PRE-United: Unsmooth Sailing

Every so often, we do one of these posts about memorable (to me, at least!) costars and their roles. Anyone who's dipped a toe into The Underworld knows that Airport (1970) is a top ten favorite film of mine. One of its many story threads concerns the unraveling marriage of the airport's general manager, played by Burt Lancaster. As a snowstorm has engulfed the place and one of the airliners is threatened by an unbalanced, bomb-wielding passenger, he must also contend with his demanding wife Dana Wynter.

 

Lancaster is already having a particularly trying night, with picketers over airplane noise, the snowstorm and a jet that's stuck in the snowy ground when Wynter calls to remind him of their engagement that evening. Exasperated, he abruptly ends the call.

He later takes a moment to call her back, after chatting with their daughters for a moment, but now she is seething. "You hung up on me... don't ever do that again."

Her rendition of a compromise is for him to meet her at the event instead of coming home first!

During their argumentative phone conversation, we're shown a variety of vignettes depicting their turbulent marriage.

His boredom at her social-climbing charity events...

...disagreements over his choice of occupation...

...and ruined family dinners as their squabbling affects the children. (Tellingly, though Wynter is ever-unsatisfied with their station in life, a housekeeper is shown behind a swinging door and she is always bedecked in jewelry and Edith Head gowns.)

If he thinks he's off the hook after this second rough phone call, he's got another think coming. Ultimately, she shows up at the airport for another round.

By now the mad bomber scenario has reached a crisis point, but so has his marriage. I remember the first time I saw this movie I could hardly believe how callous and shallow Wynter was in the face of Lancaster's hardships. But women like this do exist, trust me on that one! 

Amazingly enough, though, Wynter is able to bring about some shadings to the role which indicate that she isn't a complete monster. The two wind up in a sad, but less volatile, state than the one in which the evening began. Anyway, he has pert widow Jean Seberg waiting at the next gate for him!

Wynter has her very own tribute here. I loved her voice and her genteel manner. For me, even playing a shrew, she was the picture of elegance in Airport. She's really best known, though, for the exemplary 1956 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Lancaster was quite the dreamboat in his youth and enjoyed a stellar career as a movie actor. He was something of a role model for me in that back in my 20s when I still wondered about pursuing acting as a real career, he had become a huge star after having made his movie debut at the ripe age of 33!

In a way, one could say that Lancaster and Wynter had appeared together in The List of Adrian Messenger (1963) seven years prior to Airport, but as it turns out, Lancaster's heralded, disguised cameo as a picketing woman wound up not even being he! Director John Huston cheated by showing Lancaster unveiling himself at the end while not actually having done the part in the film proper. (And while Wynter's character was around for the scene in question, they shared no screen time anyway.) Frank Sinatra also didn't film his "cameo" either... just the gimmicky "unveiling" at the end. What shit.

Anyway, one must go further back in time to discover when Lancaster and Wynter were first united on screen. Here we see a typically boisterous Lancaster in the prologue for the 1952 swashbuckler The Crimson Pirate. 

On board a sailing vessel, a sneering Baron (Leslie Bradley) is entertaining a well-heeled lady-friend played by Wynter in one of her earliest roles.

She is bored to tears by him and his boat. But not for long!

In a flash, Lancaster has dropped in!

He's soon followed, natch, by his li'l partner in crime Nick Cravat.

Wynter thinks she might pull one over on Lancaster and begins to unearth a small pistol covered with a handkerchief.

But he isn't having it...

After wrestling it out of her grasp...

He plants a kiss on the glamorous lady (who's no longer bored, anyway!)

Lancaster show Wynter the business end of his gun.

Bradley gets a taste of it, too.

There's no bloodshed, though. The movie is generally filled with devil-may-care, frolicsome fun.

Lancaster takes over the ship and that's the last he sees of Ms. Wynter (until 18 years later in Airport!)

As I've noted in past posts, Cravat was Lancaster's acrobatic partner back in their days of live performance. He appears in many movies which starred Lancaster and even pops up as a passenger in Airport.  Lancaster never truly lost his New York accent, but Cravat's must have been even thicker because his character here was depicted as mute in order to prevent his true voice from upsetting the verisimilitude!

The two of them frolic around with a notable lack of clothing.

"Whattya think of my basket?"

They even have one sequence in drag! Take THAT Adrian Messenger.

At this stage, pushing 40, Lancaster was nonetheless a bronzed, athletically-impressive god of the silver screen.

Note how in the prologue, filmed after the rest of the movie, his hair was back to it's natural dishwater brown.

In one sequence of Pirate, he had the chance to doll up in period finery and flash that infectious grin.

As Truvy said, "Time marches on..." and the intervening years had taken their cruel toll by 1970. (He probably should have ditched the big hair by this point.)

I greatly preferred the closer-cropped look he was sporting in The Swimmer (1968), a terrific little film, just two years prior.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed this little stream-of consciousness post connecting the dots between these two performers.

And now we're setting sail for the long Independence Day weekend. Till next time, mateys!

Say, Haven't I Seen You Someplace Before? - "Airport"

Although the format and content of this blog has waffled about here and there through the years, it really came about as a place for me to foam at the mouth over all my beloved disaster movies of the 1970-1980 period. Those all-star spectacles in which a gaggle of name brand performers were pummeled with water or scorched or - as in this case - windblown and clinging for life in mid-air! The huge cast of Airport (1970) is riddled with such thespians. But interestingly, the performers who populate the other passengers on board The Golden Argosy flight to Rome depicted in the film were often known (or in some cases about to be known) entities themselves. The director George Seaton could have (and did) use extras for the movie, but he also made certain to cast experienced actors in many of the seats in order to ensure vivid reactions and an assortment of personalities within the airplane's skin. Hence this post, in which we spot some of the notable people you may not have recognized before. For example, did you know that in the famed shot above, there are - apart from the featured players Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset and Helen Hayes - a costar of a legendary sitcom, a B-movie leading lady and a former Jane, as in "Me Tarzan, you Jane" contained in the scene? More as we take off on this subject below.

Here we have a glimpse of one half of first class. The older lady looking at us is one Celia Lovsky. Once the wife of Peter Lorre, following their 1945 divorce, she began taking on multitudinous character parts in all sorts of movies and, in time, TV.

Lovsky was aboard the plane in Crash Landing (1958), traveled on a sinking freighter in Twilight for the Gods (1958) and later was on another plane with a bomb on board in Doomsday Flight (1973.) DO NOT travel with this woman!

She will always be remembered, though, by someone for her most famous TV appearance; that of T'Pau, ruler of the planet Vulcan, in a key episode of Star Trek!

Across the aisle is the other half of first class. The white-haired man in front is Benny Rubin, a comic actor whose incredible career on screen spanned from 1928 to 1985, with countless parts along the way. By the way, I always want to see more of the cute guy far right, but his seat assignment caused him to rarely be shown in the movie.  The balding man with a mustache towards the back? Another man you simply do not want to travel with...

Ray Ballard turned up five years later in Airport's sequel, Airport 1975!

Near the beginning of his career during Airport, by the time of the sequel he'd earned several lines as a severely skittish passenger on the plane which had collided with a small private aircraft. 

In a real departure from the norm, virtually every passenger on the plane was granted a character name! We would never hear these names in the movie, but it was all part of establishing real people with backgrounds (and the cast was shown a film of what happens to people during decompression of an aircraft.) Ray Ballard played a man called Gilbert Price and Benny Rubin played Sam Lasky. The young black gal is model Dawn Villere "playing" Dawn Williams. But who but they would ever truly know this?

Making our way into the rest of the plane, we find Dean Martin chatting up various passengers. He's visiting with the characters of amateur astronomer Schuyler Schultz and his parents, Mr. & Mrs. Schultz.

Many of you are probably familiar with Virginia Grey, who had a long career in movies and was a favorite "good luck charm" of producer Ross Hunter, who was in charge of Airport. And I've written before of the obnoxious son Lou Wagner, who had portrayed Lucius in Planet of the Apes (1968) and went on to play Harlan Arliss, the sometimes exasperated mechanic on CHiPs for 81 episodes.  But we can't forget the father, Dick Winslow.

He wasn't half-bad as a young man. Winslow essayed an astonishingly long and busy career as a character actor. His screen work stretched from work as a child in 1924 up until acting gigs as an old man in 1988! He had little parts in many, many movies and TV shows.

Eileen Wesson at the left plays Lloyd Nolan's niece Judy Barton and wasn't able to do a lot more after this, despite having worked in some projects beforehand. The lady on the right I don't know, but it never fails to annoy me the way she overacts recognizing her native tongue as the pre-flight announcement switches languages. LOL But, God, what about that scary-looking chick peering out from behind?! Little-known actress Savannah Bentley as Virginia Lopez. Maybe she was (with good reason!) scared of flying. Her husband Harold Lopez is played by Marco Lopez, who later was a passenger on the S.S. Poseidon!  

Lopez attending Gene Hackman's sermon on deck in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), right behind star Red Buttons.

The doctor looking at us is highly prolific performer Paul Picerni, who worked in countless on-screen projects. Across the aisle from him are two servicemen. The handsome black gent (character name Sgt. Edward Washington) is Marc Hannibal. Hannibal was right at the start of his career on TV and in movies (he also worked in The Grasshopper, which starred Jacqueline Bisset, this same year.) He proceeded to play an array of cops, judges and so on, but has an interesting blip on his resume...

Raise your hand if you've ever seen (or even heard of!) Super Stooges vs the Wonder Women (1974!) I certainly never have... What a hoot.

Hannibal does fill out his scanty costume rather well it must be said and is very strapping looking.

The soldier seated next to Hannibal is played by Richard Van Fleet. He's seen above dutifully handing out blankets to the cold and banged up passengers on the plane. Those of a certain age who ever watched All My Children ought to know him well.

In 1975 and for years on-and-off after he played Dr. Chuck Tyler, married to Donna Tyler. Chuck didn't know that his wife had not only once been a hooker, but also was unable to have children as a result of a prior abortion! Van Fleet still works in projects occasionally now.

All while Van Fleet is heading down the aisle, you can hear a woman repeatedly asking for a blanket. "Can we get a blanket??!" It turns out to be this lady in green.

If you don't already know, this is Marion Ross, better known as Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days! Then a struggling actress and single mom, she won the "role" of Joan Myers, which proved to be an incredible break. For she made connections through this gig which eventually led to her iconic role on the sitcom.

Ross' seatmates are an attractive couple, one of which presumably was in dire need of that blanket she was hollering about. Ha! The lovely stewardess shown here Is Patty Poulsen, a real-life American Airlines flight attendant who was featured in their ads and was noted for her beauty and attractive figure. This was her only turn at screen acting.

Poulsen had been named Miss Astrojet and typified the slim, pert, glamorous image that the ladies in her profession once either aspired to (or were held to!) For a more detailed look at the stewardess uniforms of Airport, be sure to click here!

In the foreground on the left here is another notable name. Thomas Browne Henry, a staggeringly prolific actor who was dean of the Pasadena Playhouse.

I can't say his career went down the toilet because he voluntarily retired from the screen after this to concentrate on theatre, but he did sort of go out with a bang as he is the hapless passenger who happened to be in the lavatory the whole time Dean Martin and Van Heflin were squaring off over Heflin's bomb...!

Now's as good a time as any to bring up Peter Turgeon as Marcus Rathbone. His through-line in the movie is being as obnoxious and trouble-making as is humanly possible. He almost detonates Heflin's bomb on the shuttle to the airport and, as seen here, interferes with Dean Martin's plan to subdue Heflin with kindness.

Payback of a sort almost comes when he is left without oxygen for a time and nearly suffocates, but he's finally given a mask. Turgeon played all sorts of police detectives, lawyers (he was Richard Gere's in American Gigolo, 1980) and codgers over the course of his career.

One of the movie's cheapest (but biggest) laughs comes when the plane is attempting a landing and Turgeon is still annoying everyone with his comments. The priest across the aisle prays, then makes the sign of the cross...

...slapping Turgeon in the face to shut him up!

When he complains to second officer Gary Collins, Collins threatens to give it a try himself! There's a good glimpse of Marion Ross seated next to the big mouth.

Yes, the man in 21-D was a real pill from the start, complaining about stale nuts during the initial snack. To the left of him is not Shelley Winters' stunt double or stand-in, but one Barbara Morrison, a long-standing character actress. She had small roles in From Here to Eternity (1953) and played a mother superior in Papillon (1975), but is chiefly known as a sitcom foil for various stars, Lucille Ball and Red Skelton being primary ones.

As for the priest (Father Lonigan) who gave Turgeon a smack, that was James Nolan, a very busy character actor for 45 years in countless B-movies, television episodes and the occasional feature such as Dirty Harry (1971) or The Shootist (1976.) At the far left here is Robert Knapp playing a part called Jack Dunlap. 

Knapp was yet another very busy actor, co-starring in B-westerns, appearing in hordes of television series as a guest star and occasionally winning a bigger role as in Gunmen of Laredo (1959), in which he's shown taking on an opponent with a tomahawk above.

But there wasn't just a priest on board The Golden Argosy. There were also a couple of nuns. The younger one in the middle (Sister Katherine Grace) was played by Janis Hansen. Late in the film, she removes her wimple while helping to tend to a serious injury. Hansen had done some TV guest roles on series as diverse as The Big Valley, I Dream of Jeannie and The F.B.I.

She probably best known, though, for playing Tony Randall's girlfriend Gloria during the waning days of The Odd Couple, including one in which Hugh Hefner appeared and she was seen sporting a Playboy Bunny get-up! Quite a change of habit...!

The older nun (Sister Felice) wasn't exactly unknown herself. Does she appear any more familiar without her glasses on? The actresses name was Mary Jackson. A working actress from the dawn of the 1950s until the late-1990s when a stroke complicated her speaking voice, she played many matrons and biddies along the way.

She is unquestionably best known, however, for playing Emily, one half of The Baldwin Sisters on more than 60 episodes of The Waltons.

Along with Helen Kleeb as Mamie, this twosome perked up many an installment of the period family drama with their highly mannered shenanigans.

Unless you're blind, you ought to have spied that hunky serviceman with the nuns in the first photo of them. The strapping dreamboat Private First Class Bud Miller was enacted by Mark Russell. 

He's MY kind of man...! After the bomb explodes, he helps plug the gaping hole in the side of the aircraft.

The Scottish-born hunk played multitudinous policemen, guards, agents, soldiers and even henchmen over the years. He even appeared (uncredited) as a Vulcan in the very same episode of Star Trek that featured Celia Lovsky.

After many years of widely-varied bit parts, he landed on Kojak in 1973 as Detective Percy Saperstein. He was in the pilot TV movie as well as the farewell TV movie in 1985, his last credit. But he's still with us today and in his late 80s.

Visiting first class again for a moment, we see (right near Gary Collins' rear) an extra who I have seen in endless movies and TV shows over the years. I can't come up with his name, though. He almost never has lines. But the blonde lady near Collins' hand. That's Wilma Francis, a 1930s & '40s starlet who returned to bit roles later in her life and also worked as a casting director in her native Louisiana. 

She has a brief, but memorable, exchange near the end of the movie when she makes certain that crafty ol' Helen Hayes doesn't wander off with her expensive fur coat!

But what I only noticed this most recent time (out of dozens, I'm sure!) is that it is Francis who is at the ticket counter when Hayes weasels her way into the plane to begin with! It's a neat little bookend for these characters.

In this shot, we see the passengers reacting to the sudden decompression of the plane in the wake of Heflin's bomb exploding. Marion Ross is having a moment, but look at the opposite side in the middle next to the priest.

That's Sandra Gould, better known as the second Mrs. Kravitz on Bewitched! Gladys Freaking Kravitz was riding The Golden Argosy! LOL She was actually playing a "role" called Millie Miles. The doctor here, Dr. Grant, was essayed by Reginald Fenderson, who had been featured in a number of non-Hollywood all-black films which were seen around the world.

As a matter of fact, it was her friendship with Gould that led Ross to come to know the casting person who thought of her for Happy Days. So this was a momentous flight indeed for Ross. (No word if that is Elizabeth Taylor's lighting stand-in on BUtterfield 8, 1960, down in the lower right corner! Ha ha!!)

You may be forgiven for not recognizing the low-key man in the very rear of the plane (also appearing in the inset.) He certainly is not featured much in Airport, though there was a time he costarred in a couple of colorful adventure films.

The man is Nick Cravat, lifelong friend of the top-billed star of Airport, Burt Lancaster. The two were circus acrobats together and later worked together in The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952) in which the duo could perform any number of daring feats without the aid of stunt doubles.

His very thick Brooklyn accent led to him playing mute characters in any period movie, including both of these. He worked in quite a few Lancaster flicks along with others without him. Known to be tremendously strong, he also was capable of considerable belligerence when riled.

By far his most legendary and memorable credit is portraying the petrifying creature who terrorizes William Shatner in a famous installment of The Twilight Zone! Considering this, it's interesting that his Airport character Nick Valli is often seen peering out the window! 

And now at last we come back to that clump of people who began this post. In this shot we have the three people I mentioned earlier - a sitcom costar, a B-movie leading lady and a former Jane.

Pat Priest (as Mrs. Jerry Copeland), who was situated directly behind Helen Hayes on the plane, had previously played Marilyn Munster in The Munsters (this was after the initial Marilyn, Beverly Owen, took a quick hike.)

Right after The Munsters, she showed off a trim, yet curvy, bod in the film Easy Come, Easy Go (1967.)

Her leading man in that one? None other than "The King" himself, Elvis Presley. After that came a number of TV guest roles until her non-speaking part in Airport.

She was seen frequently (often playing cards), but says nothing.

Following Airport, she found herself playing the wife of scientist (!) Bruce Dern in The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971.) That's non other than Casey Kasem on the right as Dern's friend.

She was still showing off a trim figure in that...

...and sported some fun hair as well! After a 1976 appearance on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Betty White's sister, she retired except for a bit part in a Munsters TV-movie.

In this shot, take note of the blonde lady at far left in sort of dim light.

As the situation shifts into one of increased tension, we see her from the other angle, now far right.

As you can see, she knew how to give good face, fixing her gaze on the mad bomber and never wavering.

Even as the shot drew in closer on Dean Martin, she's in it to win it. Hard to believe this utterly peripheral part is played by someone who starred in many secondary movies and had roles in others like All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Desk Set (1957) before heading her own syndicated TV series.

The actress is Merry Anders, a truly busy performer who worked in any number of flicks like The Dalton Girls (1957), The Hypnotic Eye (1960), House of the Damned (1963) and Elvis's Tickle Me (1965.) She also worked on the daytime soap Never Too Young and was a regular on Dragnet 1967.

Having worked as a model in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), she later starred in a syndicated TV show based on that blockbuster with Lori Nelson and Barbara Eden from 1957-1959.

With things such as 1964's The Time Travelers (seen here with burly Phil Carey), the descent into titles like Raiders from Beneath the Sea (1964) and Women of the Prehistoric Planet (1966) began to dot her resume. After two more appearances in the wake of Airport, she retired, living until 2012.

Similar shot as the one with Merry Anders above. This time, we're focusing on the blonde lady a couple of rows back.

Here's a rare semi-decent glimpse of her (in my very favorite scene from the film.) Her name, which is never heard in the movie, is Mrs. David Corman.

Even though we're focusing on her, I thought it was neat that when Jackie Bisset shoves Whit Bissel aside...

...we wind up with another one of Merry Anders' gazes. Ha! But anyway... as to the other blonde in the back.

She's Eve Brent. Brent worked in quite a few TV shows of the 1950s & '60s and had the distinction of playing Jane on two occasions.

She experienced the joy of Gordon Scott's arms in Tarzan's Fight for Life (1958.)

The pair later did three episodes of a proposed television series which were edited into a TV-movie (not depicted here) called Tarzan and the Trappers (1960.) Though her fame didn't exactly explode, she remained a working actress with bit parts in movies like A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and Coogan's Bluff (1968) and plenty of TV. She proceeded to work in many shows and movies for many years after Airport, including The White Buffalo (1977), Going Berserk (1983) and The Green Mile (1999.)

So, you see? You never know who you may be sliding in next to on a plane! I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into some of the folks who populated this massive hit with a massive cast. Till next time!