly paid low-status positions: waitress, housekeeper, etc. Please note we have several women in this film on the brink of divorce, and their status with regards to hiring was very dicey. If their exhusbands were worth anything, they should be able to support the exwife with alimony. It's all very gnarly.
Note that the young women working as stewardesses are living in buildings that are dedicated lodging for young unmarried women working for the airlines. This was not uncommon. In the town I grew up in there was a dedicated place for the nurses in town to live. It was a beautiful old stone house. Those nurses would have also been unmarried and subject to being turfed out when they married. Even in this style of lodging, the women share apartments.
The issues in this film were top of mind: noisy airports were in the news all the time. Everyone in North America heard reports from all over North America. And fear about highjackings was high.
Yes, security was exactly that lax in airports. In 1966 my Mom and I were permitted to accompany Dad to the bottom of the stair leading up into the airplane to say goodbye and wish him farewell. We all dressed-up for the occasion - Dad because he was flying, and Mom and I because we were going to be seen in public with someone who was going to be flying.
They mention that the economy class seat cost was $474.00 - which is a big pile of money for the era. It is a direct flight to Rome, and is probably round trip, but still. Please note that the Maureen Stapleton character accepts a dime tip with gratitude.
And finally, for our morality tale, the Jacqueline Bisset character is the only person seriously injured by the explosion. This is because she is a loose woman seriously tampering with the sanctity of another woman's marriage. She is not killed because she has been shown to be caring and brave.
Similarly in Independence Day, the woman who dies is the president's wife, and this is because she disobeyed him. The girlfriend of the lead muscle hero must earn her happily ever after because she is a loose woman. She does not die because she saves other people and brings them to the safe place. She gets her wedding. The estranged wife of the lead scientist hero is not at risk because she reconciles with her husband (see plaid shirt).
Airport is really a Happily Ever After movie. Helen Hayes gets free access to all the flights she could want, and thus will continue to visit her daughter and grandchildren. The manager of the airport will get his widow, and his exwife will get her beau and she will be able to be ambitious on his behalf (a lot of misery could have been avoided here by letting her work somewhere she could have exercised her ambition on her own behalf, but hey, that's for another movie). The pilot and the stewardess are going to end up together. The pilot's wife is going to end up alone and sad (because I think she truly loves him), but that's punishment for being childless. And the highjacker's wife is going to be very unhappy at first, but will be free to join her children, which should make her happy again (because children are the be-all and end-all of this movie).
And I admit: when I am watching Airport, I am not consciously thinking of all these things, I am just flowing along, enjoying the story, because I know how that world works.
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