The Oscar-winning smash hit Burt Lancaster called “the biggest piece of junk ever made”
With a legendary career that spanned almost half a century, won him an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, and saw him grace a string of cinema classics, Burt Lancaster was eminently qualified to judge what could justifiably be called a great picture.
And yet, one of the ones he slammed as being among the worst in the history of the moving image didn’t just star him in the lead role, but it also ended up being one of the most successful he ever appeared in. For some actors, the quality of any given production isn’t measured by how well it performs among critics, paying customers, or awards bodies, although those are all fairly important metrics.
From the outside looking in, Lancaster appears to be talking absolute nonsense. After all, the disaster drama he referred to as “the biggest piece of junk ever made” recouped its budget more than 12 times over at the box office, secured ten Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, won Helen Hayes ‘Best Supporting Actress’, and spawned three hit sequels that saw the franchise at large earn upwards of $380million from cinemas on combined production costs of $33m.
It also helped facilitate the rise of a golden age for Hollywood comedy, albeit for entirely different reasons when Jim Abrahams, Jim Zucker, and Jerry Zucker used 1957’s Zero Hour! and the film series that kicked off with 1970’s Airport as the springboard to create Airplane!, which itself segued into Top Secret! and the Naked Gun saga. That’s an impressive legacy, all things considered, even if Lancaster couldn’t care less.
When promoting the following year’s Elmore Leonard adaptation Valdez Is Coming – a western that didn’t fare anywhere near as well as Airport critically, commercially, or historically – the actor was asked for his thoughts on the latter making the shortlist for ‘Best Picture’, where he offered a withering appraisal.
“I don’t know why it’s been nominated,” he admitted to the Montreal Gazette. “It’s the biggest piece of junk ever made.” How many Oscars was Valdez is Coming nominated for? Much to Lancaster’s chagrin, the answer was a big fat zero. Compare that to how well Airport fared across multiple awards galas, and it starts to look as if the leading man didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
In addition to winning an Oscar from ten nods, the ensemble piece snagged a Golden Globe victory from four nominations, including ‘Best Motion Picture – Drama’, won a Grammy for ‘Best Instrumental Composition’ thanks to Alfred Newman’s ‘Airport Love Theme’, and remained the highest-grossing film of Lancaster’s entire silver screen tenure, which ended with Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams five years before his death in 1994 at the age of 80. Regardless, he believed it to be the drizzling shits, even if the evidence to the contrary was stacked sky-high.
