J. took L. to Scouts last night, and my hips were killing me so I did something very unusual: I sat down and began channel surfing. And what I found was 1974′s Juggernaut, the thinking person’s Poseidon Adventure, with a cast that included not only Omar Sharif as the imperiled vessel’s captain and Richard Harris as the black-humored bomb disposal expert, but also Ian Holm as the steamship line owner (with a gorgeous full head of thick, black curls), an equally young Anthony Hopkins as the humane police superintendent, and Roshan Seth (who would go on to play Nehru in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi) as a ship’s steward. But most surprisingly, the cast included a beautiful, lithe Shirley Knight, who went on in later years to become a sort of poorman’s Shelley Winters (and who is a dead ringer for Bill Kristol in drag), but here is a sultry and seductive divorcee, smart and forceful, with her romantic intentions firmly affixed to the ship’s captain.
The Plot: A newly refitted luxury liner, the Britannic, has just come out of drydock and sets sail from England to New York. When she has reached the mid-Atlantic (and rough weather there, no surprise), a person calling himself “Juggernaut” calls the steamship line to tell the owners of the Britannic that he has placed seven large bombs on board the vessel which will detonate in 16 hours if he is not paid a ransom of 500,000 British Pounds. The Police Superintendent (Hopkins) gets to work trying to identify Juggernaut, while Fallon, the bomb disposal expert (Harris), assembles a team of navy frogmen and flies out to the Britannic, parachutes into the North Atlantic, and fights the heavy seas to climb the jacob’s ladder onto the ship and begin to ply his trade. Of course, Fallon’s right-hand man, Charlie, will die when he gets ahead of Fallon in disarming one of the bombs, leaving Fallon guilt-ridden and drinking heavily, not wanting to continue.
As a maritime lawyer and the granddaughter of a marine surveyor and compass adjuster, give me a movie at sea and I am enraptured. I went to see Titanic just to watch the ship sink, I can’t get enough of Deadliest Catch when I’m in a hotel (no cable at home), and have spent many more hours than my husband would have liked wandering through maritime museums in every port city we’ve ever visited.
Juggernaut was released two years after Poseidon Adventure, and was doubtless trying to ride its coattails (unbelievably, Poseidon took home an handful of Oscars in 1972); but it far surpasses that disaster flick. Give it a chance if you come across it on cable, if for nothing else than to see some of the best British actors of the last 30-40 years near the beginning of their careers.
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