The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The SS Poseidon is sailing from New York to Athens when an underwater earthquake creates a huge wave that turns the ship over. A small group of passengers do their best to survive, despite the water coming in and the fires breaking out.

I was curious to see this film, which I had often heard about. It’s trashier than I expected. There’s a shabby made-for-TV quality to it, and it has none of the big-budget grandeur of disaster classics such as The Towering Inferno. The characters are absurdly diverse “types”, including:
• a rogue preacher (Gene Hackman)
• an angry, bad-tempered cop (Ernest Borgnine) and his ex-prostitute wife (Stella Stevens)
• a gee-whiz American kid (Eric Shea) and his older sister (Pamela Sue Martin)
• a woman given no other function than to be “a fat lady” (Shelley Winters) and her thinner husband Jack Albertson (Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)
• a nervous singer (Carol Lynley) whose band of beardy blokes doesn’t make it
• a kindly, injured waiter (Roddy McDowall)
• an absurd-looking runner (he jogs like a parody of a Carry On character), who’s too shy to have any luck with women (Red Buttons)

Meanwhile, Leslie Nielsen plays the captain. After seeing him in Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it’s strange to see him in a straight role: I kept waiting for the gags that never arrived.

The concept is good, but it’s poorly executed and poorly written. There’s a lack of dramatic tension. Too much of the film becomes a logistical challenge of getting a group of people past an obstacle or from one room to another. The ship is meant to be upside down most of the time, but it rarely looks that way. You only see it in close-up, and the lack of contextual shots mean that what you do see looks like a set. It made me respect the action sequences in James Cameron’s Titanic even more than I did already. 

Character-wise, there are sections that are unintentionally comical – ridiculous, even. Often, one person is speaking and everyone else is holding a strange facial expression, such is the lack of dynamism in the group scenes. There’s a lot of unnecessary shouting, too. And you can tell when someone’s about to die because of the conversation they have beforehand. 

Gene Hackman makes the most of the sub-standard material, but he can only do so much. 

All these points aside, it’s entertaining enough.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1979)

Based on the classic novel by Erich Maria Remarque, this is a powerful WWI drama that sets out to show war as a pointless, futile, cruel waste of life. Richard Thomas (“John Boy” in The Waltons) is excellent as the innocent young man who enlists in the German army and quickly has any illusions about the glory of battle dashed by the brutal reality of the experience. This message is underscored again and again as his friends meet horrible deaths and then when he returns home on leave – only to find that not one person sees through the myths of heroism and nationalism that are killing hundreds of boys each day for mere inches of land.

There’s an especially affecting scene in which our hero has to spend the night lying in a trench with the Frenchman he has just stabbed. Realising how much they have in common he tries to help the man, but it’s too late. The scene is brilliantly drawn out in a way that I don’t think would happen if this was made now. 

The film evokes the constant noise of battle, but – despite a lot of maimed bodies – doesn’t quite go far enough to depict the soul-destroying filth, disease and degradation that these men would surely have suffered in their daily lives. That said, it’s one of the most profound anti-war films I’ve seen.