D-RATED MOVIES

Inspired by the success of The Poseidon Adventure, the studios are now churning out what they call “crisis epics” or “blockbusters,” deftly avoiding the more appropriate term “disaster films,” since that might elicit sarcasm from reviewers. By whatever name, they are with us: Airport 1975, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and such cousins of the genre as Juggernaut and The Taking of Pel-ham One Two Three.

The social historian of the future will probably find the origins of the vogue of such movies in the malaise of the times, the ennui of a cynical body politic in a depressed economy. We were promised the apocalypse in the Sixties, but we’re getting tired of waiting, so let’s have it vicariously. The last time disaster spectacles had it going for them was the early Fifties, when an unpopular President was succeeded by a bland one, an unpopular war was ending in a stalemate, and economic security was uppermost in everyone’s mind. Remember Clifton Webb going down with the Titanic, Peter Ustinov fiddling while the back lot burned in Quo Vadis, or George Pal immolating the entire planet in When Worlds Collide? Of course, the studios are happy to cash in on the success of a formulaic film, one their writers can copy at the drop of a plot line, but perhaps to say that The Poseidon Adventure caused disaster films to become popular again is to mistake a symptom for the disease.

Unlike the disaster films of the Fifties, however, those of the Seventies hit us where we live. One could watch the Titanic sink or Rome burn in relative comfort, reassured by historical distance. The science-fiction apocalypses also had a reassuring air of the preventable or improbable about them, even Stanley Kramer’s well-meaning attempt to terrify us with atomic annihilation in On the Beach. The current films play more insidiously on the secret terrors of everyone who has ever flown in a plane, sailed on a ship, or taken an express elevator in a skyscraper. We are all prey to claustrophobia, acrophobia, and those manifold and unnameable phobias produced by the essential unreliability of technological civilization. Moving of the earth brings harms and fears in Earthquake, but the real monsters of the film are the freeways, the dams, the skyscrapers, the elevators, the concrete and steel and aluminum, the plate glass, the sewer systems and gas mains, the air conditioning, the power lines, and the rest of the cheap, shoddy, pretentious and uncontrollable urban environment. To be sure, the current films also give token knocks to authorities: politicians, bureaucrats, the shipping company that owns the Poseidon, the corporation executive who won’t buy Charlton Heston’s earthquake-proof buildings, even the academics of Earthquake who won’t believe a mere graduate assistant could predict catastrophe.



All of this begins to sound like the disaster picture is worth taking seriously. I’m afraid it isn’t, except in so far as it reveals something to us about ourselves, about our willingness to spend $3.50 to wallow in our private fears. Even the best of the genre, The Poseidon Adventure, is only gripping junk – effective despite its stale plot, shoddy production, and stupid dia-logue. Most of the best things about Poseidon are camp: its cliff-hanging situations, its comic-strip characterization, its hammy acting. But occasionally it also produces some memorable images, such as the encounter of the central group of survivors with a spectral group of survivors going -we know -the wrong way. In the end we don’t really care who survives, but we want to get the hell out of the ship ourselves-never mind that our escape route is really back up the aisle and past the popcorn stand. Shrewd filming gets the audience out of its seats and into the frame, and even audience wisecracks become defenses against the dreamlike terror of some of the film’s situations. The end of the film is in fact anti-climactic. One feels that all the wrong people have made it through. Better to succumb with Stella Stevens than survive with Carol Lynley.

Earthquake, on the other hand, is just ineptly filmed and rather boring junk. Its script sometimes lurches toward self-parody. (Ava Gardner to Charlton Heston: “Don’t lower your voice to me.” Or George Kennedy rescuing Victoria Principal from a fate worse than Marjoe Gortner: “Earthquakes bring out the worst in some guys.”) There are some glimmerings of a heavy-handed wit in the film: The opening moments of the earthquake are set in a movie theater, so that we watch a movie about an audience watching a movie as the quake begins, and do a momentary double-take to make sure those are filmed people rushing in panic toward a filmed exit. But the rest is dross. The characterizations are routine: We’ve seen Charlton Heston’s Strong Man Forced to Choose Between Love (Genevieve Bujold) and Duty (his marriage to the boss’s daughter, Ava Gardner) before, and George Kennedy must be getting tired of playing the Cop with a Quick Temper But a True Heart. Some interest is generated by Marjoe Gortner’s grocery-store-clerk Dr. Jekyll become National Guardsman Mr. Hyde, and by Richard Roundtree’s shabby would-be motorcycle daredevil. But they seem to be carrying messages that the script never gets around to delivering. None of the acting has the juice of Shelley Winters or Stella Stevens in Poseidon. Genevieve Bujold tries to act, but gets upstaged by the special effects department. Ava Gardner, who is roughed up more by the hairdresser and the costumer than by the earthquake, plays the bitchwife as if she’d seen too many of Elizabeth Taylor’s recent films.

No one expects literature or drama from a super-spectacle, but Earthquake’s spectacle isn’t all that hot. The film pretends that Los Angeles (which was more spectacularly destroyed by the Martians in War of the Worlds back in 1953) is about the size of Waco in order to keep the paths of its characters crisscrossing, but it fails to achieve the eerie sense of entrapment that kept us fighting to get out of the Poseidon. It plagiarizes from The Poseidon Adventure in some of its stunts: The scene of the man falling spread-eagled through the stained-glass ceiling of the Poseidon’s inverted ballroom is copied in Earthquake. It tries to steal a march on The Towering Inferno with a skyscraper rescue sequence, but like so much of the movie, this bit is ineptly filmed. The camera fails to establish a sense of the height or the precariousness of the position of the rescuers. An elevator disaster is so jumpily cut, with so many shifting camera angles, that the final frame of the sequence had to be splotched with a blood-red pattern to establish that the people in the elevator have indeed plummeted to death.

Finally, Earthquake tries out a gimmick called “Senssurround,” a souped-up sound system which whooms a heavy bass rumble into the theater. It gave me a headache, but it also took the audience out of the absorbing privacy of their own terrors into a community of awareness that after all, this is only a movie. Rather than being caught up in the action, the audience spends its time wishing the racket would stop and looking for its source.

Well, that’s why the studios don’t call them disaster films. But nothing I, or any reviewer, can do could prevent Earthquake from makingmoney. Like most of the films in itsgenre, it’s a carnival ride rather thana work of art. If you are turned on byspecial effects and by fake carnage,even the third-rate thrills of Earthquake will suffice. But let me plead foraudience responsibility as a counterto the industry’s venality. A fewweeks before this particular disaster,and the equally banal and inept Airport 1975 opened, Richard Lester’stight, witty, and suspenseful Juggernaut shone for a very few days on thescreens of several of the city’s moreremote and uncomfortable theaters. Isaw it among the teeny:boppers ofRichardson, who spent more time inthe aisles than in their seats. Although Juggernaut isn’t strictlyspeaking a disaster film, it showswhat an intelligent director can dowith a healthy budget, a big cast, anda conventional suspense plot. If thedistributors, the money-grubbers whospeed good films like Altman’sThieves Like Us quickly through Dallas and leave trash like The Exorcistrunning interminably, ever let us seeJuggernaut again, or if you can catchit at a film society or on the tube, seeit, learn something about how goodmovie-making works, and thumbyour nose at the hacks and flacks ofthe movie business.