The Poseidon Adventure + Intro

Irwin Allen, producer of TV shows like Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, earned the moniker Master of Disaster when he took his talents to the big screen. The SS Poseidon is a luxury liner on its final voyage, from New York to Athens, when a tsunami causes the ship to capsize. Survivors must climb to safety as the doomed vessel begins to sink.

Gene Hackman’s minister, travelling to Africa as punishment for his unorthodox views, and Ernest Borgnine’s Detective Lieutenant, lead the escape, with sterling support from Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Stella Stevens and Shelley Winters, and a pre-Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen as the ship’s Captain.

About Disaster! Season

This film is part of our Disaster! mini season, a short season curated by Jamie Sellers, celebrating the brief golden age of those blockbuster American movies that used a looming or ongoing disaster as their main plot device, this being roughly a period through the early 1970s.

These movies had A-list ensemble casts of Hollywood stars past and then-present, and directors with an eye for the dramatic. Irony is all but absent – no-one’s tipping the wink to the viewer, everyone’s deadly serious, and quite often very angry too. It IS okay to laugh though, on occasion – in fact, we defy you not to.

Plot devices might feature an arrogant or careless authority figure whose actions (or lack of) are partly or entirely responsible for the unfolding chaos; a blue-collar folk hero whose down- to-earth commonsense ultimately averts an even worse scenario; and often a stupid kid who ignores every danger sign and puts him or herself in grave mortal danger. Warning: it’s the early ‘70s, and chauvinism is not in short supply.

Jamie Sellers is a freelance Music Curator, extreme quizmaster, and occasional singer. He’s been volunteering at the Electric Palace since September 2019. He watches around 250 films a year, and counts among his favourites The Hustler, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Ordet. His favourite current directors are Alice Rohrwacher, Kelly Reichardt, Francois Ozon and Christian Petzold.

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