Oh Captain, my Captain!
Although his role is not a large one in terms of screen time, Leslie Nielsen’s contribution to Irwin Allen’s seminal disaster classic “The Poseidon Adventure” is a pivotal one, literally. As the Captain of the ill-fated SS Poseidon, it is he who reluctantly follows the orders of the ships new owners to proceed at full speed for Athens with insufficient ballast on board. So, when an undersea earthquake triggers a tsunami, his – and the lives of his passengers – get flipped, turned upside down.
The ship that launched a thousand disaster movies, the final voyage of the SS Poseidon is brought to a watery end when the ship is swamped by a rogue tidal wave and a ragtag group of passengers must try and navigate their way through the upside-down ship to reach rescue before the vessel sinks into the Mediterranean.
Karma is swift and merciless to Captain Harrison and he’s conspicuously one of the first to die as the stricken ship rolls in the New Year. Nielsen’s Captain owes much to his starship captain of fifteen years earlier and while he might only last a quarter of the movie’s runtime, it’s still a notable role for the veteran actor. Not least because his earnest air of authority and seriousness primed the pump for him to take on a similar role in the seditiously subversive take on the disaster movie genre that would transform and reinvigorate his career less than a decade later, but also because it’s a testament to his stature and name recognition at the time.
In the early seventies, in a movie which starred Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall and Jack Albertson (best known as Grandpa Joe in “Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory”), it is Nielsen who gets the coveted final ‘and’ credit. As the old saying goes, if you can’t get first billing, make sure you get the last slot.
The film itself, of course, is a masterclass of character arcs against the backdrop of direst circumstances, with top notch production values and tremendous performances from its ensemble cast. It’s one of the greatest disaster movies ever made and remains – to this day – the high-water mark (ironically) for the genre. The later remake may have bettered it in terms of special effects but the key to the appeal of “The Poseidon Adventure” is that the disaster is never the star, it’s the survivors themselves who provide the heart of the movie.
Although explicitly a New Year movie, it’s earned a reputation as a Christmas stalwart in the same way as “The Sound Of Music” has due to its ubiquity on TV over the festive season for years and years after its release. Packed full of indelible moments, by turns terrifically tense and heartbreakingly poignant. Irwin Allen would return, time and again, to the disaster genre and even the Poseidon itself in the 1979 sequel with mixed results but never again would he recapture the perfect mix of kitsch and drama as he does here and for this Nielsen Ratings review, I’m going to say the magic ingredient is good old Captain Harrison himself, Leslie Nielsen.
