Disaster movies were fixtures in theaters in the 1970s.
"The Poseidon Adventure," which premiered on this day in 1972, wasn't the first disaster movie and it most assuredly was not the last, but it may have been the best.
It included five Oscar winners in its cast — Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Jack Albertson and Red Buttons — and won two Oscars — for Best Original Song and a Special Achievement Award for special effects.
In the movie Carol Lynley appeared to be singing the song — "The Morning After" — but, in fact, it was sung by an unseen vocalist, Renee Armand. Maureen McGovern recorded the song and made it a hit.
On a fictional cruise ship closely modeled after the RMS Queen Mary, a group of people fought to survive after the ship capsized in a tsunami on New Year's Eve. Up was down and down was up. To survive they had to make their way to what had been the lowest level of the ship — but was now the highest.
I always thought "The Poseidon Adventure" was a cut above most of the disaster movies of that era. Its characters were developed better; consequently, the viewers empathized more than they did in other disaster movies that were more superficial in their character treatments.
The disaster movies of the '70s benefited when the acting was good — which was seldom — and, to be sure, some of the stars of "The Poseidon Adventure" were guilty of flagrant overacting — most notably Hackman, Winters and Borgnine. By and large, though, the acting in "The Poseidon Adventure" was good. It was truly an all–star cast, although some of the stars made little more than cameo appearances.
There were some truly harrowing moments in "The Poseidon Adventure," too. Oh, sure, sometimes they were kind of cheap thrills, the ones that make you involuntarily recoil from the safety of the theater seat you're occupying when the characters on the screen face some kind of threat. Because the acting was better than usual for a disaster movie, audiences cared more about the characters in "The Poseidon Adventure."
Of course, the acting was never the main attraction in a disaster movie. It was the special effects that mattered — and, as I mentioned earlier, the special effects in "The Poseidon Adventure" received a special award at the Oscars.
In hindsight, sure, the story was over the top. I mean, this giant tsunami struck precisely at midnight on New Year's Eve. Perfect timing, huh?
(There has always been a segment of the movie market, though, that responds to escapism — while discerning viewers usually prefer plausible escapability, for some people escapism of any kind will do. Hence the appeal of the "Sharknado" movies. Somehow "The Poseidon Adventure" qualified as plausible escapability.)
But that was the thing about '70s disaster movies. They were always over the top.
Roger Ebert was more cynical in his review of the movie, saying it was "the kind of movie you know is going to be awful and yet somehow you gotta see it."
Like a car accident or a train wreck, I suppose.
But I disagree with that assessment. I didn't think it was an awful movie when I first saw it, and I didn't expect it to be (unlike, say, "The Towering Inferno"), but I was rather young and not as jaded as I later became. Maybe I should have expected worse.
But if I had, I would have been wrong.
The story was plausible enough that it sustained the viewer's interest, and that is a credit to the writers.
But, while "The Poseidon Adventure" received seven other Oscar nominations in addition to the one for Best Original Song, it was not recognized for its writing.
And that bothers me because it seems that it is from the story that the other categories — especially sound, art direction and cinematography — take their leads. If they were worthy of Oscar consideration, the writing that inspired them should have been as well.
