JUGGERNAUT (1974)

[The Burgomaster]

Decent thriller about an explosives expert who plants 7 time-bombs aboard a cruise ship and demands a ransom in exchange for the lives of the passengers.  It has a typical 1970s "all-star cast," including Richard Harris (as the hero who tries to defuse the bombs), Omar Sharif (as the ship's captain), and Anthony Hopkins (as a Scotland Yard inspector).  The scenes of Harris attempting to defuse the bombs are similar to scenes from about a dozen other "mad bomber" movies, but they are still pretty suspenseful.  This is available on DVD for $10 or less.



Post Edited (08-07-04 19:14)

[Yaddo42]

Always liked this one, more straight forward than most of the lighter toned action comedies from Richard Lester. I wonder was this the first movie with bomb makers having a particular "style" or even putting in fake mechanisms to confound or boobytrap attempts to diffuse the bombs? It may not have been, but I've seen many movies since that seem to borrow from this film with that plot element since.

In a book about Lester that I have, the author explains that there is a scene involving Harris putting on his lucky cap for a few seconds and then taking it off again. That whole bit was done because they had to do a retake of part of the scene. But Harris was wearing a toupee woven into his hair during the film. He was drunk, and nearly unconscious, when the makeup people had applied it that morning and tied it on too tight. After filming in pain, Harris couldn't take it any more and Lester agreed to let him remove it. The cap scene was created on the fly to do the retake without having to redo lots footage for the scene already done and still let Harris recover from the pain of the toupee.

[Neville]

A quite decent 70s thriller. Always surprised me that the same Lester who ruined the Superman franchise, made goofy musketeer stuff and even made films with The Beatles had done this one as well.

[BoyScoutKevin]

An all-star cast, which means it also starred Omar Sharif, David Hemmings, Shirley Knight, Ian Holm, Clifton James, Roy Kinnear, Freddie Jones, and Julian Glover with uncredited appearances by Cyril Cusack and Michael Hordern.

One of the first films to deal with the subejct of terrorism, in this day and age, I doubt if it would ever get the green light to be made.

And indeed, something of a departure for its director, Richard Lester.

[Yaddo42]

It's funny you should mention (not) remaking it. There was an Entertainment Weekly article in the late 90s about how MGM was struggling to stay viable as a modern movie studio. They had two real assets to work with: the Bond Franchise, and their vast back catalogue of film they could use as source material for remakes. IIRC, the article said that MGM was so cash poor that they could not compete with the other majors for when bidding wars for hot scripts came up in Hollywood.

In the article, several names were mentioned as likely potential remake material, but the two I remember were "Rollerball" and "Juggernaut". We know what happened to "Rollerball". I know J would occasionally get mentioned as being in development after I saw that article, but I guess nothing became of it. So there were plans to redo it at one point.

I'm sure the terrorist attacks killed off any interest at the time, if the project wasn't dead already. I'm a fan of Lester and "Juggernaut" but had a hard time seeing a remake with any relation to the original being worth a damn. I figured you would get something like "Speed 2", rather than the patience, methodology, and deliberation that made up J. The film, like so many great ones from the past, would be considered "too slow" by contemporary audiences. Plus the quest to find the bomber subplot is rather like a police procedural story, not the stuff of summer blockbusters. I still think elements of "Juggernaut" (mostly the fake bomb mechanisms and boobytraps) have been used many times in current thrillers, just not the film itself.