Earthquake (1974, Mark Robson)

Collapsing old buildings.

My Disaster Blasters series continues! Previously, we looked at The Poseidon Adventure and The Horror at 37,000 Feet. Next time, we’ll wrap up this series with The Towering Inferno.

Inevitably, there are spoilers here. Read with care. Thanks!

What is it? Earthquake, directed by Mark Robson, written by George Fox and Mario Puzo, and starring Charlton Heston, George Kennedy, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree, Genevieve Bujold, Marjoe Gortner, Victoria Principal, Kip Niven, and introducing Walter Matuschanskayasky as Drunk.

First viewing? No; in the Letterboxd era, I watched it on 24 June 2021, 28 February 2024, and 28 January 2025. Prior that, seen countless times on HBO in the ’80s.

What’s it about? When the Big One hits Los Angeles, architect Graff (Heston), actress Denise (Bujold), suspended cop Slade (Kennedy) and daredevil Miles (Roundtree) must rescue others and themselves from the resulting destruction, all while the Mulholland Dam threatens to burst and drown the city

What are your thoughts about it? In his book Nightmare Movies, novelist and critic Kim Newman wrote about Jaws and its influence, “All sharks do is eat, keep moving and make little sharks. All [Jaws] does is bite, keep scary and make little sharks.” As The Poseidon Adventure was the highest grossing movie of 1973¹, its success all but guaranteed the disaster movie trend would continue. Since then, there’s been The Hindenburg (1975), Avalanche (1978), City on Fire (1979), The Day After (1983), Daylight (1996)², Volcano (1997), Dante’s Peak (1997), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), Geostorm (2017), and Greenland (2020), just to skim some titles off the top. All The Poseidon Adventure does is flip over, keep exciting and make little disasters.

The Poseidon Adventure’s first official spawn³ was 1974’s Earthquake. It’s a dumb, clumsy film, one that is pulled in so many directions it barely seems to know what it’s doing half the time. What it wants to do is clear: be the next Poseidon Adventure. Every attempt it makes in that direction, fails in one way or another.

POLICE SQUAD, in C * O * L * O * R

It wants to have a star-studded cast. What it’s got is Charlton Heston (reportedly for the sum of $600k), up and comer Richard Roundtree, hot off Shaft, and then… Ava Gardner, ten years on from The Night of the Iguana, Lorne Greene, just off Bonanza, and… George Kennedy? I guess? Genevieve Bujold and Victoria Principal’s careers would later bloom, and ex-preacher (and Against the ’70s icon) Marjoe Gortner’s wouldn’t, but no one was there to see them. Now, is it fair to compare the two via cast list? Gene Hackman had just won Best Actor for The French Connection, but otherwise I doubt Ernest Borgnine and Shelley Winters got butts into seats. (Then again, it was 1972, so who knows.) No, the casts are about the same; Earthquake’s might even be a smidge better. Yet, there is a discrepancy, and I think it comes from how these casts are used, how the screenwriters structured their stories. TPA keeps its core cast together as a single group; they, rather than any one individual, becomes our empathetic focal point. Earthquake splits its story into slices, with Heston, Kennedy and Gortner with the main stories, and Bujold with a secondary story. Roundtree starts with his own story, but the film soon abandons it, while giving tertiary characters like Kip Niven’s seismologist and Scott Hyland’s dam caretaker prominent chunks of screentime, despite their narrative insignificance. (They’re the disaster movie equivalent of the politicians and generals who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards and talk about What’s to be done with this Godzilla.) The constant context shifting is tiring, and when characters start crossing over into each other’s slices, there’s less frisson and more finally.

For real, if you told me this was from DAMNATION ALLEY, I wouldn’t have questioned it.

It wants to have spectacle; the definition of disaster movie is spectacle. And it has that, for sure — maybe more than it can chew. The Big One doesn’t occur until about 57 minutes in, but once it does… if you came for an earthquake, buddy, you’re gonna get an earthquake. The film won a Special Achievement Award⁴ for Visual Effects at that year’s Academy Awards, but it may as well have been for Most Visual Effects. Over the final hour, skyscrapers collapse, freeways collapse, a dam collapses, houses collapse, houses explode, houses tumble down hills, elevators fall, people fall, people get swept away by fierce waters, people are buried under concrete and other shit, fires rage, and throughout all this, desperate rescues are attempted. The film must’ve been the most effect-intensive Hollywood production at the time. But there’s so many individual effects that the quality gets spread around unevenly. The miniatures look good, for a few seconds at least. The matte work is lovely, if a bit too Damnation Alley for what’s necessary. But then there’s the infamous office elevator shot, which didn’t work after two weeks of trying, so the filmmakers resorted to splashing a hilariously awful optical effect to suggest blood and death. It’s almost Brechtian.

BLOOD, in C * O * L * O * R

I’ve said before that good special effects go hand in hand with good acting. Ultimately, it isn’t the quality of the effects that let Earthquake down, it’s the directorial choices around them. Too often the direction of the extras strays into Harold Zoid territory, actors flailing and leaping and running about like headless chickens. At one point, during an impressive miniature shot, Robson (or the second unit) direct extras to leap out of a skyscraper window like lemmings, rendering an exciting moment silly. He’ll also mix serious carnage with a flippant tone. When a bar begins to collapse from the quake, Robson cuts from a shot of a short order cook having an entire pot of boiling water dumped on him, scalding him to death, to Walter Matuschanskayasky’s⁵ camping it up as a drunk too sloshed to understand the danger he’s in. At another moment, in a residential neighborhood, a man yells about a gas leak in a house, and some other guy, with a smug look and a cigarette dangling from his lips, goes in to presumably take care of it. Cut to explosion. Punch lines have never been as cheap or cynical.

This is the my favorite moment in the film, Miles fucking up his stunt. I’m not sure how this scene came about. My intuition tells me this was supposed to be a successful stunt, but it went wrong while the cameras were rolling, and they kept it, because it’s kind of jaw-dropping. I can’t imagine asking a stunt man to do this intentionally, but who the hell knows.

Finally, it wants to be socially relevant. The filmmakers understood that TPA’s upside-down metaphor was the filling that kept it from being hollow; what could they offer in its place for Earthquake? This is both Earthquake’s biggest failure but also, paradoxically, its biggest success, just by existing. It’s not thought-through, but there’s something there. I’ll try to elucidate what I think I see.

Shot of anarchy.

In Earthquake, the buildings and infrastructure — the skyscrapers, the houses, the roads, bridges, and dams — are the institutions that we prop up in order to serve us. And they’re failing. Authorities are either weak, like Sam Royce (Greene), or dead, like seismologist Dr. Adams (Bob Cunningham). The people at the bottom, the assistant dam caretakers and junior seismologists, can see the danger coming, but getting their superiors to listen is an uphill battle. Slade joined the police force to protect people, but reluctantly concludes (correctly) that the police are there to protect the rich and their property. (“Do you know who owns that hedge you just wrecked? I’m gonna tell ya, Slade: Zsa Zsa Gabor!”) Graff builds these structures for a living, but even he can’t convince the moeny men to make them strong and safe. Graff isn’t innocent, either: he’s supposed to be this masculine ideal, a strong husband, but the institution of marriage is crumbling on his watch.⁶ Remy, as awful as she is, is no different than the caretakers or seismologists; she sees clearly from the jump what is happening, while I think Graff is genuinely surprised by his true feelings for Denise.

The two dam caretakers have a little breakfast nook in their lookout post. I love that for them.

When it all comes tumbling down, it’s up to the people to help each other. The film takes the time to show us Slade’s precinct, the one he’s estranged from, get destroyed. Graff is outside his office building when the quake hits, and he doesn’t even pause to run back in and help in every way he can. Miles had big plans for his daredevil career, but once the extent of the quake is clear to him, he puts his motorcycle to work. Most people will help each other out; those that don’t, well, the film is pretty explicit about what kinds of people don’t.

Kip Niven as the junior seismologist. Check out NEW YEAR’S EVIL to see Niven give a pretty terrific performance as a slasher villain, coming across as brundlefly of Jeffrey Combs and John C. McGinley.

Marjoe Gortner’s Jody is introduced as a cashier at a small grocery store. (Visible behind him: a sign reading CREDIT IS DEAD DON’T ASK FOR IT.) He doesn’t like the Hare Krishnas on the sidewalk outside, and he creeps on Victoria Principal’s Rosa under the guise of helping her out. That would’ve been enough to mark him as a villain, but the film goes further. When he hears that the National Guard has been called up, Jody, a reservist, goes back to his boarding house to get ready. After silenly suffering the taunts of his fellow boarders, he enters his room. His walls are covered with body-building pictures. Greek and Roman statuary replicas dot the room. On a makeshift shelf, two German WWII helmets. Martial arts weapons in the corner. On the inside of his closet door, a tasteful pinup of a woman, kept hidden like a shameful secret. These days, we’d call Jody an incel, but there’s another name that cuts across decades: sad loser. Perhaps I’m just naive, but it’s crazy to me that screenwriters in 1974 knew about this kind of guy, and it would probably be crazy to them that this marginalized fuckhead could find his way into the mainstream and into power.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2025 United States government.

And true to form, Jody uses the disaster not to help people, and not even really help himself, but to settle grievances. In my experience, this is the definining trait of conservatives who slide towards authoritarianism and fascism — they’re full of grievances. Graff and Slade aren’t hippies by any measure, probably as socially conservative as they come, but at their core is decency and a desire to help and protect people. Jody lacks that, and by the film’s definition, that makes him dangerous, a societal threat. When his National Guard unit catches his housemates looting (the evidence is a little circumstantial), Jody uses it as an opportunity for revenge, murdering them in cold blood. The flipside of grievance is entitlement, and so Jody thinks he’s entitled to Rosa. He whisks her away to some demolished building and tries, in his hapless way, to woo her, which can’t help but be undergirded with the threat of violence. Rosa is repelled by him at every second.

Jody the vengeful twerp is eventually shot and killed by Slade, saving Rosa and restoring balance to the world. Not roaming the corridors of power, ripping out the copper wiring and trying to kill people through intentional negligence. Nice ending if you can get it.

How many stars out of five? Three aftershocks out of five; it’s a dumb, dumb movie, but I do love it. With its “lazy Saturday afternoon watching the tube” vibe, could possibly be considered what critic Keith Phipps calls a “five-star three-star movie.”

Where can I stream it? As of this writing, you can rent it from Amazon, Apple, and Fandango at Home, and purchase it from those same vendors.

What can we take from it? The following is a bit spare, but I might use this as the basis for something in the future. In the Cypher System, the GM doesn’t make rolls for the enemies — it’s entirely player-facing, so the player makes rolls to dodge enemy attacks. However, the GM does have the power to affect the game through GM Intrusions. These are unfortunate things that can happen to the player characters, but only if the player agrees to it. If they do, they get experience points for their character. A popular way to do this is through a GM Intrusion deck of cards — draw one to determine the Intrusion, and everyone, GM included, is surprised by what happens. (This also introduces a bit of randomness that would normally be difficult for the non-dice rolling GM to incorporate.)

Below are twenty GM Intrusion “cards” (or, if you prefer, a d20 table) for a disaster movie-themed game. There are two different intrusions for each entry. “Journey” Intrusions represent the kind of unforeseen obstacles that normally crop up while trying to navigate a disaster area. The “NPC Interaction” Intrusions represent the kind of tense social encounters that can happen in the aftermath of an earthquake, tsunami, tornado, etc. Journey entries and NPC Interaction entries are intended to be determined separately, so draw or roll anew for each one.

NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ’70S: The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)