Earthquake (1974)

Official trailer

Earthquake is the second-best disaster film of 1974. The Towering Inferno is the best. Both films defined what the disaster genre would be for the next fifty years and Earthquake’s specific contribution was the realization that you could make a movie out of a city falling down and not need a plot more complicated than that. Mark Robson directed it. Charlton Heston plays Stewart Graff, a stagnant engineer. Ava Gardner plays his wife. George Kennedy plays a cop. Lorne Greene plays Heston’s father-in-law. Geneviève Bujold plays the affair.

Walter Matthau plays the drunk in the bar, billed under the joke name Walter Matuschanskayasky. The script was co-written by Mario Puzo. I have a soft spot for this movie. It’s big, loud and a little dumb, and it knows exactly what it’s for, so the moment the ground starts moving I’m happy. The first hour tests me, and that’s the reservation that keeps it at an 8, but the destruction is so committed that I forgive a lot.

Universal Pictures premiered the film in Sensurround. It was the studio’s name for theater speakers that vibrated the chairs at the right frequencies. The decision to deliver an earthquake to the audience as a physical experience instead of just an audiovisual one was the kind of theatrical innovation studios used to attempt before home video made the theater experience replaceable. Original audiences felt the floor shake.

The Earthquake

The disaster sequence is well-staged for its era.

Practical miniatures, real building collapses, careful editing to suggest scale that the budget couldn’t directly produce. The Hollywood Reservoir dam sequence is the famous set piece. Real water cascades through real miniature streets. The cinematography by Philip H. Lathrop tracks the destruction with a journalistic eye that most later disaster films have abandoned for stylized chaos.

The dam sequence is the reason I’d sit down with this film again. Real water pouring through real miniatures has a weight that no computer flood has matched for me, and Lathrop’s plain, newsreel way of shooting it makes it scarier.

The film doesn’t stint on death. People die. The audience sees them die.

Children die. Heroes die. The third-act dam failure kills off characters the audience expected to survive. The willingness to kill audience favorites is part of what made the film feel like a real disaster instead of an action movie with disaster as background.

The Soap Opera

The pre-earthquake first hour is a soap opera.

Heston’s marriage is unhappy, he’s having an affair with Bujold, Gardner is suspicious, Lorne Greene is plotting and George Kennedy’s cop is in trouble at his precinct. The threads don’t connect to each other in any meaningful way. They simply exist until the earthquake reorganizes them, and I’d happily lose twenty minutes of it.

This was the disaster film template. Establish a half-dozen disconnected characters with personal problems, then have the disaster cut through all the personal problems and force the characters to deal with survival instead. The technique works because the audience comes to care about the characters they’re about to watch die. It’s not subtle and it doesn’t need to be.

The Performances

Heston is in his late-career mode. Stoic, competent, slightly tired of being Charlton Heston. He plays the engineer as a man whose professional life has surpassed his personal life and who knows it. Ava Gardner, in one of her last major roles, is given a thin part and commits to it completely. George Kennedy plays the cop the way George Kennedy plays cops, meaning very well.

Kennedy is my favorite thing in the film. He plays the cop with a big, tired decency that has me rooting for him every time he’s on screen, and he makes the soap opera stretch easier to sit through. The supporting cast is large and uneven. Some of the disconnected subplots work. Some don’t, and the film doesn’t much care because it knows that once the ground shakes, all of these people are going to be running.

Does Earthquake still hold up?

8/10. It’s the defining disaster film of the 1970s alongside The Towering Inferno and a textbook example of the genre. The Sensurround experience is gone, but the destruction sequences and the willingness to kill its leads still work on me, and they’re why it gets the 8. The draggy first hour is why it doesn’t climb higher. Watch it as a double feature with The Towering Inferno.

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