286. The Poseidon Adventure (US 1972)

Director: Ronald Neame/Irwin Allen

Starring: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Duvall, Roddy MacDowell, Stella Stevens, Red Buttons

Music: John Williams

Cinematography: Harold E.Stine

Novel: Paul Gallico

Screenplay: Wendell Mayes, Stirling Silliphant

Fact: Red Buttons was born Aaron Chwatt

Lie: Before choosing his stage name, he was briefly called Red Buttocks

Time: 117 minutes

 In one line: cruise ship is flipped upside down by a tidal wave

Summary

Passenger liner the SS Poseidon is on its last voyage from New York to Athens. A sea-quake unleashes a tidal wave which overturns the ship. A small group of passengers attempt to make their way to the hull of the ship where they hope to be saved.

Click on the poster to see the trailer

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The Poseidon Adventure is the archetypal 70s disaster movie - a mixed group ('mixed' as in ages and gender, but there are no gay characters, and there are no black or Asian faces to be seen) band together. Some live, some die. You know the score.

The Poseidon Adventure - a multicultural wasteland, but real-life gay man Roddy McDowell makes matters worse by trying to 'black up' to show solidarity with the burgeoning Civil Rights movement.

I’d have no complaints if someone came up to and said: “The Poseidon Adventure is a completely shit film; you’re so wrong you’re almost retarded and I bet you ate dog food – real shite like Chappie, rather than good stuff like Pedigree Chum - for your Christmas dinner, y’big spunkchafer.”

Well, I would complain, come to think of it – I’m a vegetarian, for a start - but that’s to ignore the raison d’aitre for this site – namely to find the good in any film – no, make that to find the good in any thing* - that may have enriched your life, if only…. just for a moment…………

The Poseidon Adventure is the archetypal and best of the 70s disaster movies. Although quite silly at times, a largely very talented cast (Hackman, Stevens and Borgnine in particular) breathe life into their characters and make you care for them in a manner that’s absent from producer Allen’s follow up, the fairly awful (but still quite exciting) The Towering Inferno.  

I remember seeing this with my dad and little sister on Liverpool ’s giant Odeon One cinema. Although the effects may be laughable today, the sight of the giant tidal wave filling the screen was just fantastic for a nine year old boy. Steven Spielberg once said that a man carrying takeaways is either very hungry, or KNOWS someone who is very hungry. Or was that John Lennon? No, it was Neil from The Young Ones, come to think of it.

 What Spielberg actually said was that he felt sorry for any kid who had grown up with CGI and hadn’t known the feeling of seeing a Ray Harryhausen monster animation for the first time. You can pull the statement apart however you wish, but the essential truth is clear: a sense of wonder is all relative.

What I also remember from that evening was a little mouse climbing up the back illuminated cinema curtains – the cinema wasn’t scruffy by any means – in fact it was quite plush, but the sight of a formally dressed old-fashioned cinema manager trying to prod the squeaky little bastard down with a brush pole is something (like Leland’s once-seen woman in Citizen Kane) that I think about every day. Well not absolutely every day, but certainly most days in the week; and if not most days then now and again. Come to think of it (which obviously I don’t), I probably don’t think about it at all and this is the first time I’ve thought about it since the day it happened.

Anyway, the film. It’s difficult to see Leslie Nielsen playing it straight in his early scenes as the Poseidon’s captain, but get past that and there’s some good stuff amongst the dreck. Borgnine plays a New York cop who’s married ex-‘hooker’, the fairly stunning Stella Stevens. I’m reliably informed that Stevens played Marilyn Monroe in a film  - and that’s no surprise at all.

The interplay between Borgnine and Stevens is actually quite good and (for its genre) fairly well written and quite risqué. TPA was a family film which was second only to The Godfather in that year’s box office listings. Their conversation is littered with references to the realities of Stevens’ character’s profession and there’s a good line concerning the mechanics of suppository use.

 Hackman plays the Christ figure, the Reverend Frank Scott, a preacher who is angry about the conservatism of his superiors and in the process of being Craggy Islanded to a remote un-named African country.

The most famous scene is when fatty Mrs Rosen (Shelley Winters) swims part of the submerged galley to save the Reverend Scott who has been pinned to the wall by a piece of sheet metal. Besides giving Bette Midler her one decent (micro decent) routine, Shelley's swim reminds me of the BBC's Esther Williams-style swimming hippos trailer. The denouement of her life-saving act really shocked me at the time.

The Reverend Scott took his blimping fatties in their swimwear obsession to extraordinary, er, 'lengths'

But I'm over it now.

Of the main leads, Hackman's still with us and makes the odd film when he feels like, and best of all Ernie Borgnine (though in his 90s) is still working and provides the voice-over for Mermaid man on 'Spongebob'.

So, The Poseidon Adventure: lots of good bits, lots of terrible bits:

7/10

*Finding the good in anything at all - clackers for example – that moment of impact just before they shattered into a million shards and caused all sorts of appalling ocular and testicular injuries.