Juggernaut [Blu-ray]

Director: Richard Lester Richard Lester

Overview

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.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/13/2023
UPC:	0738329263034
Original Release:	1974
Rating:	PG
Source:	Kl Studio Classics
Language:	English
Time:	1:50:00
Sales rank:	14,666

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Richard Harris	Fallon
Omar Sharif	Captain Brunel
David Hemmings	Charlie Braddock
Anthony Hopkins	Superintendent John McCleod
Shirley Knight	Barbara Banister
Ian Holm	Nicholas Porter,Christopher Porter
Clifton James	Mr. Corrigan
Roy Kinnear	Social Director Curain
Caroline Mortimer	Susan McCleod
Freddie Jones	Mr. Buckland
Mark Burns	1st Officer Hollingsworth
John Stride	Hughes
Julian Glover	Cmdr. Marder
Jack Watson	Chief Engineer Mallicent
Roshan Seth	Azad
Kenneth Colley	Detective Brown
Andrew Bradford	3rd Officer Hardy
Paul Antrim	Digby
John Bindon	Driscoll
Adam Bridge	David McCleod,Nancy McCleod
Tom Chadbon	Juggernaut's Contact
Kenneth Cope	Bridgeman
Michael Egan	Mr. Fowlers
Freddie Fletcher	2nd Radio Officer
Kristine Howarth	Mrs. Buckland
Victor Lucas	Detective
Paul Luty	Clerk
Simon MacCorkindale	No.1 Helmsman
Eric Mason	2nd Detective
Richard Moore	Junior Officer
Doris Nolan	Mrs. Corrigan
John Pennington	Passenger
David Purcell	1st Detective
Martyn Read	Kelsey
Cyril Cusack	Actor
Michael Hordern	Actor
Norman Warwick	Actor
Ben Aris	The Walker
Liza Ross	Laura Kellogg
Bob Sessions	Jerry Kellogg
Ian Talbot	Naval Technician
Ken Thorne	Composer

Technical Credits

Richard DeKoker

Richard Alan Simmons

Alan Plater

Richard Lester	Director
Richard DeKoker	Producer,Screenwriter
David V. Picker	Executive Producer,Producer
John Richardson	Special Effects,Special Effects
Richard Alan Simmons	Screenwriter,Producer
Wally Veevers	Special Effects
Gerry Humphreys	Sound Effects,Sound/Sound Designer
Les Wiggins	Sound Effects
David Allen	Sound Effects
Alan Plater	Screenwriter
Denis O'Dell	Producer
Simon Kaye	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

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.

All Movie Guide - Tom Wiener