Review: Earthquake

An Earthquake charting 7 on the Richter scale hits L.A. as we follow several of its eclectic inhabitants before and during the catastrophe. Charlton Heston plays an engineer (and former gridiron player) in the midst of an affair with an actress (Genevieve Bujold) whilst unhappily married to shrill Ava Gardner. Lorne Greene plays Gardner’s father (!) and Heston’s boss, Marjoe Gortner plays a bullied grocery store manager and National Guard NCO who has an unhealthy interest in pretty Victoria Principal. Richard Roundtree turns up as a stunt motorbike rider, and George Kennedy plays a grouchy but heroic cop. Lloyd Nolan plays a doctor, Barry Sullivan a seismologist. Walter Matthau has a recurring cameo as a sloppy drunk, credited here under what was supposed to be his real last name but turned out to be a dumb joke (It’s really Walter ‘Matthow’, not ‘Matthau’ and certainly not ‘Matuchanskayasky’ as credited here).

 

There weren’t too many films in the 70s all-star disaster movie genre that I’d go on record as saying were good, let alone great (“The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno” are my personal favourites). This 1974 offering is most certainly not one of the better ones. In fact, whilst almost all of the other films could be counted upon to take themselves at least half-way seriously, some seem to be dispensing with seriousness entirely here. Highly variable director Mark Robson (the effective chiller “Bedlam”, the camp misfire “Valley of the Dolls”) takes a potentially workable plot/gimmick and mixes stupidity and boredom with some very bad casting choices to boot. So he gives us an embarrassing recurring cameo by Walter Matthau as a drunk dressed like a pimp, as well as former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner hopelessly miscast as a psycho military pervert, the nadir of the film. Gortner had no business being here playing a bullied pervert and the film’s requisite unhinged character. Then we come to the truly bizarre pairing of 59 year-old Lorne Greene and 52 year-old Ava Gardner as father and daughter! Are you shitting me, movie? If all of that sounds too wacky not to be entertaining, I can assure you that this film is mostly a soap-opera slog. John Williams (“Jaws”, “Star Wars”, “Superman”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”) even obliges by delivering a forgettable soap opera score, and the film’s look is fairly dull too.

 

Even the normally reliable action man Charlton Heston looks rather disinterested at the helm of this one. His soap opera unhappy marriage to Ava Gardner is even weaker material than usual for this kind of thing. Poor Gardner is in latter-day Liz Taylor mode here and it’s not pretty to watch. George Kennedy, a veteran of the genre, has his moments, but also overacts outrageously at times too. As cool as “Shaft” is, not even Richard Rountree can fail to look silly in a yellow-and-black jumpsuit playing a wannabe Evel Knievel. He looks like a member of Stryper for crying out loud. Faring best is probably Genevieve Bujold, who looks to be trying hard to ground this thing in some kind of reality. Whether this is a good idea or not is up for debate. Otherwise, for a film set in and around Hollywood and featuring a bunch of people who should convince in such surrounds, almost nothing here remotely convinces. Even by disaster movie standards this thing is cartoony and thinly drawn. To be honest, even the line-up of ‘stars’ here is a bit thinner than most, with several TV actors and B-players filling up colourless functionary roles with rather dry, technical dialogue. You get Barry Sullivan, Lorne Greene, Lloyd Nolan, Donald Moffat, and several others. John Randolph probably fares the best of those as the city mayor, but otherwise it’s pretty dull stuff. Were all the top-drawer people working on “The Towering Inferno” at the time? Sullivan and Greene aren’t bad actors, but they are extremely dry actors delivering uninteresting, dry dialogue. At times it’s kind of like “The China Syndrome” made by hacks and dummies and drowning in talk, talk, talk. Even if you think it wasn’t such a bad idea to indulge in the sillier side of things, there’s not enough to laugh at here either (Unless seeing former evangelical Gortner hating on Hare Krishnas tickles your funny bone). Things pick up a bit once the carnage starts, and that stuff is quite well done for the time. However, by then you’ll likely have written this one off completely and you’ll have seen it done much better elsewhere. Also, it has to be said that for all the crumbling buildings we see, we sure don’t see a lot of road destruction which is rather odd.

 

The basic idea here was doable, but the effort from most seems incredibly lacking. Stiff, dull, and flagrantly miscast there’s not much fun to be had here in this cheap soap opera treatment. I love Walter Matthau, but he’s an embarrassment here in what seems like an inside joke that just isn’t funny. Even Charlton Heston seems to be going through the motions. Skip this one even if you’re a fan of the genre, though I guess it’s a bit better than “When Time Ran Out…” and “The Swarm”. Scripted by George Fox (his sole IMDb credit) and Mario Puzo (“The Godfather”, co-writer of “Superman”), the deflating ending sucks, too.

 

Rating: D+