Earthquake

Collector’s Edition Blu-ray

Distributor: Shout! Factory

Release date: May 21, 2019

MSRP: $29.99

Amazon price: $24.96

The Film

The disaster movie craze of the 1970s was a bizarre cycle in which audiences wanted nothing more than to see a bunch of stars thrown into a massive catastrophe.

Some people date the start of the trend to Universal’s 1970 megahit Airport, but that film was really just an old-fashioned Grand Hotel-style, star-studded soap opera, which happened to have a minor disaster in its final minutes, when a bomb went off on a plane.

Downtown Hollywood crumbles as “The Big One” hits. (Shout Factory/Universal)

The true prototype of the disaster movie is Irwin Allen’s spectacular 1972 production of The Poseidon Adventure. It established the indelible template. Take a huge mix of rising and has-been stars, introduce their characters as quickly as possible, then throw them into a cataclysm, filled with groundbreaking special effects to make the audience feel like they’re there.

Poseidon was a colossal, industry-shaking success. Allen quickly announced he would follow it with The Towering Inferno, featuring a mix of megastars and effects so massive that two studios, Fox and Warner Bros., had to join forces for the first time to produce it.

Universal responded by rushing into production an epic saga of Angelenos surviving “The Big One,” a massive earthquake that devastates the city. They also quickly announced a follow-up to Airport. Airport 1975 would more closely follow Irwin Allen’s model, rushing through minimal character setup to get to the juicy disaster elements as quickly as possible. Both would star one of the top box-office draws in the world, Charlton Heston.

Stewart (Charlton Heston) drives to work, while talking on a 1974 carphone. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Earthquake is a thoroughly odd film. Made in a mad dash, going from idea to completed, released film in only nine months, it’s a far cry from the auteur-driven films the era is remembered for. While Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin, Pakula, Bogdanovich, Polanski, and Altman were making indelible, highly personal mainstream classics within the studio system, the disaster movies were corporate projects, directed by journeymen, guided by powerful producers who often directed portions themselves.

In the case of Earthquake, its producer was its director, Mark Robson. At this point, it’s most remembered for its innovative effects and its technical achievements. Judged purely as a work of cinema, Earthquake is pretty dreadful. It’s abundantly clear how rushed it was. It’s artlessly, clumsily directed by Robson. The script is clunky and cliché-laden, while the flat lighting and obvious sets make the whole thing look like cheap television.

Charlton Heston writes in his autobiography that he took the underwritten lead roles in Earthquake and Airport 1975 against his better judgment, to enable him to get his smaller arthouse passion project films financed. In Earthquake, Heston also found himself forced to act opposite a former co-star he had less than fond memories of, Ava Gardner.

Remy (Ava Gardner) and Stewart (Charlton Heston) find their fight interrupted by a minor foreshock. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Their opening marital fight scene, viewable here, gets the film off on the wrong foot, because it’s so abysmally written and staged, and so broadly acted, that it actually plays as wildly entertaining, unintentional comedy. If the rest of the film were this much of a hoot, it would be enjoyable in a campy, Mommie Dearest kind of way.

Unfortunately, the remainder of Earthquake is more tedious than anything else. Both it and Universal’s other big response to Poseidon, The Hindenburg, faced one gargantuan inherent challenge. They both revolve around disasters that take place over a matter of seconds, instead of the lengthy catastrophes Irwin Allen wisely chose, which play out over the course of their entire films.

As a result, Earthquake must vamp for half its running time, filling the first hour with sudsy, undercooked melodrama that feels like a bad episode of The Love Boat. We’re introduced to an eclectic mix of Angelenos. Heston plays a successful structural engineer who, for no apparent narrative reason, also used to be a star football player. Meanwhile, Gardner chews up every inch of available scenery as his emotionally unstable, pill-popping wife. In an ill-advised choice, presumably meant to appeal to Gardner’s vanity, Lorne Greene plays her father, though he looks more plausible as her younger brother.

Remy (Ava Gardner) has lunch with her… father? (Lorne Greene) (Shout Factory/Universal)

Meanwhile, Universal stalwart George Kennedy plays a cop suspended for breaking all the rules to defend his own kind of justice, as movie cops must. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, plays an Evel Knievel-type daredevil stunt driver preparing for his big break. Walter Matthau is almost unrecognizable as a wino at a bar who barely notices the quake when it hits. And Victoria Principal plays a young woman who exists only to walk around in a tight t-shirt that almost every man in the film becomes transfixed by.

Marjoe Gortner, in one of the film’s most schizophrenic and noxiously dated subplots, plays a closeted gay grocery clerk with a fixation on Principal. After the quake, he inexplicably dons a blond wig and reveals he’s also a deranged National Guardsman. He gets a chance to turn his semi-automatic on the homophobic jerks who taunted him and manically mows them all down, before equally inexplicably attempting to rape Principal in the ruins of the city.

Rosa (Victoria Principal) finds herself stared at by Jody (Marjoe Gortner) (Shout Factory/Universal)

Alone among the actors, then-recently Oscar-nominated Quebecois actress Geneviève Bujold seems not to have gotten the memo about what kind of film this was, and she acts her heart out. She brings a vibrant, unpredictable energy to her handful of scenes and is actually quite compelling as the widow of one of Heston’s coworkers, who quickly becomes Heston’s mistress. Unfortunately, Bujold is given little to work with, as every female character in the film is just a useless, passive sex object or a shrill harpy.

When the quake finally does hit, halfway through, it’s a relief from the tedium, and genuinely spectacular on a visual level, partly because this is a film from before the era of CGI, so everything onscreen is practical – a mix of extensive model work, massive shaking sets and gorgeous matte paintings.

The film stretches the seconds-long quake out to ten full minutes by cutting to every single character and showing their experience throughout the quake. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to care about what’s happening to any of them, and they spend most of the ten interminable minutes just helplessly flailing about.

Denise (Geneviève Bujold) stumbles through the ruins of her house, searching for her son. (Shout Factory/Universal)

For a vastly superior similar sequence, look no farther than the finale of Superman: The Movie, made four years later, where multiple characters we have grown to know and love over the course of the film are thrown into a similarly cataclysmic quake.

The destruction in Earthquake is definitely impressive, and it’s what the film is mainly remembered for. There are death-defying stunts. People are crushed by falling debris. They fall from great heights into the skylights that seem conveniently placed in every disaster movie. One woman memorably has a glass storefront explode onto her, leaving her with jagged shards protruding horrifyingly from her face.

Sam (Lorne Greene) tries unsuccessfully to rescue a coworker. (Shout Factory/Universal)

When the quake is over, the film moves on to a second menace that has been carefully set up, in one of the threadbare script’s few wise choices. The opening shot, under the titles, is an ominous helicopter journey over Hollywood, ending on the Mulholland Dam, which holds back the immense Hollywood Reservoir. We cut back to it frequently throughout the film, as the dam is weakened by the quake and its aftershocks. It’s clear it could burst at any minute.

In the second half of the film, the authorities moronically herd all the survivors into a shelter set up in an underground garage and shopping mall, seemingly for no reason than to introduce a new peril for the film. When an aftershock collapses the entire building, Heston gets to demonstrate some heroics in the film’s only truly compelling sequences. He attempts to rescue his loved ones from the sub-basements before the dam finally collapses and floods everything.

The Mulholland Dam bursts, in one of the most elaborate effects sequences in the film. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Earthquake was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1974, but in the end the disaster films are mostly curios, largely remembered for their spectacle, not their craft. They were products. However, just a year after Earthquake, Universal would hire a young director for another disaster movie, and inadvertently hand the reins of one of the most complicated productions of the decade to an auteur who would reinvent the blockbuster, when Steven Spielberg gave the world Jaws.

A frame from the correctly mastered replacement disc, with the image in the proper 2.35:1 aspect ratio. (Shout Factory/Universal)

The same frame from the incorrectly mastered first pressing, with the image at 2.20:1. Notice the information on both sides that has been cut off. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Video

It is very important to note; the first run of Shout! Factory’s Earthquake Blu-rays has a mastering error on Disc 1, containing the film’s theatrical cut. The film was presented in the wrong aspect ratio. Instead of the intended 2.35:1, it is 2.20:1, with the sides cropped off.

Shout! has corrected this, but you’ll need to contact them at  https://www.discshipment.com in order to get a replacement disc. It’s unknown if or when the sets being sold commercially will include the corrected disc.

This review has been held back until now because The Roarbots were waiting until we were supplied with a corrected disc.

All those issues aside, the film looks spectacular. It’s a brand new 2K scan, from original elements, and looks flawless. There is no noticeable print damage or dirt, and the colors look exactly as they should for a 1974 production. All of the captures in this review are from the Shout Blu-ray.

Earthquake was previously released on Blu-ray by Universal in 2013, but that disc used an older transfer of the film. Shout’s disc is definitely superior, just make sure you get the corrected disc.

The Sensurround announcement that plays at the beginning of the film. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Audio

Perhaps more than anything, Earthquake is remembered for its sound. In 1974, movie audio remained largely unchanged since its introduction. It was primarily mono, with exceedingly limited range for low and high pitches.

Universal created a brand-new system called Sensurround, which premiered with Earthquake. It featured intense low-level audio, blasted into theaters through enormous specially installed speakers, creating a deep bass rumble that would make the viewers themselves shake.

Patrons who experienced Sensurround in its full glory must have felt they truly were in an earthquake. There are reports the sound actually caused plaster to fall from the ceiling of the Chinese Theater.

Sadly, Sensurround didn’t catch on. Universal used it for a few more of their films, then dropped it, but it was the forerunner of many modern audio advances, from the widespread use of stereo to digital 5.1 sound.

Shout! provides three audio options on the film. First is a modern 5.1 remix, which takes the film’s audio elements – music, effects and dialogue – and creates a contemporary-sounding mix, in which the dialogue is perhaps a bit too low. They also include a 2.1 track with the film’s original audio mix, which attempts to recreate the experience of Sensurround, though even the best home theaters may not be able to fully replicate its intensity. In addition, there is a 2.0 stereo track with the film’s original audio mix.

A production still of Charlton Heston from one of the many galleries in the extra features. (Shout Factory/Universal)

Extras

The 2-disc set comes loaded with extras. The most impressive is the full extended television cut of the film. In the era of TV airings of feature films, networks and studios faced a huge problem. Movies usually run around 2 hours, and they required the deletion of enormous chunks of material to fit commercials into a 2-hour evening broadcast block. However, they were too short to run in multiple parts. Universal solved this with a number of their films in the 1970s by shooting additional material just for television airings, so the films could be expanded and run as a 2-part miniseries.

In the case of Earthquake, Universal brought back Marjoe Gortner and Victoria Principal, two years after the film was originally made, and shot new scenes beefing up their subplot. They also hired actors Sam Chew and Debralee Scott and filmed a brand-new subplot with them which could be inserted into the existing film.

Debralee Scott and Sam Chew in one of their new scenes, shot in 1976 for the film’s NBC network broadcast as a two-night miniseries. (Shout Factory/Universal)

All their scenes take place, thriftily, on an existing airliner set that Universal had on hand. Chew plays a young engineer coming to LA to interview with Heston, while Scott plays his eccentric, superstitious wife. Their plane into LA touches down just as the quake hits, and takes off again, circling the city for the remainder of the film.

The video quality of the TV cut is exceptional. It’s 1:33:1, because the original footage from the film was cropped to that ratio for TV airing and all the new footage was shot in that ratio. It is also a new 2K transfer, though not quite as flawless as the main feature.

The Blu-ray wisely provides both the full TV cut of the film, for completists, and also an option to view just the new television scenes, which total 23 minutes.

The most iconic shot in the film, showing ruined Hollywood. It is entirely a matte painting by the brilliant Albert Whitlock. Only the smoke and flame elements in the shot are real. (Shout Factory/Universal)

The set also features three new in-depth interview videos. Film music historian Jon Burlingame speaks for 16 minutes about the film’s score, by the inimitable John Williams, recorded just a year before he would rocket to fame with Jaws. Matte painting genius Albert Whitlock’s huge contribution to the film is described by one of his associates, Bill Taylor, for 10 minutes. Finally, Star Wars sound maestro Ben Burtt describes the film’s innovative Sensurround system in an 11-minute piece.

In addition, the set is loaded with period audio interviews with the cast, trailers, TV spots, radio spots, and extensive still photo galleries showing production photos, publicity shots, and conceptual artwork.

Grades:

Film: C

Video: A+ (grade applies only to the corrected disc)

Audio: B+

Extras: A