This week on “Picture Perfect,” the focus is on airports and airplanes. Believe it or not, I actually had the idea before I learned of the death of George Kennedy on Sunday at the age of 91. Kennedy appeared in all four of the “Airport” films – “Airport,” “Airport 1975,” “Airport ’77,” and “The Concord: Airport ‘79” – as cigar-chomping airline troubleshooter Joe Patroni. Only Patroni could fire a flare out the window of the Concorde and not have his arm ripped off.
In the original “Airport” (1970), producer Irwin Allen established the pattern for disaster movies of all stripes by placing an aging all-star cast in spectacular peril. Burt Lancaster! Dean Martin! Jean Seberg! Jacqueline Bisset! Helen Hayes! The list goes on and on, longer than the longest runway. The bongo-laden theme was by veteran composer Alfred Newman, from the last of his over 200 film scores.
Another movie with something of the same feel is “The V.I.P.s” (1963), allegedly inspired by a real-life love triangle made up of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and Peter Finch. The story is set at London Heathrow Airport, where flights are delayed because of a dense fog. The film was written by Terrence Rattigan, and sports a laundry list of stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor and Orson Welles, with Margaret Rutherford in an Academy Award-winning performance. The music was by Miklós Rózsa.
By contrast, Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal” (2004) is an (intentionally) comic take on the predicament of an Eastern European who finds himself in a kind limbo, trapped in an international arrivals airport terminal in New York after his country erupts into civil war and his passport and other documentation are no longer valid. His plight mirrors that of real-life Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who lived 17 years in a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Tom Hanks plays the unfortunate traveler, who makes the terminal his home, and Catherine Zeta-Jones the airline attendant with whom he strikes up a relationship. The music was by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams, and I think you’ll find it quite different from the Williams known for his work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.”
Finally, we turn to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller, “North by Northwest” (1959), a film which had Cary Grant encountering love and danger in, on, and from a variety of planes, trains and automobiles. Planes are particularly significant. Over the course of the film, we find out the title is a play on a Northwest Airlines flight; Eva Marie Saint learns she must do all she can to avoid getting on another; and of course the film’s most iconic image is that of Grant fleeing a strafing crop duster. Bernard Herrmann’s opening fandango propels us into the adventure.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of music from films featuring airports and airplanes this week on “Picture Perfect,” tonight at 6:00 ET, with a repeat tomorrow morning at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
