THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Back in 1978 I made the terrible decision to go see ‘The Swarm’, now generally reckoned to be one of the worst films ever made.  It was an Irwin Allen production and thus may explain why I’d never got around to catching two of his earlier, more successful films, this one and ‘The Towering Inferno’. 

But I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this potentially quite silly story about a luxury liner that gets turned upside-down by a giant wave.

To be fair to Mr Allen he brought a lot of talent to bear on this adaptation of à best seller.

The cast includes no less than five Oscar winners: Gene Hackman (who won his first Oscar during filming), Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson and (checks notes) Red Buttons.  They form the backbone of the small group of survivors trying to make their way up (or do I mean down?) the stricken vessel.  They are joined by Roddy McDowell (sporting a dodgy Irish accent), three actresses who all turn in decent enough performances as well as showing quite a lot of leg (it’s the 1970s after all), and a precocious young kid.

Mr Allen also hired two distinguished screenwriters to do the adaptation: first., Wendell Mayes, who had got an Oscar nomination for ‘Anatomy of a Murder’, and then Stirling Silliphant, who had gone one better and won an Oscar for ‘In The Heat Of the Night’.

Between them they produced a more than adequate screenplay which fleshes out the characters enough for me to be totally invested in their fate.

Hackman plays Reverend Scott, an unorthodox priest who believes in active faith rather than simply praying for help.  Accordingly he takes charge straightaway once disaster has struck, and is a dynamic presence throughout (one can see why Burt Lancaster was initially offered the role).

It’s tempting to interpret the film in allegorical terms, perhaps with Scott as a prophet-like figure leading his people to the Promised Land, in this case the engine room where the hull of the ship is relatively thin. 

But not everyone is happy to follow Hackman in an unquestioning manner.  Chief among these is Borgnine’s character, a loudmouth cop with an ego as big as Scott's so naturally they butt heads from time to time.  Borgnine delivers the acting goods towards the end when his wife falls to her death, causing him to vent his grief in a vitriolic tirade aimed at Scott.  

Scott then himself loses his temper, with God, at all the needless death, including his own when he makes the ultimate sacrifice in order for the remaining six passengers to survive.

Winters and Albertson turn in lovely performances as a married couple looking forward to seeing their grandson for the first time, and I have no great problem with the former picking up a Best Supporting Actress nomination.  

She provides the most memorable moment of the film (or indeed many others) when she performs a spectacular dive into the water, and then swims underwater in order to rescue Scott.  As an overweight grandmother who feels herself to be a burden to the others she is so very happy to prove herself useful and show off her one and only talent.  

That she then dies of an heart attack is on one level very manipulative yet such are the strengths of the performances of her and Hackman that I found myself moved. 

Apparently Winters spent a lot of time being coached in preparation for her underwater swimming, which points to a great strength of this pre-CGI film in that everything seems very real, not least because the cast didn’t rely on stunt doubles.

Ronald Neame directs with a sure touch, and the end result is much better than it has any right to be, and I can’t wait to see ‘The Towering inferno’.