EARTHQUAKE — ...Or, What Not to Do When Disaster Happens to You
Director: Mark Robson
Writers: George Fox, Mario Puzo
Music: John Williams
Actors: Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy (of course), Lorne Greene, Geneviève Bujold, Richard Roundtree, Marjoe Gortner, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Victoria Principal, Monica Lewis, Pedro Armendáriz Jr., Donald Moffat, Walter Matthau (cameo)
Run Time: 123 mins | Country: USA | Release Date: November 15, 1974
Best Uses: Summer outdoor screening in open area of a park, like a soccer field or a baseball diamond, with no tall trees nearby.
I'm not sure why I had a sudden craving for an earthquake disaster movie this week, but with the ongoing COVID pandemic and after four years of living under the acid and vinegar dictatorship of Donald Trump, I guess I just wanted to watch a bunch of people who were having an even worse time than I was.
As is customary in a disaster film, EARTHQUAKE presents us with an array of characters who are living their everyday lives before the disaster strikes. These lives happen to be lived in Los Angeles, California. Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner are having marital problems, partly because Charlton is flirting with the idea of running off with Geneviève Bujold, a recently-widowed single mom and struggling actress who's just landed a small role in a film.
(I had been looking forward to seeing Ava Gardner in EARTHQUAKE, but she is given little to do aside from throwing fits in which she whips her wig around and spews lines like, "God DAMN you!" in that overly-dramatic way that classic Hollywood stars of the '40s and '50s did in the 1970s, when they could finally let loose with the on-screen profanity that had been building up inside them for decades.)
Lorne Greene is the head honcho at the company Charlton Heston is working for (doing something-or-other...I forget), and he is also Ava Gardner's father. That's right. Born in 1915, Lorne Greene was just seven years old when he fathered little Ava, who was born the day before Christmas in 1922. In the scenes in which Ava addresses Lorne as "Father..."—even though we haven't yet had a chance to do any research about their ages online—we still know intuitively that something is wrong. It's hard to imagine that this sense of something being "off" in these scenes wasn't hanging heavily in the air on the set. One can only assume that everybody was just too damn scared to inform movie-star diva Ava Gardner that the role of her father would need to be recast for Charlie Chaplin, age 85.
George Kennedy is a renegade police officer forced to take a leave of absence after inadvertently destroying Zsa Zsa Gabor's hedges in a car chase; Richard Roundtree is a motorcycle daredevil preparing to demonstrate his skills on a loop-de-loop course in hopes of wowing a talent scout booking new shows for Las Vegas; Barry Sullivan must have been one of the elderly experts wringing their hands over the forecast of pending doom...but I'm not sure which one, since I don't think I'd seen him in anything since "Queen Bee" back in 1955.
Marjoe Gortner plays a grocery clerk-turned-executioner (more on that later) who takes Victoria Principal hostage, and Victoria Principal does very little in this film aside from being taken hostage. I saw Victoria's name in the opening credits, but then didn't recognize her at all in the film. I guess I was expecting her to look like she did in the Jhirmack commercials of the early 1980s, but instead she looked like this. Walter Matthau has a cameo as a drunkard, supposedly to provide some comic relief, though failing at both.
None of that really matters, I know. The real star of this movie is the earthquake! The doggone thing goes on for about eight minutes and fifteen seconds, not counting the aftershocks. (I looked it up and learned that a 9.0 earthquake could indeed run somewhere between eight to ten minutes.) In the film it seemed excruciatingly long. A new sound system was developed for the release of this film—a system that literally shook the theater to simulate an actual earthquake! It even cracked the plaster when EARTHQUAKE was screened at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I couldn't help but wonder what sonic effect the system would produce every time Ava Gardner snapped her wig.
During this 8-plus minutes of shaking, we see lots of people who were formerly indoors go running outside into the downtown streets of Los Angeles, where they are then conked on the head by falling chunks of cement or by deadly shards of glass from atop the city's buildings. Seismologists race toward bookcases which proceed to fall upon them; we see Geneviève's innocent young son on his bike as he is thrown into an irrigation canal and is then in urgent need of rescue; we see a truckload of cows go careening over the side of a freeway ramp; we watch as the famous Capitol Records building is slowly reduced to rubble...and we see the Mulholland Dam begin to crack. All of this is very exciting.
The aftermath of the quake is peppered with aftershocks, and we see both the best and the worst of humanity on display. The best: George Kennedy redeems himself after destroying Zsa Zsa's shrubbery by organizing survivors to assist the townsfolk who are trapped under rubble. The worst: Looters! Well, three of them...and they're hippies. You would probably assume that LA. looters would have a bunch of car stereos or maybe even cold hard cash stashed in their looters' suitcase, but actually it seems they've raided the jewelry case at Granny's Attic Thrift Store. Their case is filled to capacity with strings of pearls and brooches! The looters are subsequently shot dead by Gortner, who has been called to civilian patrol duty and is now wildly drunk with his newfound power. The scene is preposterous, even by this script's exceedingly low standards, and would have been better left on the cutting room floor.
A special shout-out goes to Monica Lewis, who plays Barbara, the office secretary to bosses Charlton and Lorne. She is monumentally dedicated to her work, even when disrespected by her male colleagues in times of extreme crisis. First she is shoved out of the office elevator when trying to escape the quake with the others (this actually turns out to be a good thing); then when the stairwell comes to an abrupt end and they need something elastic to use as a makeshift seat-belt for the office chair they'll be lowering to evacuate people to relative safety below, Lorne screams at her (yet again?), "Barbara! Take off your pantyhose, damn it!" Once they've finally lowered the ailing Lorne Greene to safety, Charlton's mind turns to his mistress. He's concerned about her, sure, but he's just not accustomed to making these types of phone calls for himself. After all, that's what secretaries are for. "Barbara! Do you know Denise Marshall?" (yes) "See if you can get to a phone; find out if she's alright!" Barbara asks the obvious, since even the stairs are currently out of order: "Are the phones working?" Charlton: "Try! Please!!" "Okay," Barbara answers breathlessly as she dashes off to find a phone. Poor Barbara.
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