Don't get on the plane! It's a Disaster Movie!Team Experience is looking at highlights and curios from the filmography of Olivia de Havilland's 100th birthday this Friday. Here's guest contributor Sean Donovan...
Airport ’77, the third film of the Airport franchise, capitalized on the immense success of the 70s disaster movie craze in the twilight of its years. Just one year later in 1978, the critical and box office failure of Irwin Allen’s The Swarm showed how much audiences had sobered up, no longer excited by disaster movies and more interested in openly mocking them, based on their cheesy acting and overwrought destruction (a movement chronicled by Ken Feil in his worth-the-read book Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination). So if something feels lacking and obligatory about Airport ’77 -- in which a botched hijacking lands a Boeing 747 in the ocean, the passengers struggling to get back to land safely-- that’s only because the film presents a crew of movie stars eager to cash their checks and get out as quick as possible.
Among them is our honored centennial, Ms. Olivia de Havilland! And who can blame her for dipping into the disaster movie depths?
Her generational cohort Shelley Winters scored an Oscar nomination for being the token old lady to brave disaster (at the age of 52, but that’s Hollywood), in the genre-defining The Poseidon Adventure. Older actresses like Helen Hayes, Gloria Swanson, and Myrna Loy had already wandered into the Airport franchise, Hayes walking away with an Oscar for her efforts. As an aging member of Hollywood royalty in the 1970s, it seems one of your duties was to class up a trashy disaster film with your mere presence...
De Havilland classes up Airport ’77 and then some. She is introduced by Brenda Vaccaro’s heroic stewardess breathily exclaiming “Mrs. Livingston, you look wonderful!” and indeed she does!
Elegant and graceful as ever playing a wealthy art patron, Olivia de Havilland has a commanding regality that feels perfectly at home aboard a high-class jet. Emily Livingston is always accompanied by her African American maid Dorothy, played by Maidie Norman, a film and radio actress who supplemented her decades-long acting career by teaching literature and theatre at the college level. A continuity error reveals the racist class logic of the film: Emily is shown boarding the plane with Dorothy behind her, only to find Dorothy already seated once she enters. Simple carelessness, but it has the effect of drawing all focus back to Emily’s movements, with Dorothy little more than an appliance ever-ready to be called into service. Emily makes a dramatic show of being an empathetic employer- cooing “Dorothy, relax! Have a drink!”- yet Dorothy never truly goes “off the clock” during the film, keeping a watch over the children while the adults mingle and flirt. And predictably, once the dust settles on Airport ’77, the rich white woman escapes the doomed plane unscathed, while Dorothy is among the few casualties.
A film with this large a cast gives few actors the chance to stand out, leaving most of de Havilland’s work in minute gestures. Hardly a meal for such an experienced professional, but she works hard regardless- one moment of silent confusion as she looks out at the wreckage of the plane from her lifeboat is especially poignant. Her romantic co-star Joseph Cotten, together again after Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, is given even less to do. Fresh Oscar winner Lee Grant (1975 for Shampoo) has quite a large role as the queen bitch of the plane, serving only to insult the other characters and shut down whatever Jack Lemmon’s pilot suggests they do to survive. A truly toxic embodiment, full of such zingers as “Strangers! They’re not us, you think everybody’s us, can’t you forget about other people?” when her husband (Christopher Lee) suggests helping others. Grant is punched by Vaccaro towards the end of the film, in what feels like a brutal moment of full-on misogyny.
Grant dives into the ugliest parts of her character without shame, and seems to have a similar strategy for the disaster set-pieces. You better believe Lee Grant lived every moment of her waterlogged apocalypse dream, taking in the sleazy glamor, rolling around in the waves like a lunatic. Meanwhile, Olivia de Havilland is hard to even place in the scenes of wet watery chaos. I like to imagine she said something along the lines of don’t you even try it- I have TWO Academy Awards! Call it a cynical paycheck, but true to herself, Olivia de Havilland walked away with her glamor and dignity intact.
Related: Irwin Allen the "Master of Disaster" & more Olivia de Havilland