What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 with Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Carolyn Lynley, and Pamela Sue Martin


The Poseidon Adventure is one of the best of the "disaster" films that populated 1970s movie screens. It's held up well because the standard in those pre-CGI days was to make the movie believable; whereas, now the standard is to use over-the-top, unbelievable special effects.

The movie is also helped along by its outstanding cast including veterans Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, and Ernest Borgnine; 1970s heavyweight Gene Hackman; and several talented old and new tier-two stars like Stella Stevens, Carolyn Lynley, and Pamela Sue Martin.

At the outset, a cruise ship departs for a multi-day trip over New Year's. As the passengers do their thing - have fun, argue, dance, eat, drink, gamble - the owner of the ship pushes the captain to go for speed to save money, à la the Titanic disaster.

Owing to an underwater earthquake, and in the movie's era-iconic visual moment, a tsunami hits the ship, flipping it upside down. It's not perfect, but the lack of CGI makes the special effects still impressive today.

As the ship settles down after the wave, an iconoclast preacher, played by Hackman, realizing the ship is upside down, encourages the survivors to follow him on a journey up to the bottom of the ship, which of course is now the top. Only a few agree to go.

There is a lot of 1970s "Me Generation" religious ideology in play as Hackman was already challenging the Protestant Church's establishment before the wave hit. You see some of that attitude in his leadership of the small band of survivors who follow him.

If you want to carry the metaphor further, you might view him as a Christ with his Apostles or, alternatively, as Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Hackman even yells at God, demanding He stops getting in their way if He isn’t going to help. It's full-on 1970s anti-establishment stuff.

You don’t need to pay that rigmarole any attention if you don’t want to; instead, you can simply enjoy a good old-fashioned disaster/survivor movie, which is where The Poseidon Adventure shines.

Hackman's group fight among themselve but also pull together as they overcome obstacles, including flooding decks, flash fires, locked steel doors, underwater escape routes, destabilizing shocks as the ship experiences explosions, and other challenges.

You can pick apart scenes and effects if you study them closely, but if you just go with it, it’s a darn good disaster-escape story, complete with a little 1970s titillation as Lynley, Martin, and Stevens end up with fewer clothes over time, often soaked through.

Hackman and Borgnine – Borgnine plays a retired New York City police detective – fight endlessly, embodying the anti-establishment trope, while others, like Buttons and Lynley, form an unlikely bond born of kindness and need.

These are professional actors, all led by experienced director Ronald Neame, who take their work seriously. The result is a somber, not-campy effort with fewer cringeworthy moments than most of its 1970s counterparts, and it even delivers a few genuine nail-biting scenes.

For what it is – a 1970s disaster movie with a big cast – The Poseidon Adventure has aged well. It’s the perfect movie to grab a bucket of popcorn, sit down, and enjoy a fun picture from a time when disaster films were all the rage.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lawyer Man from 1932 with William Powell, Joan Blondell and David Landau


Not every precode movie is a steaming cauldron of wanton sex – most aren't.

Many use their precode freedom to take a realistic look at social issues. In Lawyer Man, political corruption and legal ethics are explored through the career ups and downs of an honest Lower-East-Side attorney.

When William Powell, playing the honest lawyer, wins a big case for a poor immigrant, a prestigious uptown lawyer offers him a partnership. Powell then moves to the high-rent district with his smart, loyal, and quietly pining-for-him secretary, played by Joan Blondell, in tow.

Once there, Powell refuses to play ball with the city's political boss, played by David Landau. Since this is the era when "political machines" ran cities, Landau then sets Powell up to be disbarred. The climax sees Powell fighting back against the machine and Landau.

The story is simple, but it's also very precode as the movie takes for granted that the audience knows political organizations and city governments are crooked patronage systems. Jobs and contracts were doled out in return for bribes and graft.

It also doesn't shy away from showing plenty of sexual shenanigans, with aggressive women – one played with viper-like blonde greed by Claire Dodd – using sex in exchange for money and favors. Dood will be the pivot that eventually tests Powell's integrity in his new "rich" world.

Beyond its revealing look at corruption, the fun in this film is Powell playing a smart but personally careless lawyer. He wants to get ahead, stay honest, chase skirts, and fight corruption, all with a blind eye to the entrenched interests he's challenging.

Blondell sees all those risks and tries to warn her overconfident boss, for whom she's carrying a torch, but Powell has to learn the hard way. Blondell was outstanding at playing the wisecracking "smart gal" with a heart of gold, a role she perfected in the 1930s at Warner Bros.

Powell is excellent as the mirthfully smooth yet fundamentally honest lawyer with the grit to fight the system. He is, though, a bit less believable as the downtown "champion of the immigrant" lawyer, as everything about the man says he's educated and urbane.

This is, though, a small flaw in the movie as Powell is supposed to be "at home" with the immigrants and "out of place" with the swells, but the reverse seems true. He's good at relating to the immigrant community, but it's obvious he's not one of them.

Powell went on to great success playing roguishly sophisticated characters throughout the 1930s, while Blondell, as noted, often played the "sassy gal" going toe to toe with the fast-talking male actors of that era. It's fun to see them together here, early in the decade.

Lawyer Man is a short, enjoyable precode look at the blatant corruption of that era's big-city governments dominated by "political machines." It’s a candor that would largely disappear from movies after the post-1934 enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code.

While a work of fiction, Lawyer Man offers modern audiences a vivid reminder of how entrenched politically corrupt "machines" once were. Today we are equally cynical about our political class, with the good news being that the system did correct itself, once, when it rid itself of the "machines."


N.B. Another pre-Code specialty of Warner Bros. – and something else that would vanish with the Code’s enforcement and the “cleaning up” of “immigrant” America on screen – is the scene where Italian Powell, back in his old neighborhood, speaks Yiddish with a Jewish man.

 

[Edward]

View attachment 664144
The Poseidon Adventure from 1972 with Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Carolyn Lynley, and Pamela Sue Martin


The Poseidon Adventure is one of the best of the "disaster" films that populated 1970s movie screens. It's held up well because the standard in those pre-CGI days was to make the movie believable; whereas, now the standard is to use over-the-top, unbelievable special effects.

The movie is also helped along by its outstanding cast including veterans Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, and Ernest Borgnine; 1970s heavyweight Gene Hackman; and several talented old and new tier-two stars like Stella Stevens, Carolyn Lynley, and Pamela Sue Martin.

At the outset, a cruise ship departs for a multi-day trip over New Year's. As the passengers do their thing - have fun, argue, dance, eat, drink, gamble - the owner of the ship pushes the captain to go for speed to save money, à la the Titanic disaster.

Owing to an underwater earthquake, and in the movie's era-iconic visual moment, a tsunami hits the ship, flipping it upside down. It's not perfect, but the lack of CGI makes the special effects still impressive today.

As the ship settles down after the wave, an iconoclast preacher, played by Hackman, realizing the ship is upside down, encourages the survivors to follow him on a journey up to the bottom of the ship, which of course is now the top. Only a few agree to go.

There is a lot of 1970s "Me Generation" religious ideology in play as Hackman was already challenging the Protestant Church's establishment before the wave hit. You see some of that attitude in his leadership of the small band of survivors who follow him.

If you want to carry the metaphor further, you might view him as a Christ with his Apostles or, alternatively, as Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Hackman even yells at God, demanding He stops getting in their way if He isn’t going to help. It's full-on 1970s anti-establishment stuff.

You don’t need to pay that rigmarole any attention if you don’t want to; instead, you can simply enjoy a good old-fashioned disaster/survivor movie, which is where The Poseidon Adventure shines.

Hackman's group fight among themselve but also pull together as they overcome obstacles, including flooding decks, flash fires, locked steel doors, underwater escape routes, destabilizing shocks as the ship experiences explosions, and other challenges.

You can pick apart scenes and effects if you study them closely, but if you just go with it, it’s a darn good disaster-escape story, complete with a little 1970s titillation as Lynley, Martin, and Stevens end up with fewer clothes over time, often soaked through.

Hackman and Borgnine – Borgnine plays a retired New York City police detective – fight endlessly, embodying the anti-establishment trope, while others, like Buttons and Lynley, form an unlikely bond born of kindness and need.

These are professional actors, all led by experienced director Ronald Neame, who take their work seriously. The result is a somber, not-campy effort with fewer cringeworthy moments than most of its 1970s counterparts, and it even delivers a few genuine nail-biting scenes.

For what it is – a 1970s disaster movie with a big cast – The Poseidon Adventure has aged well. It’s the perfect movie to grab a bucket of popcorn, sit down, and enjoy a fun picture from a time when disaster films were all the rage.

I remember seeing that one as a kid, back in the early eighties, on television. I've seen it a few times since and it always holds up. It feels like such a different era of cinema now.

Spoiler

What stands out for me particularly is how Hackman, as the hero, is 'allowed' to die in the end. It's such a rare thing in cinema these days - Logan in many ways really stands out because it bucks the contemporary trend by doing the same. There's a place for the unkillable hero, I suppose, but at an impressionable age I read so much Greek and other mythology - Robin Hood a notable example - where the hero's death is such an important part of the narrative arc. Sometimes the refusal to permit this in so much modern cinema, the refusal of the fanbase to tolerate it, seems so infantalised. I'm thinking particularly of the huge online backlash ahead of the release of Dial of Destiny when it was rumoured that Indiana Jones was to died in that picture. It robs so many films of their tension: it was hard to feel a sense of real danger in a crucial scene in World War Z when you're sitting there thinking "Well, they won't kill off Brad Pitt....".

The remake was interesting in the same way remakes of George Romero pictures are interesting: as a comment on the time in which these remakes are made, and thereby a comparison with the times in which the originals were made, and the then and now comparisons between the two. Not as good as the original, but interesting nonetheless.

I've watched a couple of films in the last week. The Mean One (2022, currently on Amazon Prime) is in the vein of 'modern horror film take on established childhood classic.' Specifically, it's the Dr Seuss story of the Grinch, but done as a 'what really happened' horror picture. Something akin to the notion of reading the original Grimm fairy story after being familiar with the sanitised, populist version. Much to my surprise, I thought it actually worked rather well. A lot of these sorts of things never get beyond an ill-thought out juxtaposition of a cute kiddy thing with violence. This however was clearly made with a lot of love for the inspiration (I wouldn't call it source material so much because this is completely unauthorised; while it is very recognisably, visually, a take on Seuss' Grinch, the film dances around the original, never quite using its language. The Grinch is never quite called that: it is, twice, implied that the word Grinch is used, but drowned out by a waitress shouting "Finch!" Events take place in Newville, not Whoville, and so on.) The ending is a very dark little twist on the ending in Seuss' story. Best of all, it plays the whole thing straight and leaves the audience to 'get' it. The opposite of so many modern pictures (I'm thinking especially of the Scream franchise) which all but have someone turn directly to camera to ay "Psst! Look at us being clever!" every two minutes, the cinematic equivalent of including a laugh track to instruct the audience how to recognise the jokes in a sitcom.

I also watched The Strangers: Chapter One . I was something of a fan of the 2008 original (its 2018 sequel I have never seen, so can't comment of that). The original picture was a well put together, psychological horror that stood out from the trend among its contemporaries of always providing an explanation / motive / justification for the villain, making the lack of any real motivation on the part of the antagonists truly chilling. Chapter One feels like a relatively straight remake of the original. Slightly different setting, but essentially the same story. Alone, this makes it somewhat superfluous. The original is no Jason Vorhees: it's a story that only works as well once. That said, this is a well made and well paced picture on its own (even if the protagonists aren't wholly sympathetic), and it is intended as a redux, not connected to the 2008 or 2018 pictures. It's intended as the first part of a trilogy, each of which will have a very different structure to the story, so it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Not one for the casual fan, all told.