Airport had enough plot and enough star power in its cast for three feature films, and it only encompassed about half of the complexity or characters found in Arthur Hailey's best-selling potboiler. Essentially built around 12 harrowing hours at a major Midwestern airport, the film had everything an audience of the period could have wanted — suspense, romance, drama, and comedy — all spread across a vast canvas. Mel Bakersfeld (Burt Lancaster) is the manager of Lincoln Airport, facing a night beset by the worst blizzard in a decade, a wife (Dana Wynter) who announces she wants a divorce, a primary runway blocked by an airliner stuck in a snowdrift, and a governing board ready to fire him. Bakersfeld's cynical, smooth-talking brother-in-law Vernon Demarest (Dean Martin) won't let up on his criticism of the management at Lincoln, but he has his own problems as well, mostly in the form of a young stewardess, Gwendolyn Mehan (acqueline Bisset) who is pregnant by him and whom he finds he genuinely loves. Add to that the presence of an old lady stowaway (Helen Hayes) and a mentally disturbed passenger (Van Heflin) carrying a bomb and there's more than enough plot to keep viewers engrossed for two hours plus. Airport became one of the top-grossing movies of its era, racking up seven-digit box-office numbers and spawning an entire film genre — the disaster movie. With Jean Seberg, George Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Barry Nelson, and Maureen Stapleton filling out the rest of the leading roles, there was something for almost everyone in this film. The movie still has a lot to offer if only as a prime example of Hollywood at its most successfully glitzy, but, if possible, viewers should try and see the letterboxed version of Airport on DVD (released May 2001). — Bruce Eder

AMG Review: Airport was widely lambasted by critics for its tried-and-true technique of showcasing a raft of Grand Hotel-style big-name box-office stars in a melodramatic thriller; Judith Crist called it "the best film of 1944." But no one could argue with its success or its influence. Director-screenwriter George Seaton displayed a masterful old hand's touch for showcasing stock characters in a soap opera format, adapting Arthur Hailey's blockbuster novel with Dean Martin as the pilot and a cast top-heavy with stars. Airport won huge audiences and six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, with veteran Helen Hayes, one of the first Oscar winners in 1932, winning a supporting award. The crowd-pleasing behemoth spawned almost a decade's worth of big-budget disaster films, including three inferior sequels, and then another round of disaster spoofs, beginning with 1980's Airplane!. — Michael Betzold