EARTHQUAKE: Blu-ray reissue (Universal, 1974 ) Shout! Factory

Disaster was big business in the 1970's; the ‘people in peril’ scenario carried to its zenith and extreme in Irwin Allen’s 1972 smash, The Poseidon Adventure, followed two years later by Allen’s opus magnum, The Towering Inferno (1974). The formula was hardly new. In the late 1930’s, Hollywood had put its best foot forward on such immortal all-star catastrophes as San Francisco (1936), The Hurricane (1937) and The Rains Came (1939). Then, however, the focus remained more on the people than special effects; the nature of disaster situated as a dramatic high point rather than the crux of the melodrama. 1970’s disaster movies were something quite different; a chance to resurrect the glam-bam glitter of old-time talent desperate to work in an industry that had already experienced its own seismic shift a scant decade before, the tremors, toppling the old studio system and last gasp of the establishment still being sincerely mourned throughout Hollywood. The new Hollywood that replaced this starlit mecca was grittier, more direct in its approach, less willing to take a gamble, and far more ready to pull the trigger on gratuitous sex or the never tiresome fallback – uber-violence – to get people back into theaters. But there were still those eager to see the cultural touchstones from the old regime – namely, its stars – pull themselves together for one last hurrah. If these cheers came with a modicum of nudity, a brutal fist fight and/or race through the streets – either on foot or by various modes of mechanized transportation – and could also be counted upon to place such familiar faces in peril; all the better for box office. Yet, there is something faintly grotesque about this inhuman desire to witness our own demise at the movies; our uncanny fascination with self-destruction, fairly reeking of bizarre voyeurism.

Producer, Irwin Allen implicitly understood this cruel self-infliction and delighted in making his audience sweat out every last drop of dread by creating carefully plotted nail-biting labyrinths into which some very top-flight talent was put through the rigors of survival of the fittest. The key to a successful disaster epic, particularly one from the seventies was in this careful balance, establishing characters one could root for, and, then, having the disaster (natural or man-made) pick them off – one at a time – terrorizing the remaining survivors and, in tandem, the audience, eager to see if their faves made it out alive. Rather tragically, this premise is not entirely licked in Mark Robson’s Earthquake (1974) since, an earthquake – even the proverbial ‘big one’ - cannot be sustained for much longer than a few moments on the screen, leaving the plot of Earthquake – the movie – rather vacant for long stretches before and after this cataclysm. What we are left with then are bookends of melodrama. Regrettably, the Mario Puzo/George Fox screenplay is a silly little soap opera, dedicated to embittered spouses, surly drunkards, emasculated dreamers and dewy-eyed lovers torn asunder; all of them, experiencing a ground-breaking (literally) moment of realization their lives are relatively small in comparison to the unexpected wrath of Mother Nature and will likely never be the same again. Arguably Earthquake – the movie – would have worked much better had it taken its cue from San Francisco (1936); a film celebrating that particular city and the star-crossed machinations of a pair of mismatched lovers (played by Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald) who ultimately realize the strength in sentiment and their importance to each other through surviving the spectacular 1906 quake that leveled the city. Set in the then present, Robson’s Earthquake is trying too hard to be cut from the same tapestry as Irwin Allen’s aforementioned disaster classics; its star-studded roster mimicking both The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.

The only problem is that unlike either of these movies, Earthquake does not take place within the confined spaces, but across the whole expanse of southern California – centralized for the film as downtown Los Angeles with a few visual nods downwind to Hollywood. This spread, or lay of the land, is too vast; the disheveled and the displaced, left to wander these various crumbling streets and caved in byways in their feeble, tear-stained and bloodied disorientation, either with altruistic or cutthroat motives. The latter third of Earthquake is also heavily mired in vigilantism. There is another problem with Earthquake; chiefly its roster of stars. Most are woefully underutilized.  Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene and Walter Matthau are great actors. But you would never guess it by watching Earthquake. Geneviève Bujold probably gives the most heartrending performance in the movie. Yet, even her’s lacks the soul of conviction to keep us interested in what happens to her character or that of her young son (played by Tiger Williams). And then there are the cringe-worthy misfires; Richard Roundtree’s brutally bad ‘jive-talkin’ heroism as a sort of failed Evel Knievel; George Kennedy’s bitter cop transformed into a blubbering mass of contradictions, and, Victoria Principal, as an afro-wearing bimbette more concerned her wig and form-fitting polyester ensembles remain relatively wrinkle-free throughout the deluge as she coos and cowers from the peripheries of the screen.

Because the quake hits roughly in the middle of the movie we are afforded far too much time with these characters, easily allowing us to pick apart their inherent flaws. Blame the George Fox/Mario Puzo screenplay here; so inarticulately cobbled together, it barely holds our interest in-between tremors. Ava Gardner’s shrillness as the brittle/scorned middle-aged frump wears paper thin almost from the moment her character appears. Charlton Heston treats his performance as though at any moment he might part the Pacific with a wave of his hand. Lorne Greene has an even greater difficulty maintaining his composure in character without the fertile backdrop of a sprawling Ponderosa to back him up. What we are left with then, is ‘the quake’ – rather spectacularly staged in Sensurround, a then newly branded monophonic process developed by Cerwin-Vega in conjunction with Universal to enhance the audio experience by adding extended-range bass acoustics to sound effects. These lower frequencies caused the floors in older theaters to vibrate underfoot, thus creating a heightened – if gimmicky – sense of realism.  Under Frank Brendel’s command, most of the matte work in Earthquake is exceptional. During the last third of the story Earthquake also attempted – rather inanely – to create a dam-busting deluge – done in miniature, but with cutaways that neither heighten the impact, nor came to anything in the final edit; the waters from the crippled Mulholland Dam never reaching the already beleaguered city, but merely filling underground sewers where several key survivors are trapped.

After some impressive aerial shots of L.A. with Hollywood in the background, lensed by Philip H. Lathrop, we settle into the feuding and fussing of one Stewart Graff (Charlton Heston) and his significant other, Remy Royce (Ava Gardner); a socialite harpy, prone to threats of suicide because she suspects her husband is fooling around. Stu has just returned from his morning jog and is in the process of topping off his workout with some resistance training when Remy barges in. Long since unmoved by his wife’s constant badgering, Stewart takes a shower and prepares for work, discovering Remy unconscious with an empty bottle of pills nearby. But before he can induce vomiting, a violent tremor rattles their bedroom and Remy’s nerves. No, she is not dead – just faking – the pills, neatly tucked under her pillow. Stewart is not impressed. We shift focus with the briefest of purpose or motivation; first, to the nearby Mulholland Dam where a worker (Clint Young) on a routine inspection is drowned inside one of the drainage shafts filled with water after the tremor – an ominous prelude to the movie’s penultimate flood sequence. Next, its’ on to downtown Hollywood where Sgt. Lou Slade (George Kennedy) and his partner Emilio Chavez (Armendáriz, Jr.) are in hot pursuit of a suspect. The chase ends badly (actually, in the front hedges of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house…no, really!). Back at the precinct, County Sheriff's Deputy (George Sayawa) chews out Lou for the mishap and Lou, a hothead with a very short fuse, knocks him on his proverbial pride. In his own defense, Lou tries to justify his actions by explaining to his supervisor (Lonny Chapman) how the suspect he was pursuing had stolen a car and even run over 6-year old Mexican girl without stopping: all very convincing – except Lou is still placed on temporary suspension.

On his way to work Stewart decides to play ‘weekend daddy’ by popping in on Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), his lover and an actress who is also a widow with a young son, Corry (Tiger Williams). In the meantime, panic alarms have begun to go off at the California Seismological Institute after junior staffer, Walter Russell (Kip Niven) has calculated Los Angeles is on a collision course with ‘the big one’ destined to hit the city in the next few days. Too bad Dr. Frank Adams (Bob Cunningham), the chief seismologist, has already discovered this for himself, having been buried alive by another tremor while out in the valley conducting research. Acting supervisor, Dr. Willis Stockle (Sullivan) stubbornly refuses to place the city on high alert, suggesting that if Russell’s predictions are wrong the institute will lose its funding. He also points to the obvious panic of an unorganized full-scale evacuation of L.A. This would be as devastating as the quake itself. Instead, Stockle places the National Guard and police on high alert to help deal with the fallout.  Moving on: Rosa Amici (Victoria Principal) has reached the checkout of her local grocery store, only to realize she does not have enough money to pay for her items. The benevolent manager, Jody Joad (Marjoe Gortner) insists Rosa keep her things. She can make up the difference the next time she shops. Learning of the mobilization of the National Guard, Jody hurries to his dilapidated boarding house to change into his NCO uniform. A bit of ridiculous gay-bashing ensues from his housemates shortly thereafter. We now shift gears to a seedy downtown watering hole where Lou has ambitions to get stinking drunk next to a resident wino (Walter Matthau). 

Aspiring daredevil, Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), his manager, Sal Amici (Gabriel Dell) and Rosa convince Lou to a loan of $50 so Quade can perfect a new motorcycle stunt. In the meantime, the previous tremor has cancelled Denise’s photo shoot. So, she decides to surprise Stewart at work. With presumably nothing else but free time on his hands, Stu takes Denise back to her place where they make love. Later, he invites her and Corry to spend the summer with him in Oregon where he has been assigned to oversee a new development project. It’s all so perfect – except Stu’s boss, Sam Royce (Lorne Greene) also happens to be his father-in-law, with a wily penchant for keeping his spoiled daughter happy. He is even willing to hand over the presidency of his company to Stu at a moment’s notice just so their crumbling marriage will not end in divorce. The offer has merit. But all of it goes out the window when Stu spied Remy coming up the stairs. Has she orchestrated the whole thing just to keep her hooks in him? It would appear that way. So, Stu, in big-dumb-male chest-thumping mode, storms out of the office, pursued by Remy into the street. There, mercifully, the major quake suddenly strikes to shut them up. In its ‘every man’ – and woman – for him/herself scenario, Earthquake suddenly shifts into high gear for a fleeting nine minutes of unparalleled mayhem. Buildings crumble, gas lines rupture, and, water mains break, roads crack, church steeples topple, cars drive off the suspended highway, and, a hapless populace flees on foot in all directions. Rosa, who had gone to the movies to see High Plains Drifter is nearly trampled by the panicked theater patrons, her pointless stumbling about the streets, while everything comes crashing down around her, making one wish a big chunk of brick and mortar would just put her out of her misery. The quake also destroys Quade’s stunt track and flattens a bridge over a spill way that Corry was riding his bike across, leaving the child unconscious.

The rest of Earthquake is basically a tale of survival with a few truly silly oddities along the way. Together with Stewart, Sam manages to rescue many of his employees before he suffers a fatal heart attack (shades of Shelley Winters from The Poseidon Adventure). Denise discovers her son lying on the ground near some live high voltage wires and, after crawling down to him via the damaged bridge, gets Quade and Sal to assist in their rescue moments before the spill way floods from water being diverted from nearby Mulholland Dam.  In what is perhaps the movie’s most overblown and undernourished subplot, Rosa is arrested for nibbling on a donut inside a ruined diner. Having been made a Sergeant in the National Guard, Jody separates Rosa from the rest of the detainees, but then inexplicably turns homicidal when another faction of the Guard arrives with his former housemates as prisoners. With a psychotic vengeance, Jody executes all of them, presumably to avenge his wounded pride for having endured their long-time gay-baiting and bullying. Terrified, Rosa now recognizes she hasn’t been rescued so much as she is being taken prisoner. 

Stewart goes in search of Denise and Corry, picking up Lou along the way. The two just happen to stumble upon Jody and Rosa. She attempts to getaway. But Jody holds Stewart and Lou at gun point until they agree to leave the scene. Later, Lou doubles back, thwarting Jody’s rape of Rosa and killing him in self-defense. Stewart hears on the radio that an aftershock has destroyed Wilson Plaza where he left Remy and Sam. Now, he hurries to the scene with Lou and Rosa in tow. Together they perform a perilous rescue of survivors still trapped in one of the underground parking garages, using a jackhammer to blast their way into an air pocket. Too little/too late the Mulholland Dam gives way, its raging waters filling the underground sewer system. Denise and Corry survive. But Remy and Stewart are swept away. The film ends with Lou surveying the wreckage – a smoldering ruins in utter decay; an apocalyptic finale to what has already degenerated into a badly worn downer.

As pure entertainment, Earthquake is truly ‘disastrous’ – its storytelling a veritable claptrap of mangled melodrama. Characters come and go, none making much of an impact beyond their cardboard cutout characterizations.  Given that a lot of the film’s run-time is wasted on telling each person’s back story, the rather cartoonish handling of the drama remains the picture’s most grotesquely undernourished curiosity.  Perhaps the fault is in the performance, although I suspect the screenplay to be the chief culprit here. It is dull, uninspired and episodic at best, moving its stars about the desolate post-quake landscape like chess pieces who have mislaid their ‘connect-the-dots’ scenarios, foundering with even less connective motivations between each sequence. The silliest moment is undeniably Rosa’s capture by Jody. In her afro-wig, Victoria Principal – an actress of extremely limited talent, whom writer, Gore Vidal once suggested needed to read at least one hundred books, just to be considered lowbrow – becomes a figure of pure camp. Is Rosa really that dumb or is Principal just so naïve as to play her more vacant than woozy from the aftershocks of just having survived a fate worse than death? George Kennedy does not do the finale any favors by staving off emotions he is incapable of expressing. It is also very sad to see actors like Lloyd Nolan looking doleful as a little lost puppy and reduced to mere quips, presumably to express the pervasive sense of loss everyone is feeling.  No, Earthquake doesn’t work at all. At 129 minutes, it outstays its welcome by at least 120. Its chief marketing feature – the quake – lasts a mere 9 minutes. Buried somewhere under this rubble of wasted opportunities is director, Mark Robson’s wounded pride. Robson’s illustrious pre-Earthquake career included such classics as The Seventh Victim (1943), Home of the Brave (1949), The Harder They Fall (1956), Peyton Place (1957) and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958). In this company, Earthquake appears even more the colossal bad joke to have been made by another, less accomplished film maker entirely. If you are looking to get the shakes, try Dante’s Peak (1997) or even San Andreas (2015). 

Shout! Factory’s ‘Select’ Blu-ray gets more than a passing grade. The 1080p rendering of the theatrical cut is, first and foremost, the identical presentation as the one Universal previously released to hi-def four years ago, despite being advertised by Shout! as a ‘new 2K scan’. The good news here is that both are ‘first rate’ mastering efforts, with solid contrast and excellent color density and overall saturation, with a light smattering of film grain looking very indigenous to its source, and, a modicum of fine details emerging throughout. A few of the matte shots still look obvious, particularly close-ups of Heston as he makes perilous tries to rescue Sam and others trapped inside the office building. Here, color looks slightly off – the backdrop strangely purplish, with grain advancing to a level grossly out of register with the rest of the visuals. Earthquake won an Oscar for its sound mix and Shout! has loving preserved Uni’s ‘Sensurround’ experience on Blu-ray where, I must admit, it still manages to pack an aggressive wallop in the subwoofer - in for a work out…well…at least for 9 minutes. There is also a re-purposed 5.1 DTS and a 2.0 mono mix. The old Universal release provided us with no extras, but Shout!’s reissue lays on the goodies – thick. The biggest ‘extra’ is the television cut of Earthquake (contained on a second disc), that included 20 extra minutes of footage, expressly created for its TV debut.

While the theatrical cut is in Panavision 2.25:1, the TV version is cropped to then standard 1.33:1. A word about the TV version – its awful. Setting aside the obvious fact, that in 1.33:1 you are missing half of the action, colors herein are sorely faded – especially in the scenes shot for TV. Age-related dirt is present, contrast is poor, and overall, the movie is even less appealing at a glance than it was on the big screen. On Disc One we get original trailers, TV and radio spots for the movie, plus vintage interviews with Heston, Greene and Roundtree; also, a fairly comprehensive stills gallery.  Disc Two contains several newly produced extras, exclusive to this release: Sounds of Disaster – a tutorial on Sensurround, Scoring Disaster (addressing John Williams’ score), Painting Disaster – an homage to matte artist extraordinaire, Albert Whitlock, and the extra 20 minutes, isolated from the TV version, ‘taken from the best surviving elements.’ Bottom line: Earthquake – the movie – is good for either a snooze or a laugh, though not much else. Shout! Select’s release will satisfy those seeking to know everything and anything about making a very cheesy ‘bad’ movie. Buy if you dare. Treasure if you can. Forgettable and flubbed to a fault. But hey…to each his/her own.  

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

Theatrical – 4

TV Version – 2.5

EXTRAS

4.5