Earthquake (1974)

The greatest movie ever made..!

A Brilliant Conflict

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Construction Engineer Stuart Graff is estranged from his possessive wife, Remy, and has an affair with Denise Marshall, the widow of a co-worker. Remy tries to persuade her father, who is Stuart's employer, to use his influence to stop Stuart from seeing Denise. Policeman Lew Slade is suspended from the L.A.P.D. for punching an officer from another jurisdiction, so Slade contemplates quitting the police force. Jody, a grocery store manager, lusts after the sister of Sal, assistant to Miles Quade, an aspiring daredevil motor cyclist. The lives of all these people are devastated when a major earthquake rips through Los Angeles and reduces the city to ruins....If it wasn't for the bizarre intertwining stories that accompany the quite impressive shaking of the camera, then this wouldn't be as entertaining as it should be, because it's just over the top, you cannot help but find these narratives just that little more entertaining than the actual titular disaster.There is a wonderful cast here, not as star studded as other disaster films from this decade, but Heston and Kennedy chew more sets than the film destroys.It's tense, there are dancing power lines, exploding everything, self sacrifice, and the most fun these films have, having to guess who will live and who will succumb to the quake.The most bizarre part of the film involves Victoria Principal and William Katt, a wig wearing soldier, who takes great offensive at homophobic slurs.It's not a great film by any lengths, but like all the disaster films made at this time, they are grand, and never fail to entertain.

To give credit where credit is due - those special effects people managed to put together a pretty good depiction of this massive earthquake that strikes Los Angeles. And it goes on and on for quite a long time. And buildings collapse and houses explode as gas lines break and a massive dam is threatened and people are buried in the debris, and they tumble to their deaths or the elevator that they're on crashes down, and ... and ... and ... By the standards of 1970's special effects that was really well done. Unfortunately, you also have to sit through the rest of the movie, which ... well ... ain't so well done!We get almost an hour of soap-ish type filler before the actual earthquake hits. Yes, I know that's mandatory in these kinds of films. It's as if somebody in the 1970's decided that adding all these personal subplots about the characters would make viewers more interested; maybe we'd get to know the characters and their lives better and we'd care more. Uh. No. I just really wanted to get to the earthquake and its aftermath. I didn't really care who was having an affair with who, or any of the other numerous subplots that got going in that first hour - although it was rather fun to watch one cop punch out another in an apparent dispute over jurisdiction and - believe it or not - Zsa Zsa Gabor's hedge (not that she makes an appearance.) Basically, I spent almost an hour thinking, "can't we just get to the earthquake. Please. PLEASE!" And then it comes - and it's great, and it lasts for a few minutes - and then it's over, and we get back into many of those soap-ish subplots, through which we see the aftermath of the earthquake. This was perhaps a little more interesting than the lead-up. For example, although it wasn't graphically depicted, I was a bit surprised to see a movie from this era depict a soldier apparently trying to rape a young woman. But really - the movie had telegraphed for a long time that the real suspense was going to eventually come from the dam bursting and how many were going to be saved and who was going to die as a result. So in that second part of the movie, we waited for that to happen. There was a lot of waiting for things to happen in this movie.This had a decent cast. These 70's disaster movies always seemed to be able to attract well known names, and even a few truly big stars. Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner are in this, for example. There were secondary movie stars like George Kennedy and Walter Matthau (in an inexplicably and totally unnecessary role as a drunk at a bar who basically just wants another drink no matter what's happening around him.) There was Lorne Greene (much better known for his TV work as Ben Cartwright in "Bonanza.") And there was Victoria Principal (still a few years away from TV stardom as Pam Ewing on "Dallas") as the almost rape victim - who I didn't even recognize, as she was made up in this really far- out curly sort of hairstyle. (I had seen her name in the credits and was actually looking for her and didn't recognize her until the closing credits revealed which character she was. I had to go back and look. Now - knowing her character - I could recognize her.)Some of those 1970's disaster type movies are a lot of fun, and pretty well done. I'd say this one doesn't exactly rank at the top (or even near the top) of that list. But the actual earthquake is fun. No doubt about that. (3/10)

If nothing else, this 1974, mega-blockbuster, disaster film was certainly well-worth a few good laughs (unintentional laughs, that is).Featuring a hilarious barrage of cheesy, old-school special effects (and plenty of cornball character interaction), Earthquake's decidedly over-melodramatic story even had the Hare Krishnas getting into the overall spirit of this particular catastrophe story.With the escalating excitement of Earthquake's tale reaching 9.9 on the Richter Scale, it was definitely all-American heroism that prevailed throughout this picture's 129-minute running time (with, of course, a little rocky romance, thrown in for good measure).Showcasing a star-studded cast, headlined by Charlton Heston & Ava Gardner, 1974's Earthquake turned out to be the 4th highest grossing film of the year. And, with that, it easily earned back it $7 million production costs, 8-fold, in no time flat.Unfortunately, Earthquake didn't even come close to living up to its disastrous potential. In the long run, it got itself so bogged down dealing with too many irksome personal dramas that repeatedly punctuated its story-line.

The heat and fault-lines of Los Angeles have made the city jokingly referred to as "Shake and Bake", and with a 1971 quake in recent memory, this Irwin Allen disaster epic (right on the trail of "The Poseidon Adventure") was definite box office magic. An all-star cast was assembled to take what little drama was there and make it more interesting, sort of a "Grand Hotel" weighed on the Richter scale. A few laughs (both intentional and unintentional) have made this a cult favorite with definite elements of camp giving it an almost midnight movie status.A romantic triangle (between husband and wife Charleton Heston and Ava Gardner and his mistress, Genevieve Bujold) is the foundation on which the story is created. Fortunately, that foundation wasn't used for the buildings in downtown L.A., otherwise they might have collapsed a lot faster. There's also a very young Victoria Principal as a troubled young lady who is the victim of an obsessive neighbor (the creepy Marjoe Gortner) and motorcycle stunt artist Richard Roundtree, and of course, that bar room drunk (Walter Matthau) who is too tipsy to notice the reason he can't swallow his shot is because the ground around him is shaking more than his alcoholic hands.Laughs come frequent here, not only with the unbilled Matthau (given credit under his real name to create a surprise cameo) but with Principal's very big afro and daddy's girl Gardner spouting insults at estranged husband Heston while papa Lorne Greene makes business deals as the earth collapses around him. There's the famous shot of a truck full of cows flying off a freeway overpass (the audience actually mooed when I saw this in a revival house) and several L.A. landmarks collapsing. It is just too bad that there has to be the soap opera set-up long before the shaking starts and that makes the film a slight bore.At the West Hollywood video store that I worked at, this film was checked out for weeks after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, as were other films like "San Francisco", "The Rains Came" and "Green Dolphin Street". L.A. residents needed some fictional shaking going on after that scary event which woke us up at 4:30 in the morning. "It's really a little sick", one of our clerks told a local newspaper who called us up to find out if the real quake had an influence on our customers' video habits. Sick or not, real life disasters sometimes call upon our adrenaline and desire to find enjoyment after those scary moments have passed.L.A. audiences too found it humorous to see the Beverly Center blown up after a volcano appeared at the La Brea tar-pits and exploded in the movie "Volcano". I had no idea that the theater I was going to where the movie was playing would end up being a part of the plot and joined in the audience by applauding when that sequence took place. "Earthquake" leaves the same sort of feeling, providing laughs of irony that still amuse us today.