Review: The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Poseidon Adventure

Rating

Director

Ronald Neame

Screenplay

Stirling Silliphant, Wendell Mayes (Novel: Paul Gallico)

Length

1h 57m

Starring

Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, Jack Albertson, Pamela Sue Martin, Arthur O’Connell, Eric Shea, Fred Sadoff

MPAA Rating

Review

Disaster movies had already taken place on an airplane so a sea-going vessel seemed a natural evolution. The Poseidon Adventure was the result, a star-studded voyage of death, survival, and courage.

Based on a novel by Paul Gallico, the film takes place on the SS Poseidon an aging ocean liner on its final voyage across the Atlantic when a tsunami tips the vessel over, causing it to capsize. Floating upside down with the hull above water, the survivors must find a way to navigate the compromised ship so they can hopefully reach the surface before the entire ship sinks.

Gene Hackman, hot off his Oscar win for The French Connection, leads an impressive cast of actors as a priest who takes charge of the ragtag group who have agreed to make the perilous journey upwards. The cast also included Oscar winners Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Shelly Winters, and Jack Albertson. Borgnine plays a police detective aboard with his wife (Stella Stevens); Winters and Albertson play the Rosens, traveling to Israel to see their two-year-old grandson; and Buttons plays a shy bachelor. Also along for the ride are Carol Lynley as a singer, Roddy McDowall as a waiter, Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea as young siblings heading across the ocean to meet their mother, and Arthur O’Connell and Leslie Nielsen in minor roles.

Their journey through the ship is met with peril of numerous sorts, including burst pipes, underwater passages, and various explosions throughout the ship. It’s expected that many of them will not make it but which will survive and which will perish keeps the film tense and foreboding with each new complication causing the audience to wonder if any of them will make it out alive.

While most of the cast is playing their characters with down-to-earth appeal, Hackman’s preacher carries a bit too much of his no-nonsense style for French Connection. That might explain why his preacher is being shipped off to Africa to begin a new parish but it rings too falsely at times, but not so much that it drowns out the good work the rest of the cast delivers, especially Winters who managed the film’s only acting nomination for her brave, vulnerable performance.

Much of the film’s success can be attributed to Ronald Neame’s skilled direction, keeping tension bubbling under each frame while juggling the tremendous amounts of schadenfreude and pathos the material requires. This is aided by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes’ adaptation of the Gallico novel. Creating credible characters and intriguing situations helps bring the audience into the lives of these seemingly normal folks caught in a most horrific situation. All of this is capably blended under Irwin Allen’s masterful producing skills and Harold F. Kress’s keen editing. They all understanding the needs of the material and the desires of the audience combined together in an entertaining whole.

The Poseidon Adventure was a time capsule of its age, set aboard a method of transportation still frequently used paired with the chance to see their favorite actors in turmoil. Viewers were easily enthralled in the year’s top box office hit. While it might hinge on some things that are a bit hokey in a modern context but that doesn’t dull the enjoyment. Today, the genre might need a retooling. Audiences gave it a chance in the 1990s but it suffered the same fate then as in the 1970s: a dearth of quality productions like this one.