While criticism of Earthquake usually concentrates on its flaky Sensurround effects,
the film’s more important flaws lie in a confused approach to the genre and –
especially – one character who really belongs in a different movie altogether,
writes BARNABY PAGE.
Although it remains one of the
best-known of the early-1970s all-star disaster extravaganzas, Earthquake (1974) was less successful
commercially than Airport, The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure, and did not
enjoy the critical acclaim of the latter two.
It probably suffered in the
short term from being released only a month before Inferno, and in the longer term from its over-reliance on the
Sensurround system; watched now, though, it is flawed largely through
discontinuity of tone and the uneasy co-existence of both a strong human
villain and a natural threat. Still, the film casts interesting light on the
genre as a whole, sometimes complying with its standards and sometimes
departing from them.
At the time Earthquake must have seemed something of
a sure bet, overseen for Universal by Jennings Lang, a veteran
agent-turned-producer who was more or less simultaneously working on Airport 1975, had lately been
responsible for some high-profile critical successes including Play Misty For Me and High Plains Drifter, and was a supporter
of Sensurround.
Director Mark Robson had only
a few years earlier delivered the hit Valley
of the Dolls. Co-writer Mario Puzo was riding high on The Godfather,and
Charlton Heston, although his fortunes had waned somewhat during the 1960s, had
been revived as a star by Planet of the Apes.
In Earthquake he would again be one
of those square-jawed “Heston heroes who lack irrational impulsesâ€, as Pauline
Kael memorably put it (though not referring to this movie); he had lately
played a number of characters who defended civilisation against all odds, in
films from El Cid to Khartoum and Major Dundee, and even had a recent disaster-movie credit in Skyjacked.
Yet somehow none of its
creators could quite make it jell, and we are never sure quite what kind of
film we are supposed to be watching. It may not have helped that Puzo
apparently left the project to work on The
Godfather Part II and was replaced by the obscure George Fox, who – from
what I can discover about him – seemed to be as interested in researching
earthquakes for factual accuracy as in crafting an engaging drama. He wrote a
little about the production in a book, Earthquake:
The Story of a Movie, that was published to coincide with release of the
movie.
From early on in the film, we
feel it doesn’t quite have the slickness of the disaster classics. Earthquake belongs to a genre that at
heart took itself very seriously, yet it is more humorously self-referential
than them – not least when Charlton Heston reads, very woodenly, a script with Geneviève Bujold, who plays a wannabe
actress. Another character, Victoria Principal, mentions going to a Clint
Eastwood movie; and in one of the film’s most visually striking sequences we
later see this Eastwood flick, running sideways during the quake before the
projector conks out.
One could even take the
repeated joke of the Walter Matthau character, drunk at a bar and ignoring the
earthquake while randomly spouting the names of famous figures (“Spiro T.
Agnew!†“Peter Fonda!â€), as a comment on the all-star concept.
But at the same time Earthquake is also bleaker than many
others; by contrast Airport is upbeat
and even Towering Inferno, which ends
on a prediction of worse fires in the future, also offers the hope that better
architecture can prevent them. In Earthquake,
however, the ending is distinctly mournful – with its semi-famous final line,
“this used to be a helluva town†and
the comment that only 40 people out of 70 trapped in a basement survived. (The
death tolls in classic disaster movies vary, from negligible in Airport and Inferno to near-total in Poseidon;
numerically, Earthquake sits in the
middle, but it is clearly much more about destruction than salvation.)
And italso has more sheer nastiness than all the others combined,
notably in the miserable marriage of Heston and Ava Gardner – made all the more
bitter by the way Heston feels obliged to save her and dies in the attempt,
when he could have reached safety with his newer love Bujold – and in the
repellent character of Jody, the retail worker and National Guardsman played by
Marjoe Gortner.
It’s one of the film’s many
weirdnesses that Jody, surely its most interesting character, is almost the
only one of the core ensemble who was not a reasonably well-known name. But
this may be because Jody is not just “badâ€, he’s creepy, to a degree that he
seems to belong in a different, more squalid movie. A bodybuilder and karate
nut, he’s mocked by his housemates, who insinuate that he’s gay, pointing out
all the picture of barely-clad men on his wall.
He may or may not be; he
certainly seems to have an interest in the Principal character, a local woman
who he permits to run a tab at his grocery store. Later, patrolling the
post-earthquake streets with his unit, he has Principal – now arrested as a
looter – separated from the other prisoners, and ogles her; he captures the
housemates who mocked him, accuses them of
being gay because they’ve stolen jewellery, and murders them; eventually he’s
shot by Kennedy after at least implicitlyplanning
to rape Principal.
It’s easy to see where this
might point: we’re being told by the movie that Jody is in fact gay and in denial, planning to assault Principal to
prove his heterosexuality, turning the taunts back on his housemates to deflect
attention. This interpretation of the character is supported by an interesting
scene, one of those added for the 1976 network TV premiere, where he subtly
menaces Principal with his over-friendly attentions and shortly afterwards
comments on the beauty of a burning building; at the time there was still a strong,
Freudian-influenced perception of linkage between pyromania and sexual
deviance.
Remember, this is 1974, and
the concept of a homicidally closeted gay man wasn’t so ludicrous to
film-makers or audiences at the time; today it might be possible for a viewer
to persuade themselves theoretically that Jody is a lonely, marginalised character
to be sympathised with, but these incidents and his manner in general
(sometimes ingratiating, sometimes aggressive) make it clear that he is not intended to be liked.
In any case, Jody is a far cry
from the lovable conman Fred Astaire in Inferno,
and he’s not the only character in Airport
to be harsher than counterparts in other disaster movies. Even George
Kennedy is far more aggressive here than in his merely curmudgeonly Earthquake role, drawing a gun on Heston to
requisition his car.
These are pronounced
differences between Earthquake and
its disaster contemporaries, but nevertheless there’s no question that it falls
firmly into the genre as it stood at the time. The critic Gene Siskel was wrong
to see a natural disaster as essentially different from a man-made one: “With a
Poseidon Adventure or an Airport the ending is clear — people are
saved ultimately thru their own or somebody else’s enterprise,†he wrote. “But
with an earthquake, the final solution is out of one’s hands, anyone’s hands…If
the tremors don’t stop, then everybody’ll die; if they do, then only a few
people will die.â€
It’s true that Earthquake does – understandably – lay
less blame at the feet of man. Even if sloppy building or inattention to
problems at the dam exacerbate the
effects of the earthquake, nobody can blame it entirely on people, the way one
might the disasters in Inferno or Poseidon.
But the difference is more one
of degree than the dichotomy that Siskel proposes. Inferno is about fire (natural) as it affects a building (man-made);
Poseidon about water as it affects a
ship; even in Jaws, for that matter,
the problem is not the existence of the shark per se but its proximity to the town; in all of them the natural
factors are at once very potent, and not limitless; likewise here. Earthquake isabout a quake (uncontrollable) as it affects a city (to some
extent protectable), and it’s difficult to see this as departing importantly
from the genre model.
The movie is in fact split in
two as if by a fault line: the quake itself ends at the one-hour point, almost
exactly halfway through, and during the second half the majority of the
specific threats in Earthquake are
man-made.
Heston dies at the end because
he is trapped in a subterranean structure,
not because a sudden hole in the ground swallows him up; it is electrical wires
that endanger Bujold’s son; it is not water, as such, but the fact that the
water is held back by a dam which
forms the ultimate peril. (Indeed, at one point the film-makers line up a
catalogue of potential mishaps – a child cycling on a bridge, men on a
window-cleaning platform – to unintentionally comic effect.)
And even the baddie is killed
by a human, in a context which has relatively little to do with the natural
disaster.
Given this, it is not surprising
that – like Inferno in particular – Earthquake is also concerned with the
role of engineering, mankind’s interface with natural forces. The Heston
character is an engineer working in construction, and in an early scene is
anxious for a client to upgrade building specifications – the resemblance to Inferno’s architect Paul Newman is
clear, as it also is in Heston’s line “we never should’ve put up those
40-storey monstrositiesâ€.
Human engineering (or control)
is presented as directly oppositional to the natural power of the earthquake
(or chaos); in the first interior shot of the California Seismological
Institute a sign saying “Engineering†is visible. Later it will be engineers
who worry about the dam, and the improvisational ingenuity of Lorne Greene (as
Gardner’s father) that rescues people from a stricken skyscraper. That scene
is, in fact, remarkably reminiscent of the breeches-buoy escape sequence in Inferno.
This respect for technology
was displayed, too, in the film’s extensive –and, in the event, itself somewhat
disastrous – reliance on a technical innovation.
Indeed, part of Earthquake’s reputational problem is
that it was sold not so much on its drama – which certainly has successful
sequences, even if the multiplicity of moods and locations dilutes its
intensity in comparison to most disaster movies of the period – but on its
effects.
Doubtless felt to be most
significant of these at the time, though the technology has disappeared now,
was Sensurround. This system used large subwoofers to generate very
low-frequency sounds in the auditorium, much as the lowest pipes of a big
church organ are more heard than felt. (It also reportedly damaged the fabric
of some cinemas, although these stories may have been the work of imaginative
marketers; certainly plausible, however, are tales of people in theatres adjacent to a Sensurround screen being
all shook up as they watched a completely different movie.)
Although around 800 cinemas in
the US and 2000 worldwide reportedly had the ability to make the earth move
this way, the technology was hardly ever used after Earthquake and had disappeared within half a decade. The only other
Sensurround releases were Midway (aka
Battle of Midway) in 1976, which was
a hit; the largely forgotten 1977 disaster movie Rollercoaster, which wasn’t; and Battlestar Galactica in 1978, a peculiar re-edited mash-up of the
TV series’ first episodes. After that it was never used again.
Today, of course, we miss this
part of the Earthquake experience
(though if it’s anything like 4DX, it’s more likely it was an irritation than a
thrill). And it may be that the production team were relying so heavily on
Sensurround to wow the audience that they neglected other effects; in any case,
Earthquake’s effects are frequently
regarded as disappointing.
(Above: Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal.)
In particular, the large-scale
shots of buildings shuddering are thoroughly unconvincing – one often has the
distinct impression that the camera is
moving, not the subject – and, in what should have been a spectacular sequence,
the Styrofoam “concrete blocks†raining on extras as a building collapses are
palpably not heavy. The implausible staggers of their victims and the lack of
coordination between audio and visuals – the bangs and crashes on the
soundtrack seemingly unconnected to specific chunks of “concrete†hitting the
ground – don’t help. Other effects, for example the blood-spatter on the camera
lens after an elevator crash, are also more distracting than convincing.
Some shaky POV shots do work
more happily, for example a truck seen on a bridge, as long as one doesn’t stop
to think about the contradictions of some footage being stylised this way while
other long mid-earthquake sections aren’t. Most effective are a few small
details, like wobbling filing cabinets and a pot of hot food falling on a chef.
However, while Earthquake’s effects do it few favours,
they are not the essential problem with the movie. It is ultimately the
screenplay that fails.
It is not that it is
completely lacking in dramatically successful moments: for example, some of the
scenes at the dam, especially the early one where an elevator arrives
unexpectedly full of water. Equally, the sour chemistry
between Gardner and Heston as their marriage collapses is persuasive enough,
even if Gardner – as critic Gerardo Valero marvellously puts it – “plays her
part as if she had seen Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a few too many timesâ€.
Some of the humour, too, works
decently enough in itself. There are some nice one-liners (Gardner to Heston:
“Don’t you dare lower your voice to me!â€), as well as some cute observations on
the triviality of movies when set alongside things like real earthquakes. But
it can also feel forced, especially the lengthy bar scene with the Matthau
character and the cops ignoring a fight: while droll enough, these gags belong
in a different film from Jody’s violence and sexual predation.
Indeed, Jody himselfseems to belong in a different film
from the more genre-typical heroism. And this is the fundamental weakness of Earthquake:it has less clarity than the great disaster movies of the era
because it’s uncertain whether it should be primarily about the quake, or be a human story set against the background of the quake; and it can’t
decide whether it wants to be comic or horrifying or exciting.
Certainly, you can’t help
feeling that Earthquake sometimes
aspires to hinting at a Los Angeles apocalypse like Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (which was in fact
filmed the following year). Of course, LA has personal resonance for so many
film-makers (whereas Inferno was set
in San Francisco and Airport in the
Midwest), and indeed the screenwriter Fox saw the film explicitly this way,
with the quake as a judgement on the city. He has been quoted (by John Shelton
Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The Myth of
the American Superhero) as saying that “we ought to make the audience feel
– unconsciously, in their nerve ends – that the quake is somehow generated by
the characters they’re watchingâ€.
But it is too patchwork in
tone to pull this off. For a while we might well see the looters or the
budget-trimming real-estate developers as exemplars of modern urban corruption,
but the next moment Earthquake is
inviting us to chuckle at Matthau’s voluble sot, or hiss-boo the wicked Jody
like a silent-movie black-hat.
It spreads itself too thinly
in terms of geography, too. In attempting to portray a whole city it must
resort to a far greater variety of locations than Inferno, Airport or Poseidon (although, oddly, few of them
are recognisable), and this weakens the intensity and immediacy of both the
disaster and the drama. Since the camera can move freely around the city, and
the characters are often widely separated, we feel as if their escape surely
can’t be so difficult. (In the scenes added for the 1976 broadcast, there is
even a whole subplot set on board an airplane.)
Ultimately, though, this lack
of clarity manifests itself most of all in Jody. He is a genuine bad guy; far
too strong – and too thoroughly unsympathetic – a character to be overshadowed
by a mere earthquake. For too much of the film, and in our memories of it, he
and not the destruction is the real threat.
So Earthquake is never quite sure if it wants to be about its
characters’ struggle for survival against the disaster, or if the quake is
incidental background to their struggle against human adversaries. Individual
dramatic elements may be chucked around with great force, but as with the
Styrofoam masonry, the cumulative impression is unconvincing.
(For more coverage of "Earthquake" and the Sensurround process, see Cinema Retro issue #20 in our back issues section.)
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