"At midnight on New Year's Eve, the S.S. Poseidon, enroute from New York to Athens, met with disaster and was lost. There were only a handful of survivors. This is their story..."

Some movies are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them, others still are great for no clear reason at all. Such is the case with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the seminal disaster movie about hapless passengers trapped aboard a luxury liner that turns upside-down when struck by a mammoth tidal wave.

Almost instantly the movie became the target of parody -- it was, I hazily recall, soon immortalized in the pages of Mad magazine as "The Poop-Side Down Adventure," for instance. But there's no escaping the fact that audiences everywhere seem to love The Poseidon Adventure. Slick, schlocky -- call it what you will. This unique tale of survival (or, as the ingenious ads put it "Hell, upside down") belongs to that tiny handful of movies that are compulsively watchable. No matter how many times you've seen it, indeed, whether you think it trash or treasure, once you start watching you just can't turn it off. And, rarer still, its best scenes never seem to lose their impact to multiple viewings. Watching The Poseidon Adventure the tenth time is much like the first.

Whoever's responsible for whatever's great about The Poseidon Adventure is anyone's guess. The fact that it gets no respect in "serious" film circles seems due to the fact that no one person seems responsible for it, as if it had simply appeared out of the ether. Like The Wizard of Oz, like Casablanca, the auteur theory or just about any other type of scholarly thought just doesn't apply. For the Poseidon was, as its publicists called it, a "movie movie," an unapologetic respite from the easy riders and raging bulls school of filmmaking. Not that you'd ever confuse producer Irwin Allen with Bergman or John Cassavetes. Nonetheless, Allen fancied himself an auteur for the masses. This was not so much "A Ronald Neame Film" as it was "Irwin Allen's Production," even though Neame actually directed the picture. No, this was Allen's big comeback, his first movie in ten years after languishing in such goofy (and by 1971, cancelled) fantasy shows as "Lost in Space" and "The Time Tunnel." He was canny enough to hire a director as skilled as Neame, but from the beginning Allen, a former agent, quickly turned all attention toward himself. The self-anointed "Master of Disaster" followed The Poseidon Adventure with the even bigger The Towering Inferno (1974), a nasty, all-star extravaganza with none of Poseidon's charms and all of its faults. Allen then made pictures like The Swarm (1978), a deliriously awful pot pourri of '70s high concept moviemaking ("Bees! Bees! Everywhere millions of bees!"), and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), an alarmingly cast, artlessly directed follow-up. The Poseidon Adventure boasted "fifteen Academy Award winners," in its ads. Beyond the Poseidon Adventure boasted Telly Savalas and Slim Pickens.

If Allen isn't responsible, then whom? Surely not Paul Gallico, whose novel from which the film is based is, amazingly enough, even worse than Stirling Silliphant's script. Once a noteworthy television writer who left the small screen after penning In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Charly (1968), Silliphant was slumming Big Time by the early-1970s. After Poseidon, Silliphant went to on work on Shaft in Africa (1973), and would soon pen most of Allen's goofiest concepts. Even here in The Poseidon Adventure, Silliphant's dialogue is thuddingly literal, often vaporizing all verisimilitude. Near the climax, for instance, precocious 10-year-old Robin Shelby (Eric Shea) blurts out the story's final hurdle, obvious to all: "Mr. Scott! The hot steam is blocking our escape!"

Maybe then it's the little moments, the kind described so well by James Mason in A Star Is Born as those little bits of magic that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up on end. Or something like that. I think my seminal moment in The Poseidon Adventure comes when Reverend Scott (Gene Hackman) observes the chaos as a ballroom full of panic-stricken people fills with black smoke and rushing water. As passengers drown like so many terrified rats, Scott slowly closes sliding doors on either side of him, until we see only a tight close up of his pained expression. This is a nice bit of direction from Ronald Neame, for the horror isn't explicitly shown, but seen instead in Hackman's performance. (One can easily imagine Allen fighting Neame over that bit of editing. "Whaddya mean, not show the people drowning!?") Hackman grimaces and just as he shuts the doors for good he does this little thing with his face. He bares his teeth like dog guarding its supper bowl and tightens and contorts his features into an almost involuntary expression of horror, a look at once both hilarious yet exactly right.

Some of these little bits of business take on weird qualities. Jack Albertson plays an Israel-bound grandfather, Manny, whose wife, Belle, played with grating, charming, Jewish motherness by Shelley Winters, has just succumbed of a heart attack. In a touching moment, Reverend Scott encourages Manny to carry on in his wife's memory. Frail from grief, Manny picks himself up, begins to follow the others to freedom, and promptly bonks his head on a metal pipe. Obviously, this was not intended, but left in, I suppose, because someone thought it made Manny that much more cuddly, or something.

The best and most underrated performance in the picture goes to Ernest Borgnine, hands down. Unlike practically the entire rest of the cast, Borgnine's streetwise cop, Rogo, isn't trying to win our affections (or an Oscar Nomination). He bellyaches and loses his temper throughout the picture, but we can't help but love the ol' lug. There's a genuine sweetness in his early, Marty-like scenes with his screeching, ex-hooker wife, Linda, played by Stella Stevens. His reaction to her death late in the film has a raw, emotional realness that's hard to take every time you see it.

Linda's shocking death is Poseidon's anomaly. It's the only death in the picture that isn't dramatically justified. It plays like a Production Code-imposed loose end that needed tidying up in the final reel. In any case, such visceral cruelty for its own sake became standard procedure for most every disaster movie made in Poseidon's wake. When Jennifer Jones fell out of the wobbly glass elevator in The Towering Inferno, audiences were horrified all right, but in an entirely different manner. By then, audiences for disaster movies had become rather like those giving thumbs down at the gladiator matches.

Allen and others who tried to duplicate Poseidon's success thought audiences wanted to see people die spectacularly amid elaborate disaster effects. It was as if Watergate, Vietman, and gas shortages had turned pissed-off movie audiences into an ugly mob in search of a high and grisly body count. But Poseidon isn't about any of those things. "God likes winners," Reverend Scott says early on, and "life matters very much" some time later. Such notions seem downright quaint today, when movie audiences not only expect cheap cynicism, they get downright uncomfortable without it.

Poseidon, then, with its message about trying, trying even if you can't possibly succeed, has a wonderful innocence about it.

Kevin (last name not given) maintains theposeidonadventure.com, a mesmerizing tribute site. "I couldn't stop thinking or talking about it," he writes. "Every opportunity I had I went back to the theater to see it over and over again." But even Kevin can't quite pin down what it is about the movie that continues to fascinate almost everyone who sees it, adding only, "I still can't go to a restaurant, mall, or just about any public place without visualizing it upside-down, and then plotting an escape route."

Video & Audio This is an import disc from Region 2 (NTSC) Japan, and like a lot of early Fox discs, what was 4:3 letterboxed stateside is presented in full 16:9 glory here. And Poseidon looks great indeed, with a razor sharp image and good color. The Japanese DVD has optional English and Japanese subtitles, as well as both English and Japanese Dolby Digital mono tracks which are clear and crisp. Beyond liner notes in Japanese, the DVD also includes as extras a dog-eared trailer and a behind-the-scenes featurette, which mainly shows Allen directing the ballroom second unit footage and expressing on-camera concern for the stunt crew.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo! The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.