Earthquake (1974)

I can't explain the disaster movie. I really can't. All I know for sure is that throughout the Seventies, there were a whole gaggle of them.

But for the longest time, they all made money.

Maybe that's all the explanation they need?

Anyway:

Starting and ending somewhere between 1970 and 1979, studios thought it would be a great idea to make movies about things crashing, burning, exploding, imploding, sinking, crumbling or, sometimes, all of the above.

Irwin Allen based a whole career on such movies in their heyday and he is certainly best-remembered as the man behind flicks like The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm and When Time Ran Out. Whenever you had a city (or two) you wanted destroyed, Irwin was your go-to guy.

Not that those Irwin Allen projects were the only games in town: you had The Hindenburg, City on Fire, Tidal Wave, Avalanche, Meteor and a whole slew of Airport movies.

There were even songs in the Seventies about disasters: "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", "The Night Chicago Died", "Disco Inferno", the theme to "SuperTrain" and others.

And then there was the big mack daddy - the disaster film that was to be THE EVENT of 1974! The reason Sensurround was invented! The movie God created Charlton Heston to star in! The cinematic titan that destroyed Los Angeles and several boroughs therein.

My loyal readers, I give you Earthquake, the motion picture that all other B-movies had been leading up to.

Plot Time! Engineer Stuart Graff (Charlton Heston) is separated from his possessive wife Remy (Ava Gardner), and is having an affair with widow Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold). Meanwhile, Remy tries persuading her father, Sam Royce (Lorne Greene), Graff's employer, to use his influence to stop Graff from seeing Denise. Policeman Lew Slade (George Kennedy) is suspended from the L.A.P.D. for hitting an thick-headed officer from another jurisdiction. Jody (Marjoe Gortner), a perverted grocery store manager and part-time National Guard officer, lusts after Rosa Amici (Victoria Principal), assistant to Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), an aspiring daredevil motorcyclist. These are the kinds of people whose acting God punishes by sending a nice eight-Richter earthquake to L.A.

And oh, what an earthquake it is! This is something which spreads devastation far and wide, puts wide cracks in the desert floor, destroys dams, makes buildings crumble, windows shatter and send shards of glass into women's faces, makes blood spray up onto the camera lens in about the most Seventies-ish fashion ever and gets everyone's polyester all stained and dirty.

This is directed by Mark Robson, who was actually a pretty darned respectable director. His pedigree includes lensing films the likes of The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Peyton Place, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, Von Ryan's Express and, for the purposes of this review (AND my site in general), Valley of the Dolls. Looking at Earthquake, you can appreciate the epic look Robson goes for in the composition of some scenes. But overall, you'd never guess that this is a man whom Frank Sinatra, Lana Turner, Trevor Howard, Ingrid Bergman, Rod Steiger, Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Susan Hayward or Humphrey Bogart would give the time of day to.

Well, maybe Rod Steiger would....

Of course, when it comes to content, we can mostly blame the writers; one of whom, George Fox, apparently would never work in this town again. And the other was Mario Puzo. Yes. Mario Puzo. THAT. Mario Puzo. And while you won't find any dramatic multi-cultural crime stories here, this will make you want to wack someone.

Any actor would only be as good as the material they have to work with, naturally, but it was common practice in disaster movies that the hamminess level would be turned up as high as humanly possible. In Earthquake, everyone onscreen at least follows the rules. Chuck Heston, teeth clenched and brow furrowed, growls out his every line, eyes squinted and trained on the horizon. Gardner wails her every declamatory line with the flourish she gave as Maggie Grayson in City on Fire. Greene plays a captain of industry as well as he did Pa Cartwright or as well as he would Captain Adama, so no real challenge there. Of course, every film like this needs a blustering authority figure, so Kennedy fits the bill as well here as he had in every single Airport movie ever made. Gortner, for as small as his part is, at least bugs his eyes and bares his teeth as well as can be expected.

Unfortunately for Bujold, Roundtree, Principal and blink-and-you'll-miss-them parts for such class acts as Barry Sullivan, John Randolph, Jesse Vint, Kip Niven and Pedro Armendáriz Jr., they aren't really given much opportunity to do anything more than voice concern, run around the debris, get endangered and/or get killed by Nature's wrath.

One scene I will always cherish is one of the many where the camera shakes violently (so you'll get the idea there's an earthquake, natch), here on a stretch of raised highway where typical LA traffic swerves and sways hither and yon. A truck hauling cattle shudders badly and, with a couple of cuts of the frenzied driver struggling with the steering wheel while cows moo hysterically behind him, a shot of a chintzily-built overpass is obviously jostled from beneath so that the cars jump off of the model set and all kinds of Hot Wheels, a toy cattle truck and all come crashing down.

THIS is the movie which won two Oscars, kids. 1974-era Oscars.

Don't forget about the Sensurround, though! This is one of those movies where loud roaring was not only part of the background sound, but one of the selling points of Earthquake overall. Just like Rollercoaster, Midway and Battlestar: Galactica, Earthquake rumbled its way into the viewers' ears through an overuse of the stereo sound and large, low frequency speakers which contained specially designed 18-inch drivers in custom black wood cabinets. They came with special extenders used to widen the mouths of the horns and take advantage of the theater walls to further increase low frequency extension.

The original Sensurround design used for Earthquake employed noise generators. Low-frequency control tones were also printed on the film's mono optical or magnetic track; from the projector, the tones entered a control box in the projection booth, which fed low frequency pseudo random noise to audio amplifiers driving the speakers. The control track method was employed because there was no way to accurately record bass lower than 40 Hz on an optical or magnetic film soundtrack at the time. When receiving the noise signal, the amplifier and sub woofers responded with sound pressures at the center of the theater to a maximum of 120 dB measured 4 feet in front of any horn. The resulting rumble could be felt by audience members as well as heard.

And that is another reason why Earthquake sucked; it had to use new sound technology to punch up scenes that really wouldn't have passed muster WITHOUT new sound technology.

All sniping aside, some of the main reasons anyone will watch Earthquake nowadays is because

A) they want to see what passed for landmark special effects in 1974,

B) all-star extravaganzas are not to be ignored,

C) they mistake it for something from the Irwin Allen oeuvre,

D) modern-day disaster films just don't contain this level of self-contained mockery, and

E) there's a certain level of fun to be had in a movie where in the midst of natural disasters, death and vast destruction, one can count on the reassuring sight of Walter Matthau in a curly wig getting consistently soused for two hours.

Surprisingly enough, all things considered, this film DID do remarkably well. Made for $7 million, it pulled in nearly $80 million, coming into the Top 5 Money-Earners of '74 (just two films behind The Towering Inferno...and earning $20 million more than The Godfather: Part II, interestingly enough).

To be sure, Los Angeles has been destroyed many times before and since, and when it comes to vast destruction, California really gets the brunt of these disaster movies. It should only come naturally that, along with floods and fire storms, evil bald geniuses wanting to aim Army missiles into the San Andreas Fault or flooding Silicon Valley to corner the computer chip market. If you're going to make a disaster movie about something, you might as well make it about something that most Californians would be familiar with.

I guess I found Earthquake entertaining in a bone-headed kind of way. Charlton Heston considered, it's not like it makes any sense or the story takes the high road at any time but for the mean little kid who wants to watch things go "boom" you could do a lot worse.

What am I talking about? Looking at the past films I've reviewed, I myself have done a lot worse.

So put on your polyester suit, drink a toast to Bobby Riggs and pop in Earthquake: it's not technically good but at least it isn't as bad as Volcano.