Amazon.com Essentials:
Hands down, this is the best movie (and was one of the first)
to come out of the seemingly endless cycle of disaster movies that
dominated box offices during the 1970s. It could even be argued that
Titanic owes
some of its success to the precedent set by this 1972 blockbuster
starring Gene Hackman as a priest who leads a small group of survivors
to safety from the bowels of a capsized luxury liner. From its stellar
cast to its cheesy, Oscar-winning theme song, The Morning
After, the movie has all the ingredients of a popular classic,
beginning with a New Year's Eve celebration aboard the ill-fated
Poseidon and ending as a pop allegory when the Hackman
character becomes a Christ-like martyr. Filmed on spectacular sets
where everything down is up and the ship's thick hull points in the
direction of salvation, this is "a waterlogged Grand Hotel" (in
the words of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael) that is as
entertaining as it is unabashedly brainless. The Poseidon
Adventure is filled with performances that rise above the limits
of the screenplay. It's also the only movie--unless you count her
underwater corpse in Night of the
Hunter--that lets Shelley Winters strut her stuff as an
aquatic heroine. Who could ask for anything more? --Jeff
Shannon
