Ah, the 70’s. I lived through most of them, you know.
But while 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of my first experience in an indoor theater, seeing “The Muppet Movie” with Mom and Dad, I missed out on a lot of 70’s cinema. For example, the disaster movies. I imagine Mom kept me from seeing them when they made their way to TV because they were violent and…well…featured disasters. (Back in those days when a movie airing on TV featured the “parental discretion advised” disclaimer, parents generally used discretion.)
So this weekend I watched the Shout Select Blu Ray of “Earthquake”, a Universal Picture from 1974. Like other disaster movies (“The Poseidon Adventure”, “The Towering Inferno”, etc) “Earthquake” features an all-star cast…in this case Charlton “My Cold Dead Hands” Heston, Ava Gardner, Lorne Greene, and many more. The movie darts from story to story…the dam workers noticing hairline cracks, the building designer arguing with a client about making his building more quakeproof, the Evel Keneivel wannabe who has to borrow ten bucks from a cop to buy the sterno can to set his ring of fire ablaze, and so forth.
After taking a leisurely hour or so to set up all these plotlines, we finally get what we came for: the faultline! It collapses and kills a couple guys. Then, after a couple tiny tremors, The Big One®! And this is where “Earthquake” shines. The scenes depicting the earthquake and aftershocks are genuinely harrowing, and use every non-digital trick in the 1974 moviemaking book. Matte paintings, scale models, and just dumping massive amounts of debris on some very game actors and stuntpeople.
Now, on the extremely rare chance you intend to view “Earthquake”, I won’t spoil any of the plotlines. Save to say that a lot of people die. Which, honestly, is not all that surprising in the aftermath of a 9.0 quake.
Earlier I said I spent the weekend with this movie, which is kinda true; I watched the theatrical version Friday night, and earlier today I watched the “TV cut”. According to Wikipedia:
For the film’s television premiere on September 26, 1976 on NBC, additional footage was added to expand the film’s running time so it could be shown over two nights. This “television version” made no use of material left out of the theatrical release (save one brief scene featuring Victoria Principal and Reb Brown), but rather incorporated new footage filmed nearly two years after the original using two of the original film’s stars, Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal, as well as Jesse Vint and Michael Richardson (reprising their film roles of Marjoe Gortner’s taunting roommates), expanding on the original storyline from the theatrical film. Editing and re-recorded dialogue helped integrate this expansion into the original film. An entirely new storyline shot specifically for the television version was that of a young married couple (Debralee Scott and Sam Chew) flying to Los Angeles on an airplane.
This is how it used to be…Mom always looked forward to seeing “Gone With The Wind” on TV and it too was split over two nights. The new footage shot for the TV premiere of “Earthquake” looks cheap and is cheap. I had a feeling it would be…but curiosity killed the cat.
So what is my favorite part of “Earthquake”? Well, the earthquake scenes, obviously. But a very close second: Well, let me show you. Watch this scene and note the wacky drunk character:
Any movie that features Walter Matthau in a pimp hat is worthy of attention.
