1972 disaster, dir. Ronald Neame, Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine;
IMDb /
allmovie. The luxury cruise
is not going to end well.
I wonder, looking back, how many of the audience didn't already
know what to expect from a disaster film. This stays absolutely on the
rails, with no surprises for anyone familiar with the genre, At the
same time, it does an efficient job of inflating its one-note
characters with just enough personality for an audience to care about.
As far as I'm concerned, a disaster film is like a soap opera (or like
modern survival horror): it's a way of putting people in a stressful
situation so that they reveal their true characters. But unlike the
Airport films, there's no effort made here to suggest that the
disaster is at all realistic; instead it's an unfamiliar setting (all
right, jet travel was also unfamiliar to most people in the 1970s)
rendered even more alien by the inversion of the ship and the
implausible task that the survivors are set.
So it's strange to me that there's very little effort put into making
it look inverted. All right, the dining room where we see the roll
happening is very well-mounted, but almost immediately after that we
shift into the ship's service spaces, where a normal viewer won't have
any idea what they would be meant to look like even right side up. I
suppose it saves budget, dressing the corridor with the occasional
inverted staircase, but I can't help finding it a slight waste of the
outlandish environment.
But before that, we get a special treat for fans of Airplane!, as
Captain Leslie Nielsen explains what's going on and then dies
off-screen. (Airplane! was of course the film that would
definitively kill off the disaster genre, though it had already been
looking pretty shaky after The Bees and Meteor.)
In the end, the deaths can be summed up in a handy rhyme:
A is for Acres, who fell down a vent,
B is for Belle, whose heart was all spent.
L is for Linda, who slipped on the steel,
S is for Scott, who dropped from a wheel.
I talk about this film further on Ribbon of
Memes.