Mark Robson (1974)

The York ABC can’t afford to install Sensurround[1].  This reduces Earthquake, if not to Hamlet without the prince, at least to Opportunity Knocks without Hughie Green.  Deprived of its technological selling point, Earthquake isn’t even just another disaster movie – it’s a remarkably laboured and confused one.  The idea of Sensurround has a certain appeal:  if the audience feels rocked by simulated earthquake sounds, we may not feel so safely remote from what’s happening to the people we’re watching.  The technique has made Mark Robson’s picture a dual Academy Award-winner:  Best Sound and a special prize to the team that developed the process.  Even a de-Sensurrounded Earthquake is a big film in physical terms.  The titles crash onto the screen in huge letters.  At first, the combination of a wide screen and oppressive, close-up photography is unnerving.  It’s not long, though, before you start to suspect that the size of the visuals is a front for a lack of confidence in the material.  For example, you might think a disaster blockbuster would despise the modest scale of an urban car chase but not in this case – although Earthquake‘s chase doesn’t approach Bullitt or The French Connection class.  A disaster movie isn’t where you expect a lot of social comment either but Mark Robson aims for that too and fails embarrassingly.

Perhaps as a result, Earthquake misses out on the admittedly minor pleasures of some other films of its type.  In The Towering Inferno, it was fun to see Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen cruise through the picture – doing very little acting, secure in the knowledge that their charisma would be enough.  The biggest star names in Earthquake are relatively effortful and charmless.  The heroes he plays here and in Airport 1975 are just about the best roles Charlton Heston is getting nowadays.  As his wife, Ava Gardner is intent on projecting bitchiness to the exclusion of any other quality.  Her character doesn’t even experience fear or pain until, right at the end of the film, someone stamps on her hand and sends her falling to death by water.  Walter Matthau is effortless:  as a serene drunk in a red hat, he’s impervious to the earthquake and eventually hits the deck thanks to alcohol rather than seismic activity.

The most depressing – because pointlessly conscientious – performance is that of Genevieve Bujold, as Heston’s actress-making-a-comeback mistress.  Someone else who works hard is the newcomer Marjoe Gortner, whose character is a part-time soldier, a part-time supermarket worker and a full-time psychopath.  Gortner is a famous pop-evangelist (a film about him won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature of 1972):  a cynic might think he’s therefore a natural actor.  He’s not bad:  he brings off the heavy-breathing, staring-eyed screen rapist quite forcefully but you feel he’s auditioning for other, better parts.  Lorne (Bonanza) Greene is solid as Ava Gardner’s father and Charlton Heston’s boss, as well as father-in-law.  Richard Roundtree is all right as a sub-Evel Knievel motorcyclist.

According to disaster-film tradition, the previously unrelated people in the story are introduced mechanically.  No less conventionally, they’re at make-or-break points in their lives – maritally or professionally or both.  As the earthquake threat to Los Angeles increases, the figures of authority vacillate.  They’re spineless or callous:  you can usually judge how spineless or callous by the thickness of their spectacle lenses.  A dedicated young research worker bites his lip, pants and vainly protests at this indifference to the imminent disaster.  The myopics explain what civilian panic might ensure if the earthquake happens and their accurate prediction is unfortunately typical of the film:  it dilutes the impact of things to come by describing them in advance.

A sequence in a lift is claustrophobic but it’s the only one in the film that is.  The mayor warns the citizens of LA they’ll be on their own for several hours before outside help arrives but no real sense of their terrifying isolation comes through.  The strangers-thrown-together-by-fate theme fails here because the characters coincide through a clutter of chance encounters and nothing much develops from these.  It’s an amusing idea when Charlton Heston is having to try and save both his wife and his mistress, who are trapped together, but the idea is weakened when Heston and Ava Gardner both drown (he trying to save her), while Genevieve Bujold (whom Heston saves first) escapes.   The crisis-ridden lives of the principals are more exposed as padding more fully than usual because in Earthquake nearly everyone gets killed:  problems with relationships are resolved only through death.

The cinematographer Philip H Lathrop is a fine colourist.  He gives the oozing mud, following the apocalyptic bursting of a dam, into primeval slime – this gets across the idea of manmade creations being helpless against the forces of nature.   Several highlights are revolting.  A woman with a piece of glass sticking in her forehead screams in pain as she stares into the camera – although some of the ABC audience found this as hilarious as Marjoe Gortner’s vengefully gunning down three admittedly tiresome criminal neighbours.  A wailing mob of office workers in a lift plummet to earth:  their gory deaths are expressed in a few drops of blood, sprinkled onto the screen like a sample on a microscope slide.  The falls from skyscrapers are inferior to those in The Towering Inferno but then there are no flames.

An earthquake may sound on paper like a perfect subject for a disaster film.  It turns out to be too powerful a phenomenon because it renders humanity so defenceless.  In The Towering Inferno and Airport 1975, the stars’ attempts to escape had a spurious ingenuity that, although it pained me when I was watching those movies, I missed in Earthquake.  It’s pure chance if someone escapes with their life here – and, after all, there’s really no point having a star line-up if their celebrity doesn’t boost their chances of survival.   This film not only presents its characters’ ordeal with leering indifference; it also shows those characters to be unsympathetic.  In spite of the levelling, all-embracing nature of the quake, the people are concerned only for their own safety and that of their nearest and dearest.  Even a very pretty girl (Victoria Principal) goes into a devastated snack bar, steals doughnuts and tries to empty the till of cash.  ‘Earthquakes bring out the worst in …’ observes police sergeant George Kennedy, though he mumbled the last word of the line.  Maybe it was Hollywood.

The earthquake is preceded by a montage of portentously edited shots of the different characters in their different situations and bursts of John Williams’s crass score (ominous jingle-jangles, accelerating clusters of low piano notes).  After failing with the self-interest theme, Mark Robson belatedly and clumsily reverts to a more traditional disastrous approach.  In the closing stages, the film, with a screenplay by George Fox and Mario (The Godfather) Puzo, is thoroughly uncertain. After Heston and Gardner have drowned, there’s hardly anyone left – Gortner, Lorne Greene and, it seems, Roundtree having all perished too.  Earthquake ends for no better reason than that it lacks the personnel to continue.  With the qualified exception of Jaws, I’ve loathed all the recent disaster films, from The Poseidon Adventure onwards, but Earthquake is so mediocre that it’s uncomfortable to watch for other reasons.  I never expected to feel sorry for a film like this.

[1976]

[1] Afternote:  Wikipedia describes Sensurround as follows:  ‘ … the brand name for a process developed by Cerwin-Vega in conjunction with Universal Studios to enhance the audio experience during film screenings, specifically for the 1974 film Earthquake.  The process was intended for subsequent use and was adopted for four more films, Midway (1976), Rollercoaster (1977), the theatrical version of Saga of a Star World (1978), the Battlestar Galactica pilot, as well as the compilation film Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979).  Sensurround worked by adding extended-range bass for sound effects. The low-frequency sounds were more felt than heard, providing a vivid complement to onscreen depictions of earth tremors, bomber formations, and amusement park rides. The overall trend toward “multiplex” cinema structures presented challenges that made Sensurround impractical as a permanent feature of cinema’.