Themes: Ship Cruises, Race Against Time, Terrorism
Main Cast: Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings, Anthony Hopkins, Shirley Knight
Release Year: 1974
Country: UK
Run Time: 109 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
Following his successful foray into swashbuckler comedy with The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, director Richard Lester made what has proved to be one of the few quality films from the disaster craze that dominated filmmaking in the mid-'70s. Juggernaut is the pseudonym of a madman (Freddie Jones) who plants several steel drums aboard a luxury liner and calls the company's officials once the boat has put out to sea, demanding a large sum of money in exchange for instructions on how to defuse bombs inside the drums. Anthony Hopkins plays one of the company officials whose wife and children are aboard the ship, Omar Sharif is the ship's captain, Shirley Knight is a passenger who is also his mistress, and Richard Harris and David Hemmings are two members of the bomb disposal team, which is helicoptered onto the ship to defuse the explosives. As in many of Lester's best works, humor pops up in unexpected places; particularly memorable are Harris as the weary but wisecracking top dog among the explosives experts and Lester regular Roy Kinnear as a bumbling entertainment director desperately trying to distract the apprehensive passengers. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Review
In the canon of Richard Lester's work, Juggernaut occupies a solid second rung, below his masterwork Petulia and his Beatles films (A Hard Day's Night and Help!), as well as his Dumas films (The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers). Here, Lester effortlessly rises above the mediocrity of the star-laden, special effects-driven disaster genre to something intimate and witty. The characters in Juggernaut are all weary and haggard looking, even before the discovery of the bombs aboard the cruise ship. Lester isn't interested in square-jawed heroism or plucky little people rising to the occasion. The characters aboard the floating bomb of a ship are all flawed: the captain is carrying on an adulterous affair, the bomb disposal team almost blow up the vessel on their first try at defusing, the roly-poly entertainment director is a bust at eliciting even a smile from the passengers, who are a sulking and hardly plucky lot. It's not an anti-genre film, though, because Lester and writer Richard Alan Simmons supply it with tart and sly humor, typical of Lester's best work. And finally, the suspense is real, in part because of the frailty of the characters. This is one disaster film where anything is possible and the survivor list might be very short indeed. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Ian Holm - Nicholas Porter; Paul Antrim - Digby; Ben Aris - The Walker; John Bindon - Driscoll; Andrew Bradford - 3rd Officer Hardy; Tom Chadbon - Juggernaut's Contact; Kenneth Colley - Detective Brown; Kenneth Cope - Bridgeman; Cyril Cusack; Michael Egan - Mr. Fowlers; Julian Glover - Marder; Barnaby Holm - Christopher Porter; Michael Hordern; Clifton James - Corrigan; Freddie Jones - Buckland; Roy Kinnear - Social Director; Victor Lucas - Detective; Paul Luty - Clerk; Eric Mason - 2nd Detective; Caroline Mortimer - Susan McCleod; Doris Nolan - Mrs Corrigan; Liz Ross - Laura Kellogg; Roshan Seth - Azad; John Stride - Hughes; Ian Talbot - Naval Technician; Jack Watson - Chief Engineer Mallicent; Mark Burns - First Officer Hollingsworth; Simon MacCorkindale - #1 Helmsman; Richard Moore - Junior Officer; Freddie Fletcher - 2nd Radio Officer; Bob Sessions - Jerry Kellogg; John Pennington - Passenger; Norman Warwick
Credit
Alan Tomkins - Art Director, Evangeline Harrison - Costume Designer, David Tringham - First Assistant Director, Richard Lester - Director, Antony Gibbs - Editor, Ken Thorne - Composer (Music Score), Wally Schneiderman - Makeup, Peter Allwork - Camera Operator, Ernest Day - Camera Operator, Freddie Cooper - Camera Operator, Paul Wilson - Camera Operator, Terence Marsh - Production Designer, Gerry Fisher - Cinematographer, Roy Stevens - Production Manager, David V. Picker - Producer, Richard Alan Simmons - Producer, Richard de Koker - Producer, Denis O'Dell - Producer, Paul Richardson - Special Effects, John Richardson - Special Effects, Simon Kaye - Sound/Sound Designer, Gerry Humphreys - Sound/Sound Designer, Alan Plater - Dialogue Writer, Alan Plater - Screenwriter, Richard Alan Simmons - Screenwriter, Richard de Koker - Screenwriter
On taking over the film, Lester completely rewrote the script with writer Alan Plater, as he recounts to biographer Andrew Yule. Producer/Writer Richard Alan Simmons, unhappy with the new script, had himself credited as Richard DeKoker on the finished film.
The film was shot mainly aboard a real cruise ship. SS Hamburg had recently been sold by its German owners to the Soviet Union and renamed SS Maxim Gorkiy. Before the Soviets began operating the ship for paying passengers, they chartered it to the film company.
The Black Sea Shipping Company livery carried by the Maxim Gorkiy was altered, the Soviet Union's hammer and sickle emblem in the funnel and bow replaced by the logo of the fictive Sovereign Line, and the ship was renamed the Britannic. Advertisements were run in British papers, soliciting extras who would take a lengthy cruise in the North Sea for free, but with the knowledge that the ship would actually seek out the worst possible weather, as the story demanded seas too rough for the lifeboats to be lowered, trapping the passengers on board.
Because the charter of the ship was negotiated as oil prices skyrocketed in February 1974, the Soviets ended up losing money on the deal.
Plot summary
The story revolves around a fictitious cruise liner, the SS Britannic. When the ship is in the middle of the Atlantic, the owner of the shipping line, (Ian Holm), receives a phone call from a man with a lilting Irishaccent who refers to himself only as Juggernaut. Juggernaut tells Porter he has placed seven barrels of amatol (high explosive) aboard the Britannic that will explode and sink the ship by noon the following day. The barrels are booby-trapped and any attempt to defuse them will result in an explosion. Details of how to render the bombs safe will be sent in exchange for a ransom of five hundred thousand pounds sterling. To show he is serious, Juggernaut arranges a demonstration, a series of small explosions on the Britannic's bridge that seriously injures two crewmen. Porter is all for paying the ransom and saving the 1,200 passengers onboard (the seas are too rough to abandon ship). However, the British government informs Porter that if he pays the ransom, they will withdraw his company's operating subsidy. Instead, a bomb disposal expert, Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Fallon (Richard Harris) and his team must parachute into the Atlantic, board the Britannic and defuse the barrels before the deadline. Meanwhile, Supt. John McCleod (Anthony Hopkins), whose wife and two children are onboard the Britannic leads the efforts on land to find Juggernaut.
After an attempt to defuse one of the bombs by robot fails, Fallon goes to his backup plan. Fallon's team will defuse one barrel each. Fallon will defuse the first bomb, informing his men of each move. If he fails and the bomb explodes, his men will know what went wrong. However, if two more bombs go off, the ship will sink.
Alternate ending
Some people have reported that an alternate ending to the film was shot and originally shown in British cinemas, with the film ending in an explosion after the wrong wire was cut.[citation needed] If this alternate ending does exist, it does not appear on the DVD.
