Helen Hayes as Ada Quonsett in Airport

Best Supporting Actress at the 43rd Annual Oscars (1970)

Notable Quote:

“Now there's nothing to be nervous about. I've flown thousands of miles and I can tell you it's a lot safer than crossing the street!”

Synopsis:

An ensemble disaster film which spends some of its long runtime on a thrilling terrorist attack on a plane, but also devotes a lot of space to mundane matters like clearing snow from runways, neighborhood complaints about loud takeoffs, and hetero relationship drama.

The character:

Early in this film, an airport employee refers to Ada Quonsett as a “crafty little old biddy”: a great summation of her character, as it turns out.  Ada Quonsett’s greatest strength is that she understands exactly how she’s perceived. She knows that everyone dismisses her as a cute old lady and cannily uses that persona to get away with, oh, let’s say … constantly stowing away on planes! You know this movie is from the 70s, because they’d chuck you in jail for that now! Ada is constantly getting away with it by pretending that she forgot her boarding pass, or that she’s having a fainting spell, and people fall for it every time because they don’t expect her to be a conwoman.

Here’s the thing: Ada is definitely a sociopath. She feels no guilt about her life of crime, and no fear when she’s found out. As of a matter of fact, she seems to delight in being caught, because then she gets to lean even more heavily into her sweet old woman persona to talk herself out of trouble. And she doesn’t roll over and repent either: she actually tends to amp up the conflict, daring the airline to sue her and deal with the PR optics, or even complaining about the flavor of soup that they serve on the plane (too much garlic, she claims)! The audacity! I love that the whole enterprise is really a fun game for her.

The performance:

This performance is very similar to that of Ingrid Bergman’s in Murder on the Orient Express: it’s goofy, broad comedy by someone who already has an Oscar and didn’t really need another one. Nothing about Ada requires an emotional intensity or range, so as someone unfamiliar with Helen Hayes, it’s probably not the best window into her abilities. Still, unlike in Orient Express, Hayes’ performance is absolutely the standout of this film.

She’s genuinely hilarious, striking a nice balance between being incredibly silly, but not overacting. Her body language is perfect: there’s a scene where the airport staff are informing her that what she’s doing is very illegal and she’s just casually nodding and smiling. And her facial expressions always show that she’s fully unmoved, and (correct!) expects no consequences from her actions. Overall, it’s a role that’s goofy, and pretty inessential, but it’s still fun.

The movie:

Airport’s legacy has obviously been vastly eclipsed by its parody, Airplane! and I’d say the cultural forgetting is deserved: for a thriller involving a bomb on a plane, it’s a boring movie. Like, a major plot point is that a plane gets stuck on a runway because it ran into about a foot of snow, and seriously no one can move this thing, even though they’ve got loaders, snowplows, etc. There are SO many characters, involved in SO much melodrama (we’ve got affairs, divorces, surprise pregnancies, and more) and it treats all of these things with utter seriousness, and no sense of irony. Still, it’s got that gorgeous 70s look, and it’s a fascinating glimpse back at a genre of movie that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Was the Oscar deserved?

I’ll say a qualified yes.