On deck, in cabins, in ballrooms and the rest of the ship we get little vingettes to introduce us to our cast o' characters with the kind of keynote writing that everyone who's done a creative writing course has taken away: ex-cop with ex-sexworker bicker but it's out of love, young hip priest roars about God for the strong with a patient older priest who comes back with a loving God, little boy knows more about the ship than its designer ... you get the idea. You do this when you are building up a big shared experience like a seige, a hijack or in this case a shipwreck.
Disaster movies have as many cliches as any other genre and they're all here but most of them are here for the first time (or near, only Airport came earlier) to play social types against each other in the great tapestry o' modern humanity. Leslie Neilsen who plays The Captain (that's his name in the credits) went on to ridicule this genre in the Flying High (or Airplane) movies by playing things as straight as a die. But the array is on show here, as it must be for this newly fashioned epic. Someone to lead, someone who would rather lead, the old/infim/hysterical dragger who threatens the whole journey and either (if noble) sacrifies themself for the good of the many or (if narcissistic) will sacrifice everyone else for the good of the one. The way out of archetypes to prevent them from being a pageant of cutouts is done with casting.
This was the beginning of the era of the starstudded poster as current A-listers were set in beds of know-the-face stars of previous decades. Gene Hackman leads the ensemble in a form fit role following from his hard boiled Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. He leads his dwindling flock upto the bottom of the hull of the upturned ship having to shed his God favours the winners approach to the religion of love as people keeping proving him wrong. Ernest Borgnine, tears his tough guy type from the air, managing to regain the heights of Marty, his impressive first starring role. Shelley Winters had reached the certain age and body type (as well deliberately putting on weight for the role) that would keep her in side roles for the rest of her career but she takes that and triumphs with it, mixing pathos with pragmatic heroism. Her self-awareness is disarming. Her swimming stunt was not a double. That goes for all of them, high or low, they did their own stunts. Recently when Tom Cruise held on to the wing of a plane as it took off for real it was a selling point of the film. Back in 1972? Eh, it's a living.
The art direction is stellar and serves as a constant reminder of the survival situation as well as the more holmilitic journey of descending for ascent. At the outset we have a cruise ship, mighty and dependable with lavish interiors here and cosy reassuring cabins as well as a clean and orderly bridge for the provision of order. But when the tsunami hits and the leviathan rolls over all of that order and finery rolls with it. The passengers escape the ballroom by climbing a metal framed Christmas tree and move, after a major poltical dispute with the Purser's faction who want to stay put, head into the fiery bowels of the ship where there is no silver cutlery but plenty of skin frying surfaces and shin shattering steel doorways. Ordeals await in every chamber, some infernal and deadly, others tests of human capacity, and the higher/lower they go the tougher, more refulgent and hostile it gets. The tagline on the poster was Hell Upside Down and that's what it looks and feels like.
John Williams provides a solid orschestral score as he would until he delivered bombast for Lucas and Spielberg and spawned generations of bombastic copyists. The tune he did write, though, was the one that became a hit single. It was the era of the movie hit song which also meant it was the era of the movie hit song taught in music class. I can clearly recall having to wrap the tonsils around Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head and One Tin Soldier and then, after The Posdeion Adventure, it was The Morning After. It was on the radio like those others and, while I was deeply into classical and early music at that age, I loved it and appreciated its baroque finish and remember noticing (without knowing the term) that it had a middle eight. In the movie it is voiced by Renee Armond and mimed by Carol Lynley. It was made a hit by Maureen McGovern who looks a little like a cover version of Carol Lynley.
If your American '70s at the cinema is led by the likes of The Godfather or Taxi Driver, the movie brats Coppola and Scorsese et al (aka New Hollywood), you might want to spare a thought for things like this. The big bucks mainstream might have felt challenged by Easy Rider but it stuck to its M.O. and kept churning out lavish productions that raked it in. Disaster movies became as much a theme as noir had been in the '40s or serial killers in the '90s, with entries like The Swarm, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno appearing regularly with fiery poster art and explosive taglines and ever more massive casts of extras and Hollywood luminaries. It's also the era where the war movie did the same, growing from the '60s epic The Great Escape, and even whodunnits like Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile had castlists that read like Who's Who.
The big is beautiful end of town kept the snowball running as the money learned again to absorb. Disaster movies, though, began big, by definition and stayed big until they faded or morphed into action movies etc. If they also planed out into more basic cores than this one they also piled on the effects. On that, does the long shot of the Poseidon just look like a model in a swimming pool? Yes. Should that bother you? If you suffer from a lack of imagination it should outrage and strike your funny bone at once and you should never watch another movie again. I noticed without caring as I understood what it was meant to be without trouble. The scenes, however of the ship capsized in the water are terrifying enough for me not to notice. When they include sparking explosions blowing from the smoketacks my blood runs cold. And that's the point. The Poseidon Adventure shouldn't be a guilty pleasure but its insistence on the social basis of its survival story and delivery of such a convincingly hostile setting earns it points beyond what you might normally afford a blockbuster based on an airport novel. Works.
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