America loves disaster movies. A current crop of them is burning itself out now (The Day After Tomorrow, Poseidon) but the genre will cycle around again someday. This recent wave has much to do with the readily available C.G.I. technologies that allow us to build entire worlds on our computer desktops, and more to do with our post 9/11 fears. As a form of release, disaster movies give us a way to live out our worst nightmares and emerge from these vicarious experiences alive and emotionally unscathed.
AIRPORT launched the modern disaster genre back in 1970. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE followed in ‘72. You can choose to love these movies or to wince at their cheesy centers. These movies are replete with cornball heroics, craven cowards and unsuspecting victims. They are generally ensemble dramas which unfold like this… 1.) establish characters and setting… 2.) insert disaster (bomb on a plane, tidal wave, earthquake, raging fire)… 3.) let the audience watch as certain characters live while others die. The best of these films leave us guessing as to who will make it. Is it cunning, hard work, common sense, or brute strength that define the survivors? Will people turn on each other or team up? In this way, we observe in disaster flicks a sort of democracy in action. Everyone starts out with the same potential for survival. In the end determination and hard work are only part of the equation. In order to survive you also need luck.
THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE is populated with well-drawn characters and great scene chewing performances. Gene Hackman is the anti-establishment priest who tests his thesis that God helps those who get off their asses and work. He is passionate, cynical and idealistic. Ernest Borgnine’s blue-collar cop (Rogo) is the preacher’s foil. He questions Hackman’s theories and puts Hackman’s egotism under a spotlight. Their constant dialectic (about which path to take toward the bow) keeps the movie afloat until the body count really begins to rise. Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson play a loving older couple (Manny and Belle Rosen). There is decency in these people, if somewhat overstated in the script. Winters’ performance is a camp classic. When she dives into a flooded compartment to save a trapped Hackman it’s a shocking moment because her character has been so physically and emotionally vulnerable up to that point. When Belle finally buys it we realize that anyone can die, and that there is no equating deservedness with survival. She endows Belle with so much decency that her loss creates a void that the passengers and the movie must deal with from that point forward. It takes us to the bottom of the dramatic curve, which continues as two more characters lose their lives in the final act. Other notables in the cast include Red Buttons and Carol Lynley (who reportedly hated each other on the set but you’d never know it), and the likeable Roddy McDowall as Acres. Stella Stevens is Linda Rogo, and yes...there are some bratty kids too. The youngest of the kids (Eric Shea) serves the dramatic purpose of keeping Rogo humble and instructing the group about the layout of the ship after Acres is gone. The other (Pamela Sue Martin) develops a crush on Hackman.
If all of this doesn’t sound like nearly enough, it is. The movie is far greater than the sum of its parts and it’s a thousand times better than the 2006 remake. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE rises above its cheesy opening and confectionary trifle of a theme song because (like its main characters) it is so damned earnest and unrelenting. It doesn’t know it’s a bad movie. It thinks it’s a great one.
The common denominators for success in this movie reside in character, performance and, to some extent script (a script whose structural backdrop touches on themes of human determinism and community). The people who survive do so because they have worked together. They have defied the common wisdom of “stay put and wait for rescue”. One can’t help but be reminded of poor souls who died in the World Trade Center because they waited for authorities to come and get them. This cheesy B-movie got it right, back in 1972. Question authority. Use your heads. Take nothing for granted. Is there really any authority we can trust anymore?
The effective music was composed by John Williams. Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno, The Swarm) was at the helm as producer and Ronald Neame (Scrooge, Meteor) directed. Most of the visual effects are practical (fires, falling debris, the interior of the ship rocking to and fro) but they work. Even today when so much movie making is done on computers there is a certain feeling of credibility that practical effects have. The film won an Oscar for best original song (The Morning After), and Shelley Winters was nominated for Best Supporting Actress but lost. The film did, however, win a Golden Globe for best drama and was nominated for a total of eight Oscars. It won a special achievement Oscar for visual effects.
THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE begins on a bed of such 70’s camp that the drama which follows seems almost unfathomable. Ultimately, all themes advanced by the individual characters will be swept aside by one major tenet – life is preferable to the alternative. In Hackman’s words some hour or so before he falls into a fiery pit while screaming at God…“life always matters very much”. Cheesy yes, but putting the Hallmark card sentiment aside, think of what the words mean. Every soldier knows that in battle, survival is the thing. It’s better to be lucky than good. It’s better to be alive. Heroism is secondary. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE resonates because it transcends the creakiness of its individual parts and tells a story of basic human survival. We care about the people on screen and we want those last survivors to live.