Good news is that I've discovered that there are good ones. The one
that popularized the genre and codified a few things about it, Airport (1970) isn't bad,
but it is pretty unspectacular. I think established a few things about
the genre: 1) large cast of established actors, 2) buncha little
interconnected stories following groups of same, 3) an attempt to open a
window into the day to day of concerned groups, like the people who
operate airports, or a cruise ship, 4) a disaster to drive drama. Airport
was also fairly cheap, but made 12x that at the box office. I suspect
this is the other thing: 5) they were super easy to adapt to TV, which
by that point for Airport was pure profit.
The framing disaster in Airport is not quite on, say, 2012's (2009)
level of catastrophe: the disaster is there's a big winter storm. That's
it, really. A 707 took a off runway excursion and is stuck, there's a
nice old lady who's really mastered the art of flying without a ticket,
Dean Martin is cheating on his wife and so is Burt Lancaster, presumably
lots of flights are delayed or cancelled and it's just playing hell
with the schedule. George Kennedy is a senior engineer at the airport,
and the danger he's in is the strain he's putting on his marriage having
to drive his gigantic 70s station wagon out to the airport to unfuck
this stuck airliner. Compared to the disaster movies that would follow,
(even other movies in the Airport series) Airport aims much more at
melodrama and a slice of life rather than danger. The climax of the
whole thing is when a veteran with mental health problems, played by Van
Helflin in his final movie role, attempts...well, to kill himself (and
quite possibly an entire airliner) with a bomb he made, having bought
tons of insurance for himself first. You can see the technical literacy
at work in that explosive decompression is really bad, but not instant
death.
If y'all are curious, go ahead, though if you want an aviation related disaster film from the period, I'd recommend Skyjacked
(1972) instead, starring Charlton Heston. It opens with the completely
correct process one takes off in a 707, and is filled with period flying
details I now find surreal (like not only there being a first class,
there being some sort of goddamn first class lounge in from of the
aircraft). Heston, in my opinion, is excellent as the Captain of the
airliner, and the villain is James Brolin as a mentally damaged
highjacker, and if we forget how it ends you can pretend this is the
third worst thing a young GW Bush did in the 1970s. There's a lot of
negative portrayals of the mentally ill in the 70s disaster films for
some reason; Skyjacked gets a pass simply because I think they add a lot
of depth to the Brolin character, and appeared to have actually given
his character a plausible, thought out mental illness.
The Poseidon Adventure follows the Airport formula to a T, but
I've never been able to get through it. I think it's because all the
things that I like in it are things that leave the movie post-disaster.
It starts with excellent model work (ships in particular work well for
models, because if you slow down the wave action sometimes it takes a
sharp eye to tell the difference) and Leslie Nielsen is the captain of
the ship, and he's so great in the role it annoys me that he dies. Not
only that, he made me laugh with his deadpan delivery of a weird
throwaway line, which is more than the rest of the movie can do. The
other thing I like is the late great Gene Hackman plays a role that
starts off promisingly weird: a priest of some denomination who has
decided Nietzsche was right, or similar. They of course do not run with
this, despite the idea of a Nietzschian priest mocking people's faith
during a disaster film being an amazing idea, and instead boil his
character down to completely generic hero.
So the movie loses those things, and I'm left with the fact that the
disaster makes no sense. Nielsen as captain is sailing the old-ass
Poseidon to the breakers (in Israel?) and this already throws a lot of
logic errors, like 'guys ships literally going to the breakers don't
carry passengers' and the owner of the ship being onboard, needling
Nielsen to do unsafe things to save money, when Nielsen as Captain has
total authority to tell the owner to eat shit, especially as the only
leverage the owner has over Nielsen is firing him, when this is
Nielsen's last voyage with the Poseidon and quite possibly with the
owner regardless. The thing that flips over the Poseidon is a tsunami,
and guys, tsunamis are only big waves near the shore. They would
pass unnoticed by Poseidon on the open ocean. With that sort of attitude
to facts, the surviving characters, all one note, can't do anything
entertaining, and I switch off.
Got an alternative rec here, too: The Last Voyage (1960)
starring Robert Stack. It's short, the drama is good, and to film it
they actually got a real ocean liner going to the breakers to use. This
allowed them to do things you couldn't otherwise, like having bulkheads
rupture by putting thousands of tons of water pressure on them, and
otherwise get a nicely authentic performance by exposing the cast to
situations OSHA would later object to.
Earthquake (1974) hews to the same structure, but in contrast, I think
is actually pretty good. It stars Charlton Heston, with a screenplay
co-wrote by Mario Puzo, and it does something clever: in a film called
Earthquake we know what is going to happen, and we know it is going to
happen after the characters get introduced. With the disaster itself out
of the way, the film is driven by all the various consequences to that
disaster, with a further disaster hanging over everyone, the collapse of
a dam that overlooks LA. It's a storytelling gambit that works, since
post earthquake there's an almost infinite amount of ways to kill off
the cast. Speaking of, there's a lot of entertaining deaths to go
around, too: the one that makes me laugh the most is the end of the LA
geology and seismology office, which for no reason has the WORST
earthquake proofing of anyplace in the movie. There's also the confusing
appearance of phosgene gas in an office building. (For those
that don't know, phosgene is a gas that in World War 1 was used as a
chemical weapon.) Lorene Green is shouting to his staff to block up the
air vents, which have an irritating white gas pouring out of them, and I
am triply confused. First, Green calls phosgene by name. Second, if
that is phosgene then I think your post-Earthquake adventures are going
to be brief. Third, why is phosgene pouring from the vents?!
Doing a little digging, The script actually had a sort-of logical
rationale as to how the gas was created, [the overcrowded elevator
crashes into the basement, starting a fire next to a ruptured Freon
tank, and fire plus freon does equal phosgene] but in context you might
think Office buildings of the 1970s just had schedule three chemical
weapons in the walls.
The characters, of course, are more thumbnail sketches than anything,
and I can't say I was rooting for the survival of anyone, or indeed will Heston leave his wife for Yvette Mimieux (yes, she's in
this, too) or not. I think compared to our previous movies, at least,
our thumbnail sketches attempt to contribute to the story instead of add
melodrama – at least for the male characters. Richard Roundtree is a
daredevil on a motorbike (now there's a career that I'm not sure ever
existed), and so he gets to experience the earthquake while on a
motorcycle on a rickety wooden ramp. Walter Matteau has a cameo as a
drunk in a LA bar at 9:30 in the morning, and I believe his character
survives just on the strength of his outfit.
eliable acting horse George Kennedy is here, too, playing a cop, and
he even gets a scene where he reminds us he's actually quite a good
actor and just just Uncle George. Richard Roundtree is a daredevil
who's stunt is actually interrupted by the big one, and Victoria
Principal is....a young hot woman in a wig? It strikes me now I don't
think any of the women characters achieve the bechdel orbit, and one of
them is Ava Gardner, who screams so loudly at one point I think she
might've given Charlton Heston tinnitus. The only negative is the
character who's message seems to be “look out for people with mental
health problems, because in a disaster they will start murdering people
who slighted them”, and who attempts to rape the bewigged Victoria
Principal even though he is introduced as a closeted gay man, real
economy of prejudice at work there.
Finally, the The Towering Inferno, (1974) which is, in my
opinion, the best of these movies. I think it is the movie that has aged
the best as well, as it keeps up a strong pace, has two leads who make
being a leading man look easy, the cat lives, and it seems to be the
hardest to track down if you want to see it. The movie was a
collaboration between Fox and Warner Bros, who were going to produce
separate yet similar disaster films, based on two different yet similar
books until the producer, Irwin Allen suggest they combine them. (Allen
was also the producer for The Poseidon Adventure, and both movies both share a writer: Stirling Silliphant.) I don't know if that dual ownership of The Towering Inferno
being harder to find; maybe the September 11th terror attacks have made
it play a bit different. One more shared production staff member is
John Williams who scored this movie and Earthquake, and also the
Poseidon Adventure. There are bits in Inferno that would remind me of bits in the original Star Wars. Next year he'd do the soundtrack for Jaws (1975), so the man was doing pretty well.
The plot is Newman has finished the World's tallest skyscraper in San
Francisco, and the developer is having a party of (presumably)
super-wealthy and important people. The Developer has a shitty son in
law, Richard Burton, who cut corners in the electrical system, which
will, of course, spark fire. The developer, of course, doesn't really
care that some sort of fire alarm was triggered many stories below,
which of course traps most of our ensemble characters. Heading the cast
are Paul Newman as the architect of the building-to-burn, and Steve
McQueen, veteran San Francisco Fire Chief. Both are seemingly effortless
at being the serious, sympathetic center of the film. Unlike the other
films here, the approach is a lot more modern – melodrama gets replaced
by just seeing how the characters act in a disaster. The other thing
that is more modern, is that most of the ensemble cast is going to die
horribly, one way or another. This cold blooded hand with actors we
recognize means events feel like they have a real weight to them; if In
fact, lots of people die in the fire in ways that sometimes seem odd
but also realistic, like at least one of the novel authors actually did
some research on real fire deaths.
The tower itself is decorated as the most mid-70s thing imaginable, and
the decor and clothing are all mid 1970s plastics and artificial
fabrics and whatnot - which to my eye looks about as fire resistant as a
rusty can of turpentine. The blame for the disaster is on Richard
Burton, shitty electrical engineer who tried to save money by building
everything 'to code' instead of as specified, who is basically there to
be the bad guy who we want to see horribly killed.
The way the fire actually starts is IMO hysterical: it's like a fire inspector's stress dream.
Inferno also does a good job at keeping the peril up, as some of the
methods of rescue are alarming, especially if you've any fear of
heights. The end you'd be forgiven for thinking the story was all about
how America got modern fire codes, but that's good for a laugh, too.
Anyway, this has been Long Day's Journey into Emotional Sterility. I can opine on The Last Boy Scout [1991] upon request-----
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