Cinema
Floodtide
Duncan Fallowell
Juggernaut Director: Richard Lester. Stars: Richard Harris, Omar Sharif. 'A' Leicester Square Theatre (110 minutes)
Varnpira Director: Clive Donner. Star: David Niven. 'AA' Carlton Haymarket. (89 minutes)
A vague of water thrillers on the up and up ever since the success of Deliverance, has been slowly crashing into the conSciousness of regular filmgoers. As in big business, so too in the cinema, liquidation is clearly the rage. Last week we had Mr Beatty struggling in the spume of a dam which had just opened its sluices, before that Jack Nicholson doing exactly the same thing in Chinatown, then Roger Moore being knocked about mine tunnels in a little dinghy in Gold, and thus it continues. Having been tortured, knifed, strangled, shot and maimed, reviewers are now obviously to be put through death by inundation several times a week until some other terminal terror can be devised for us.
Water, the last resort of the goose pimple. There is a great deal of it in Juggernaut. It comes out of the sky and is all round the passenger ship Britannic, causing it to float. If you think this a glib remark, let me say that for most of the film it is in great danger of sinking because a boffin with a chip on his shoulder has placed seven bombs inside it of design so brilliant that even Richard Harris can only defuse them by resorting to psychology. All the same his aide, David Hemmings, is killed on the job, an older actor these days though not necessarily wiser. The obvious comparison is with the Titanic epic. The name of the ship echoes this and there is even a satirical reference to A Night To Remember from Roy Kinnear, the ship's fun man, who has the job of jollying up the passengers during their long hours of mental torture, a sort of Cockney sparrer figure who can always manage a self-deprecating old even in extreme circumstances. Indeed, all the characters are familiar within the conventions of the disaster film: the nosey little boy who strays below deck at exactly the wrong moment, the sophisticated woman traveller who admits that the only consequence of her death would be three lines in the Philadelphia Echo, Omar Sharif mopping his loaded brow and saying, "This is my •ship," the policeman supervising investigations who by a curious coincidence has a wife and two kids on board (Anthony Hopkins, eyes limp with worry from start to finish), the nice galley slave who very nearly commits an act of heroism, Mr Harris throwing a bottle of scotch at the wall in sheer frustration — very familiar this, right down to Juggernaut himself, the mad scientist
twitching at the mouth whose typically lame excuse for his horrible crime is that the government never paid him enough for his services.
The situations are familiar too, particularly when the Dunkirk spirit rears its famous head during the fancy dress ball. "My God, they're dancing!" says Omar. "They don't know," says his First Officer. "Of course they know," says Omar. Couples who have taken each other for granted for years suddenly realise that they are still in love. Children play Scrabble in symbolic ignorance. People who never touch a drop suddenly decide to get drunk and have the time of their lives. There is nothing like imminent death to bring you closer together. But the grandeur, the huge allegorical significance of the Titanic disaster is not matched. The ship is slightly squalid modern, like a Wimpy Bar on water, and although one can understand the pearls of sweat on Richard Harris's concentrated features, Dick Lester has not quite managed to transfer the equivalent tension to us. Perhaps it is because, as with the Lone Ranger, you know from the outset that everyone is going to survive for another tale.
Just as once everyone wanted to play Macbeth or Hamlet, so now Count Dracula has all the old theatrical knights queueing up in their capes and if they cannot have. the lead then a cameo will do. Vampira is not going to get Mr Niven a knighthood but his laconic sangfroid could have had worse consequences. They do not give these films X certificates any longer and so the comedy element has all but taken over in them. This is up-dated horror in the Penthouse manner played for larfs and as usual it begins very amusingly then, moving in to London discotheques, it begins to fizzle out half-way through. I wish someone would genuinely rejuvenate the classic horror film because there is life in the bitten old carcase yet. But Clive Donner is not the man to do it.
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