Payphone Scenes from “Airport” (1970)

The first scene from “Airport” (1970) illustrates just how many phone booths there used to be at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, where much of the movie was filmed. Unfortunately the booths and their tantalizing rotary dial phones make only a background appearance behind Helen Hayes’ performance.

The second scene here, which is actually from earlier in the film, shows Maureen Stapleton talking to a travel agent, with the split-screen phone call format I always liked. Besides the split-screen I find nothing especially remarkable about the Stapleton scene, except that it appears no one else has posted it to the Internet, or the Helen Hayes one either.

For some reason I thought “Airport” was a highly-regarded blockbuster for its genre. Fortunately for me I found enough online reviews to determine that this film wasn’t worth spending over 2 hours of my precious time with. The film may have been an influential film for essentially creating the genre of airplane disaster films, but as with other types of influencers that doesn’t mean it had much substance.