Date/Time
Date(s) - 13/10/2024
11:30 - 13:45
Location
Electric Palace cinema, 39a High Street, Hastings TN34 3ER
Airport + Intro
Nominated for 10 Oscars, see the first of our ‘Disaster! season’ movies, with an enviable all-star cast showing off glorious ’70s fashions and hairdos! Includes introduction from season curator, Jamie Sellers.
Director: George Seaton
136 mins / 1969 / USA
The problems for a blizzard-bound international Airport are worsened by a crazy bomber on an incoming flight…
Nominated for 10 Oscars, and the second highest grossing film of 1970, Airport ushered in a brief but very successful era of movies that shared a starry ensemble cast and a plot hanging on impending doom. Burt Lancaster is trying to keep his airport open during a snowstorm, and his wife and future mistress happy, and Dean Martin’s pilot has a wife and chief stewardess to contend with. Helen Hayes, meanwhile, won an Oscar for her role as a serial airborne stowaway. If that’s not enough, Van Heflin plays a suicidal man on board a plane with a briefcase and a crazy insurance payout plan. Uh-oh.
About Disaster! Season
This film is part of our Disaster! mini season, a short season curated by Jamie Sellers, celebrating the brief golden age of those blockbuster American movies that used a looming or ongoing disaster as their main plot device, this being roughly a period through the early 1970s.
These movies had A-list ensemble casts of Hollywood stars past and then-present, and directors with an eye for the dramatic. Irony is all but absent – no-one’s tipping the wink to the viewer, everyone’s deadly serious, and quite often very angry too. It IS okay to laugh though, on occasion – in fact, we defy you not to.
Plot devices might feature an arrogant or careless authority figure whose actions (or lack of) are partly or entirely responsible for the unfolding chaos; a blue-collar folk hero whose down- to-earth commonsense ultimately averts an even worse scenario; and often a stupid kid who ignores every danger sign and puts him or herself in grave mortal danger. Warning: it’s the early ‘70s, and chauvinism is not in short supply.
Jamie Sellers is a freelance Music Curator, extreme quizmaster, and occasional singer. He’s been volunteering at the Electric Palace since September 2019. He watches around 250 films a year, and counts among his favourites The Hustler, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ordet. His favourite current directors are Alice Rohrwacher, Kelly Reichardt, Francois Ozon and Christian Petzold.
Book now: https://www.electricpalacecinema.com/whats-on/airport
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