Zero Hour! (1957)

Having recently rewatched Airplane!, it occurred to me that I still had not seen the movie that directly inspired it, 1957's Zero Hour! starring Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell. Zero Hour! was based on a story by Arthur Hailey, who later gave us the novel Airport. It's also a movie that's practically impossible to watch with a straight face today.

Zero Hour! concerns Ted Striker(Andrews), who leads a World War II bombing raid into disaster, costing the lives of six men. No mention is made if one of them happened to be named George Zipp, but we'll assume so. He moves back to Canada and in 1956 is on the verge of getting a new job, his 13th in ten years. When he gets home, he finds that his wife (Darnell) is leaving on a plane for Vancouver with his little boy, planning to leave him forever. He buys a last second ticket for the flight (you could do that in those days) and gets onboard, hoping to convince his wife to change her mind. Disaster falls when everyone who eats fish--including the crew and Striker's young son--gets a bad case of food poisoning. Doctor Baird (Geoffrey Toone) informs Striker that he's their only hope. Vancouver Airport head Harry Burdick (Charles Quinlivan) brings in Captain Martin Trevealan (Sterling Hayden) to try to talk Striker down. Trevealan and Striker flew together during the war and have some animosity towards one another. Can Striker get the plane safely down and save all the passengers? Or will he crack up under pressure and crash the plane into the mountains? The people are getting sicker, the fogger is getting thicker, and Leon is getting larger.

I always heard that Airplane! cribbed a lot from this movie. Just how much was cribbed wasn't made clear until I actually watched it. You may have heard that ZAZ took scenes, situations, and dialogue from Zero Hour! for Airplane!, but what you may not know is just how dead on.

Elaine's line about not being able to love someone you don't respect? Check.
The doctor's line about not only finding someone who can fly this plane but who didn't have fish for dinner? Check.
Striker's line about "I may bend your precious airplane but I'll get her down"? check
"You'll have to talk him right down to the ground"? Check

And so on and so forth. I freely admit that I had to stop the movie for a couple of minutes from laughing so hard when I heard the "looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking" line here. I'm talking word for word here.

Mind you, Zero Hour! is not intended to be a comedy. If you can actually put Airplane! out of your head, it's a tight little thriller. The cast is good and everyone does their parts professionally, even sincerely. Andrews and Darnell were always good actors and they do their jobs well here. It's not that this is a bad movie at all. It's a decent--I would even say pretty good--movie at that.

The problem is, anyone who has seen Airplane! any number of times is bound to finish the jokes as soon as they start hearing the lines. When Burdick says, "Hey, Johnny, hope about some coffee", you can't help but say to yourself "No thanks" even if Johnny doesn't say it in this movie. When Darnell is working the radio and describing the flying conditions to Hayden, you almost expect Andrews to say "It's a damn good thing he doesn't know how much I hate his guts" and her to repeat it. When the plane captain's wife shows up in the tower at the end of the movie, you expect her to start groping Hayden as he's trying to talk Andrews down.

I almost feel guilty about laughing at this movie. But I guess in 2014, it just can't be helped. If you've never seen Airplane!--and there are such people I am told--you'll probably appreciate this more as the thriller it's intended to be. If you have seen Airplane!, you'll still want to see this just to see where the idea came from. Like I said, it's a good movie and well worth watching at least once.

Yes, I am serious about that. And don't call me Shirley.

Airport (1970)

Contrary to popular belief, Airport was not the first Disaster movie. The genre goes back to at least 1901 with a movie called Fire!, which concerned some firefighters battling a blaze in a burning building and rescuing a couple of people. A little over a decade later, the sinking of the Titanic inspired a couple of films. The 1930s gave us a minor wave that included one about a Tsunami (Deluge, 1932), the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (San Francisco, 1936), the great Chicago fire (In Old Chicago), and a hurricane (The Hurricane, 1937). The genre kicked back up in the 50s with a pair of movies about the Titanic and a couple of airline disaster pics, including The High and The Mighty (1954) with John Wayne and the movie that actually inspired Airplane!, Zero Hour (1957), which happened to be written by the same guy who wrote the book this movie was based on. So, as I say, the Disaster Genre was nothing new when Universal released this adaption of Arthur Hailey's novel in 1970.


The formula seems to have been set up in the 1950s with films like The High and The Mighty. Get a bunch of characters each with their own storyline, toss them together like a salad, and then converge the multiple storylines into one by putting as many of the characters into danger through either a natural or man made disaster. Airport follows this and adds a couple of things they couldn't have gotten away with in the 1950s. Humorously, Airport was rated G nonetheless, despite including such family friendly themes as people having extra-marital affairs and planning to blow up airplanes over the ocean. But I'm getting ahead of myself.


Burt Lancaster is in charge of a fictional Chicago airport and he's up to his control tower with problems:
a)The worst blizzard in years is pounding the airport
b)a plane gets stuck on a runway blocking it
c)Local residents are protesting the one working runways since it cause planes to take off right over their houses
d)His marriage to shrewish wife Dana Wynter is falling apart due to his never being home--though that's okay since he's actually having an affair with co-worker Jean Seberg
e)A little old lady stowaway (Helen Hayes) is causing all sorts of havoc
f)His pilot brother-in-law (Dean Martin) is sending reports to the higher ups trying to undermine him
g)There's a mad bomber (Van Heflin) about to board the flight to Rome.


Martin is one of the pilots on that Rome flight, checking main pilot Barry Nelson (who OO7 fans know as the actual first person to play James Bond on TV). Martin is having an affair with stewardess Jacqueline Bissett, who it turns out is pregnant with his kid.  Hayes is on the flight, too, and happens to be sitting right next to Heflin. Meantime, on the ground, Lancaster enlists George Kennedy's help in trying to get the stuck airplane off the runway, especially when he finds out about Heflin.


Beyond the people listed above, we also have Maureen Stapleton as Heflin's wife--she's the one who inadvertently tips the airline off to him--Barbara Hale as Martin's patient wife, Whit Bissell (Creature From the Black Lagoon) as a passenger, and Lloyd Nolan as a Customs Officer who has a niece on the flight.


Interestingly, the actual disaster--that is, the bomb going off--is a pretty small part of the movie. In fact, the disaster actually doesn't hit until around 90 minutes in. In this respect, the movie is very much like The High and The Mighty. It concerns itself much more with the characters and their stories than it does just throwing them into danger. We're given time to know these characters and get to care about them. Later Disaster movies couldn't wait to get the carnage going, which might be why so many of them fail. But Airport is good, old fashioned storytelling and I can appreciate that. It also helps that everyone in the cast turns in excellent performances. Hayes actually won an Academy Award for her performance and she deserved it. She's a delight in the role and steals every scene she's in, even from such major stars as Lancaster and Martin. Plus she plays a crucial role in the attempt to stop Heflin.


Airport did big business in 1970 and helped start the trend of the all-star big budget Disaster film. The Poseidon Adventure, released two years later, made sure that these sort of movies were a thing for the next eight years. Make of that what you want. At least those eight years gave us The Towering Inferno, a film that pretty much justifies the existence of the entire genre. That said, Airport runs a close second. It's also a fascinating snapshot of the pre-9/11 world of airline travel. Universal released this on Blu Ray in 2012 and did a nice job of it, even if they didn't do a making of documentary. Still, if you can sit for storytelling and don't need action and dead bodies every two minutes to hold your attention, I can safely recommend giving Airport a try, especially on a snowy day.