The Shootist (1976)

By the late 1960s, the Western as a popular movie genre was on it's way out and the ones that did get made started to reflect that thinking. Movies like The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid dealt with characters who no longer fit into the world, who had to watch the slow but inevitable passing of the Old West. It is perhaps fitting that the most poignant of these movies just happened to be the last movie of what may well be the most legendary Western star of all.

1976's The Shootist opens with a montage of scenes from earlier John Wayne westerns, including Hondo and Rio Bravo. The theoretical purpose of the montage is to tell us the lethal legacy of Wayne's character, J.B. Books. But the montage also serves as a reminder of how dominant an actor Wayne was in the genre.

Books arrives in Carson City on January 22, 1901. He hasn't been feeling like himself so he goes to a doctor (James Stewart) he trusts. He finds out he has Cancer and maybe two months to live. He wants to die in peace, so he rents a room from a widow (Lauren Bacall) and her son (Ron Howard). As people find out not only who he is but that he's dying, the glory seekers and vultures come out. Eventually he decides he'd rather go out in a blaze of glory than screaming in agony.

The Shootist is packed with guest appearances from various friends and costars of Wayne's. Besides Bacall and Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Harry Morgan, Hugh O'Brian, Scatman Crothers, Melody Thomas Scott, and even Johnathan Goldsmith--the Most Interesting Man in the World himself--all appear. It's a hell of a cast, the type you don't see much anymore. I don't know how many, if any, realized they were going to be in the last movie John Wayne starred in, but they all play up to the part.

Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino seems to have borrowed quite a few things from this. In both films, the protagonist develops a fatherly relationship with a young boy who tries stealing from him. Both films have a man of violence who learns he is dying of cancer. Both heroes decide to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.

But while the film should be a completely sober and depressing piece, Wayne elevates it above the morbid. He's still John Wayne after all. The scene where he turns the tables on greedy Undertaker Carradine and makes him pay for the privilege of burying Wayne is hilarious. But it's his verbal sparring with Bacall that really makes the movie. She loathes him at first, then pities him, then wants and needs to save him. She can't, of course. But watching two old pros like these play off one another is justification enough for the movie. And it's all done without really becoming a love story.

Some may complain that Wayne never really acted, he just played John Wayne over and over. But that can be said of a lot of actors then and now. After all, didn't we like Jimmy Stewart for essentially being Jimmy Stewart over and over? Wayne was a personality performer and like all personality performers, we watched him be him and loved it. He was a forerunner to later action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, only he managed to make some better movies. The Shootist is the last chance we get to see what made him such a great personality and by extension, such a great actor.

Contrary to popular belief, Wayne wasn't dying when he made The Shootist. He had been in remission since 1969. None the less, this does seem to be his way of facing his own mortality. Three years later he would be gone having made no more movies. In that sense, this is his goodbye and it's a beautiful and emotional one.

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.