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 it also 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.