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1.0 out of 5 stars
The Movie was (gulp) Better, Dec 15 2003
THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE will always remain one of my all-time favorite movies. I saw it when I was 9 on New Year's Eve, 1972, and I watch it every New Year's.After finding an old Saturday Evening Post article about how Paul Gallico came to write the novel, I decided to give the book a read years after seeing the movie.
(Gallico remembered a childhood trip he took aboard the Queen Mary when a wave hit the ship so hard, it nearly tipped over. An officer sitting at a table nearby in the dining hall muttered aloud, "Blimey, we nearly went over that time!" That memory motivated Gallico to inquire insurance companies about capsized ships and he went on to write POSEIDON). There are very few examples of the movie surpassing the book, but this is one of them.
Why?
Because it's the message in each. In the film, the defrocked preacher genuinely cares about his small "flock" that follows him up through the bottom of the ship--even going so far as to sacrificing himself to see their survival. In the book, he comes off as bitter and even crazy, culminating in such an looney act that you can't stand him--or Gallico for subjecting his reader to it.
The same could also be said for how the author dispatches other characters. Other deaths aren't tragic, they're just cruel. I realize it's a disaster story and unrealistic to expect happy endings for most of the characters. A very smart screenwriter once said that "movies can tell people that life is hard and life can be tragic, but they shouldn't tell an audience that life is crap." I got that feeling from reading the novel. Gallico's theme appeared to be: Life is hard, but religion will just make it harder (the survivors left in the ballroom are also rescued in the novel without the hellish journey of the main characters--the crazy preacher took them on a foolish journey). The movie said: even in the face of disaster and loss, faith, courage and love can still survive. Fortunately, the screenwriters jettisoned most of Gallico's choices and made a movie worth seeing repeatedly and caring about.
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