The Poseidon Adventure  ★★★½

The 1970 screen adaptation of Arthur Hayley’s novel Airport is the unlikely origin of the modern disaster movie.

The book was more of a mega-soap opera but did have a mid-air emergency as its central plot device.

The film spurned a run of similar efforts during that decade featuring big-name acting ensembles battling to survive disasters, including The Towering Inferno, Rollercoaster, Airport ‘74 and Flood.

The Poseidon Adventure, released in 1972, is one of the best and was actually based on a 1969 novel by Paul Gallico.

It’s set on a luxury ocean liner, the SS Poseidon, which is on its final voyage before retirement.

The ship meets heavy seas on New Year’s Eve and is eventually hit by a tidal wave caused by an earthquake.

In impressive scenes featuring fine special effects and stunt work, the ship is completely overturned.

A group of survivors, led by a radical pastor, played by Gene Hackman, and a tough cop, Ernest Borgnine, have to slowly and carefully work their way from the top of the ship, now the bottom, to the hull.

Also among the group are the cop’s former call-girl wife, an elderly Jewish couple, a young brother and sister and a ship waiter.

Master screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who also adapted The Towering Inferno, does a good job minimising the melodramatics to balance the human stories with the logistics of navigating their way through fires and rising water levels.

Hackman and Borgnine give impressively masculine performances and there is great support from veterans like Red Buttons, Roddy McDowell and, in particular, Shelley Winters who won an Oscar.

The film generally stands the test of time even today post James Cameron’s Titanic, the daddy of all disaster stories.

It spawned an average sequel, 1979’s Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and was also remade in 2006 with better special effects but less heart.