(this blog was begun the night of October 1, 2019)
Tonight's movie was "Juggernaut" (1974), a good old fashioned 1970s-style disaster movie about a British luxury liner that is discovered to have seven bombs hidden aboard. The ship is out to sea when a call comes in to the London police department. A smooth-voiced maniac is on the line, demanding an enormous ransom in exchange for the information on how to diffuse the bombs, which will sink the ship if they explode. Anthony Hopkins is the Police Superintendent who takes the call.
I'm sorry, but I must jump in here to say that Anthony Hopkins was a different Anthony Hopkins in the early years of his career. He was handsome and thin, with a shock of longish dark hair that fell across his face, and he actually seemed like a normal actor in those days, a far cry from the certifiable gent who made a later-year career out of playing "Hannibal Lecter". I am of the opinion, and I only slightly jest, that certain actors are such psychos in real life, that it is only the fact that they are in movies that keeps them out of an asylum for the criminally insane. Joe Pesci is one such psycho actor. :)
And Anthony Hopkins is another. His physical transformation alone from his early career to his "Lecter" years is telling. In the old days he played a good guy and looked normal. Now, I wouldn't wanna meet him in a dark alley. :)
Yep, some actors are psychos who get paid to be crazy on screen.
But yeah, end of tangent! "Ad, you have gotta stop interrupting your train of thought".
I know. It's annoying and I apologize.
Hopkins' role turns out to be a minor one in any case, though he does have a personal stake in locating the mad bomber; his wife and two children are among the 1200 passengers on board the endangered vessel. The real star of the show is the great Richard Harris, who plays the captain of the Royal Navy's bomb squad. His team is flown out to the ship's location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and tasked with diffusing the bombs. The tension builds even before his team is even aboard, as they parachute into a stormy sea and are lucky to even land near the pickup boats that will take them to the ship. Director Richard Lester, who made his name with two classic Beatles movies : "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help", spends much time in the ocean with the bomb squad. We see that even after they struggle to get into the rubber boats, they still face the extreme challenge of boarding the gigantic cruise ship by climbing the rope ladders that are flung from its deck. Throughout the movie we can see that Lester had a big budget to work with, and here, as the squad fights the ocean, he makes the most of his many camera angles taken from above and down in the water, because he wants us to feel every bit of it's power.
Once the team is on board, the action shifts almost entirely to the attempts to diffuse the bombs. Though in places we are diverted back to Scotland Yard and their co-ordinated search for "Juggernaut", for most of the rest of the 109 minute film we are in the ship's hold with Harris and his most trusted teammate David Hemmings ( another late great British actor from the 70s who also did the narration on Rick Wakeman's "Journey To The Center Of The Earth"). Richard Lester uses close-ups of the inner workings of the bombs and of Harris' expressive eyes and face to build tension, as he must choose, by knowledge and deduction, which screws to loosen and which wires to cut - without blowing the whole ship to Kingdom Come.
Meanwhile, Captain Omar Sharif tries to keep his 1200 passengers calm. They are aware of what is taking place, and Sharif enlists the ship's jovial activities director (Roy Kinnear) to keep them entertained with music and dancing and much food and drink.
"Juggernaut" has a mostly British cast and the interiors were filmed at Shepperton Studios, so I suppose it was a UK production. I do remember seeing an ad for it when it was released, and I am wondering why my friends and I did not go see it as we loved these kinds of movies. I will give it Two Solid Thumbs Up, however, and encourage you to see it yourself. Kino Lorber has done a very nice job with the dvd. The film looks great and every dollar of it's budget is up there on the screen. This is all life-size stuff here, no CGI, just big time studio filmmaking as it was done in the 1970s, when disaster film blockbusters came into being.
I'm gonna do a database search on Richard Harris. Man, was he ever great. It might have to wait a few weeks because I am gonna be switching into Halloween season horror mode very soon, but I'll keep him in mind for the near future and we'll see what else we can find with Mr. Harris.......and wow!, I just now Googled him, and I see that his birthday was October 1, 1930. So I unknowingly saw "Juggernaut" on his birthday. Pretty cool......./////
Well, it me again. I just now received in the mail the complete TV series of "Tales From The Darkside", a great 1980s horror anthology. We will be cracking that one open in the next few days and pounding a few episodes......
That's all for now. See you tonight as usual! Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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