Disaster at Sea Was No Disaster on Silver Screen

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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.

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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.

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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.

Pursuing a Place in the Sun

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"I love you. I've loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I've even loved you before I saw you."

George (Montgomery Clift)

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If you ever read Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy," you know the plot — for the most part — of George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun," which premiered on this day in 1951.

The movie wasn't exactly a re–telling of the novel — in fact, there were several changes in the story in its translation from printed page to silver screen — but it was heavily influenced by it, and anyone who read the book and saw the movie knew that the protagonist in the movie (Montgomery Clift) was virtually a carbon copy of the protagonist in the book.

In both the book and the movie, he was poor but ambitious, the son of religious activists, street missionaries in the Midwest. He wasn't well educated, he lacked maturity, and he was naive. He took menial jobs to help support his family; while working at such a job he met his wealthy uncle who owned a successful factory on the coast and invited his nephew to visit him, suggesting that he could have a job in the business.

So he made his way to his uncle's factory — in the book, it was on the East Coast, but it was on the West Coast in the movie.

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Other details and circumstances were different, too, but the story was essentially the same. The protagonist took his uncle up on the offer and was, indeed, given a job. It was an entry–level job at first, but the protagonist got rapid promotions. Things were looking up.

There was one problem, though. When he was first hired, the protagonist was told that most of the employees were females, and he should not have relationships with any of them outside the workplace.

So, of course, that is precisely what he did. Almost immediately he struck up a friendship with a young worker (Shelley Winters, who broke into movies in the early '40s as a blonde bombshell but found that label too limiting and claimed to have washed off her makeup to audition for the role in "A Place in the Sun"). In the story, it was probably a good match. Winters' character was almost as naive as Clift's, believing nearly to the end that his family ties brought him no privileges at all — all evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, they started seeing each other on the sly, and it wasn't long before they had sex. That, of course, was the kind of thing that simply was not seen in movies in the 1950s. It could only be suggested, hinted at, the kind of thing in which a couple kisses passionately, and the music swells, and the figures become silhouettes that fade into a morning scene in which both are seen at the breakfast table.

Everyone who saw the movie knew that something had happened, but no one saw it happen — rather like when one goes to bed and there is no snow on the ground, but there is snow on the ground when that person wakes up the next morning. You know something happened even if you didn't see it happen.

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Nevertheless, the secret — if it ever was one to anyone watching the movie 65 years ago — was a secret no more when Winters' character sought advice from a minister, who believed she was overwhelmed by the stress of being pregnant until Winters confessed that she was not married and the father had "abandoned" her.

As self–absorbed as he was, Clift's character claimed he was going to do the honorable thing (by '50s standards) and marry the girl — but he was falling in love with an affluent and socially connected girl (Elizabeth Taylor), the kind who could do many wonderful things for his career.

And his allegiance was shifting rapidly from the working girl to the society girl.

At times, Clift's character reminded me of Hamlet, Shakespeare's famed Danish prince who couldn't make up his mind. But, once he met Liz, his devotion clearly belonged to her, even though he agreed to marry Winters after she phoned him at a weekend party with Taylor and the ritzy crowd and threatened to expose him. They went to get a marriage license — only to find the office was closed for the Labor Day weekend.

They decided to come back the next day and, in the meantime, enjoy some R&R. They were on a secluded lake and decided to rent a boat. Winters' character didn't know that Clift had been plotting to kill her and make it look like an accident, leaving him free to marry Taylor — but once they were on the lake, he had a change of heart and decided not to kill her after all.

But fate intervened, and Winters really did slip and fall — and drown.

The audience, of course, knew that it really had been an accident. But Clift's suspicious behavior before and after the accident led to his conviction — with none other than Raymond Burr, TV's future Perry Mason, leading the prosecution.

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Waiting to walk that last mile to his execution, Clift told a priest that he didn't kill Winters, but he did nothing to help her when she fell in the water. The priest concluded that it was murder and Clift's execution would be justified.

In 2016, it seems a little melodramatic, but it must have seemed to be pushing boundaries in 1951. It remains only the second movie adaptation of Dreiser's novel. He didn't live to see it, but he saw the first one, which was made 20 years earlier. I've heard that he hated it.

Maybe he considered it too literal a translation. He might have preferred "A Place in the Sun," considering that it did differ in some ways from the original source (and in more than just the name). Perhaps, now that filmmakers have more freedom than they did 65 years ago, it is time for a fresh take on the story.

"A Place in the Sun" ranked #92 on the American Film Institute's original list of the Top 100 movies of the last 100 years, but it was left off the revised list that was released 10 years later.

It won six Oscars — Best Director (Stevens), Best Screenplay, Best Dramatic or Comedy Score, Best Black–and–White Cinematography, Best Black–and–White Costume Design and Best Film Editing. It received three other nominations — Best Picture, Best Actor (Clift) and Best Actress (Winters), losing to "An American in Paris," Humphrey Bogart and Vivien Leigh.

'Lolita' Wasn't Funny

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Lolita: I'm really sorry that I cheated so much. But I guess that's just the way things are.

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Just about every summary that you will read of "Lolita," the film that made its theatrical debut 50 years ago today, describes it as a comedy/drama.

I've never thought of it as a comedy.

Certainly, it is a drama. And, I suppose, there is an element of comedy in the story. To be honest, though, I never found anything particularly amusing about it, not even the lines that were clearly intended to be humorous or ironic.

The characters, all of them, were more to be pitied. And there was something about each of the characters to which everyone could relate in some way.

Like the character of Humbert Humbert (played by James Mason), for example, I have been a college professor — although not of literature, which, I suppose, accounts for some of the ironies of the plot. But Humbert had had an obsession with young girls for a long time. Thus, his attraction to the underage Lolita was hardly surprising.

I've never known a male college professor yet who didn't notice the finer figures of the female students, but few ever acted on it. A few, like Humbert, yielded to the temptation, but most did not.

When I read the book (which I did before I saw the original movie), I felt a sadness for Humbert, and I continued to feel it when I saw the film. He was trapped by his obsession, and Lolita played that for all it was worth to her.

She was a conniving, manipulative woman–child who learned early, as the Eagles so aptly sang, "how to open doors with just a smile." And anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of something like that knows there is nothing remotely funny about the feeling of being a chump.

Again, most people probably knew conniving girls when they were young, but few had the audacity to act when faced with the opportunity. Lolita was an extreme exception to the rule; the readers (and, later, the movie audience) knew that Humbert and the slimy playwright Clare Quilty (played convincingly by Peter Sellers) had been among her lovers — but how many lovers the 12–year–old had had was never really clear.

I suppose that was regarded, at the time the book was published and, a few years later, when the movie made its premiere, as part of the story's erotic appeal. (But perhaps I am an exception to the rule because there is nothing about a 12–year–old — no matter how well developed she may be — that I find erotic.)

The saddest character of the story, I thought, was Shelley Winters' role as Lolita's sexually frustrated mother. She so clearly craved a man's touch, but it was denied to her while her child needed to do nothing, really, to acquire it.

She was the real victim of the story. She was the one who was betrayed. She did none of the betraying. But she paid for it.

To be sure, Lolita was a tragic figure. Sue Lyon may have been cast in the part because director Stanley Kubrick thought she would lend the proper comic element to the role and the story, but I saw in her many girls I knew when I was growing up, and it made me wonder how many of them may have been sexually abused.

Lolita's activity could be explained as a survival mechanism. After all, she had been orphaned and left in the hands of an acknowledged pedophile. There isn't much a 12–year–old girl can do under such circumstances.

There is little — if any — humor to be found in such a situation.

And there is nothing funny about pedophiles.