JUGGERNAUT

Presented as a kind of "bonus track" after our quintet of US mega-productions, this is the contemporary British response to the wild popularity of disaster epics — albeit directed by Philadephia's Richard Lester.

Still with us at 94, the former Beatles collaborator (HELP!, A HARD DAY'S NIGHT) had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with THE KNACK less than a decade before tackling JUGGERNAUT. And with all respect to the competent journeymen employed by Hollywood on their destruction orgies, Lester is clearly operating on a 'toweringly' higher level here.

The set-up is routine: a brilliant bomber has placed explosives on a cruise ship, and threatens to blow the vessel sky high unless he receives a massive payoff. But Lester's approach deconstructs the deadpan absurdities of the disaster-movie genre as efficiently and expertly as our unflappable hero RIchard Harris goes about defusing the detonators.

JUGGERNAUT still very much holds water as a high-octane thriller more than five decades later, and crucially never strays into the danger-zones of parody or spoof. Instead, the travails of the "Britannic" (in fact the ex-Soviet "Maksim Gorkiy"!) wickedly mirror those of the United Kingdom in the early seventies, the nation's imperial glories long having since faded. But the "stiff upper lip" remains in place, the passengers' stoic response to their mountingly dire situation matched by Lester's bracingly stiff rejection of Hollywood cornball sentiment.