The Poseidon Adventure - The Birth Of Disaster Cinema
How Irwin Allen upset the applecart by upsetting an ocean liner.
In the acclaimed Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind claims that, putting “Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno aside, the ‘70s was a truly golden age.” But while they might have lacked the emotional impact of Five Easy Pieces, the epic sweep of The Godfather or the psychological drama of Taxi Driver, disaster movies like the ones shunned by Biskind produced some of the most memorable screen images of the 1970s. And while he might not have advanced film in the same manner as Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, producer-director Irwin Allen could lay claim to creating the genre that gave the world one of the biggest movies of all time, James Cameron’s Titanic,
If Allen had a genius (and the fact he created TV shows such as Lost In Space and Time Tunnel suggests he didn’t), it was realising that life in the ‘70s was perpetually under threat from catastrophe. The Kent State massacre, Apollo 13, a tsunami that killed 150,000 in Pakistan, the Heathrow air crash that claimed 168 lives - all this and the Vietnam War ensured that tragedy was rarely absent from the front pages. Realising, perhaps as Steven Spielberg did with Jaws, that people are quite interested in the things that frighten them most. Allen trampled the boundaries of good taste to create The Poseidon Adventure - the first every fully-formed disaster movie.
Like many of the films that followed it, you couldn’t describe the plot of The Poseidon Adventure as labyrinthine. Rogue wave hits cruise liner, boat capsizes, band of plucky survivors try to escape - yep, that’s pretty much that. Simplicity of storyline was just one of the many rules of disaster cinema that Poseidon Adventure laid down. Other regulations included:
Assemble a cast containing one A-list star plus a group of waning B-list celebrities that everyone’ll recognise but not care too much about if they die.
Mix and match a group of survivors from the following archetypes: a born leader (Gene Hackman’s peculiarly bewigged Reverend Scott); a sweet old fellow (Red Buttons’ steward), a beautiful woman (Stella Stevens), a craven coward (Ernest Borgnine) and a plucky old maid (Shelley Winters).
Make sure that nobody ever listens to the person who say, “Why don’t we just wait here till somebody finds us?’ Remember, fortune favours the brave!
Insist on at least one rather nasty shock moment (in this case involving a cook and a vat of boiling fat).
You’re going to need stunts. Lots of stunts.
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