As my parents remained intransigent, in their blandly baleful, parentlike way, I had to resort to more exotic ways of slaking my thirst. With the knowledge accrued from those interrogations, I corralled Pam, my best friend at the time, into sharing my fascination. We’d spend whole afternoons wearing Crayolas down to the nubs, drawing pictures of scenes from a movie we’d never seen.

Stella Stevens plummeting into flames, wearing little more than a man’s shirt and strappy silver heels. A bloated Shelley Winters, looking like a whale wearing a negligee in my inept approximation, floundering her way underwater. Not having any sense of nautical dynamics, I always drew the ship capsizing bow over stern — and certainly it looked more ghastly and impressive that way.

There were also, I blush to recall, live re-enactments of the climactic scene, when that wave crashed into the boat as the merrymakers in the grand ballroom tooted their horns and toasted in the New Year. Pam and I would arrange bolsters and pillows on my bed, then suddenly scream and toss them in the air, tumbling in tortured lumps to the floor, imagining we were now stranded, so exotically, on the ceiling. Who will survive?

Then, as Blanche DuBois so poetically put it, sometimes there’s God — so quickly! One day the kids across the street, whose parents were more lax when it came to monitoring their cultural diet, casually announced that they were going to see the movie, and would I like to come? And, at last, their patience worn gossamer-thin, my parents shruggingly assented. (Perhaps their unwillingness to let me see the movie had something to do with not wanting to endure it themselves.)

And guess what? As I drank in the movie in its soggy silliness, I recall a feeling of dismay stealing over me. Somehow it was all so much more spectacular, more enthralling, as I’d pictured it in my fervid little imagination. Was there not something rather witless about the dialogue? Were the special effects really all that special? The long shot of the boat tipping over was patently a toy boat hit by nothing near a 90-footer. I’d seen bigger waves at the beach.

Perhaps it was in that moment of deflation that my critical sensibility began to stir: after all, one requirement of being a professional critic is an ability to see beyond the treatment of the material at hand to the aesthetic possibilities it might contain if handled by more supple, sensitive artists. Imagine, if you will, what Robert Altman might have done with the movie. (Or maybe don’t.)

This disappointment did not, I should add, dampen my enthusiasm for the movies that followed in the wake of “The Poseidon Adventure”: the more lavish Irwin Allen opus “The Towering Inferno,” wherein actual A-list stars were treated like so much kindling; the lower-end “Earthquake,” with a pre-“Dallas” Victoria Principal sporting an Afro, and Ava Gardner being swirled away in the sewers of Los Angeles, surely that great movie star’s lowest ebb; or “Airport 1975,” in which an intrepid stewardess played by a tremulous Karen Black (who sadly just died) would be forced to land a jet after a midair collision.