The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 5-11
Juggernaut (1974)
Directed by Richard Lester
Lester was one of cinema’s savviest bandwagon masters. Smart enough to make films about rock and roll, but not without poking fun at everyone from the bands on down to the fans. He wanted to know what made trends tick, and that’s literally what happens in his neglected tour de force Juggernaut, in which a time bomb is placed aboard a cruise ship. A disaster movie in the Irwin Allen mold, Juggernaut keeps the trappings of The Poseidon Adventure (catastrophe in lavish locale, cast of thousands) and turns everything English. The luxury liner is depressing and grey, disappointment and inevitability replace flamboyant heroics, and in this way one actually worries about the dozen chess pieces moved around by an unseen terrorist. It’s the film people seem to remember the least from the 1970s vogue for destruction, but it’s the only one worth seeing. The much-missed Omar Sharif turns in a performance of beautiful dignity as the captain of the doomed ship. Scout Tafoya (August 7, 4:15pm, 9:15pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Lester retrospective)
