Celebrating Mark Robson’s birthday month with a look back at his most surprising effort
December brings the birthday of Mark Robson, one of the most unheralded directors of his generation whose works included Peyton Place and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and Valley of the Dolls. The filmmaker directed Kirk Douglas to his first Oscar nomination in Champion, captured the dynamic power of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward by pitting their characters against each other in From the Terrace. While those films were as different as could be, they all managed to say something about the people within each of those specific worlds. Regardless of subject, Robson’s films never failed to hone in on the complexities of men and women and translate them in a way which connected with the masses. It’s because of this that Robson proves to be both the strangest and most logical choice for a movie like Earthquake.
Released some 45 years ago, the story of a group of Los Angelinos (including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, George Kennedy, Genevieve Bujold, Lorne Greene, and Victoria Principal) who suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives when a major earthquake strikes the city has become one of the key staples for the disaster movie genre. Even though the 1974 title didn’t belong to the Irwin Allen school of star-studded action disaster epics, Earthquake still managed to strike a similar (and somewhat grander) chord on its own, thanks in large part to a director who knew the beauty of the genre’s dual nature.
The main draw of a film like Earthquake is always going to be the spectacle side of the whole shebang. People turn up to disaster films for the destruction and the carnage. Audiences thrill at getting close to characters only to mourn their eventual deaths, while watching society be tested in ways it never expected to be. Earthquake proved to be one of the pioneering titles in the genre, deliberately taking its time reveling in the collapsing of buildings, the impending doom of a dam about to burst, and the ever-present threat of yet another, more powerful earthquake looming somewhere on the horizon. The movie was famously released in a then-state-of the-art technology known as “sensurround,” which amped up the level of sound during the movie’s spectacular action sequences to the point that the seats and walls within the theater started vibrating. A bit of a hit-and-miss, the move was an admittedly clever marketing ploy designed to mimic the sound and sensation of being caught in an actual earthquake. It’s simply too enjoyable watching the actual earthquake take place. Acting as the movie’s centerpiece, the sequence is long, steady, and engrossing as Robson skillfully balances all of the various subplots and side characters, showing how “the big one” is wreaking havoc on them. Perhaps that’s Earthquake’s greatest asset in that the action isn’t confined to a single ship or building, but rather an entire city, making it a more visceral and encompassing experience. The movie couldn’t have done much to help dispel the myth that L.A. is a city fraught with natural disasters, but it didn’t stop it from being the kind of genre-defining entertainment everyone wanted it to be.
But Robson’s foremost talent as a visual storyteller was always for the personal, the exploration of the characters on the screen and the various life experiences which made them worth discovering. Alongside the many moments of disaster movie joy within Earthquake is a tale about various L.A. denizens and their various struggles. Other similar genre efforts would be quick to offer up cardboard cutouts of men and women in life-threatening situations, but Earthquake takes a thoughtful look at who they are apart from the disaster that’s about to befall all of them. The reason this happens is because Robson himself is undeniably curious about the people he is putting up on the screen. It’s because of this that we, the audience, hope the marriage between Graff (Heston) and Remy (Gardner) survives its own crumbling state (the film’s final sequence beautifully uses this subplot to weave action and emotion in the most powerful of ways), that Denise (Bujold) can provide her young son the kind of home life he deserves in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and that the somewhat aimless Rosa (Victoria Principal) finds her way by honing her wildness into fearsome independence. Catastrophe awaits them all in Earthquake, and Robson doesn’t shy away from putting them in genuinely horrific situations which show that as much as the filmmaker loves these characters, he’s more than willing to let the movie dictate what happens to them. The result is that the audience looks at the men and women of Earthquake in the way the director intended — as real men and women with flaws, insecurities, hopes, and dreams, making us root for their survival in more ways than one.
The 1970s were truly the disaster movie’s heyday, a brief period of time when a film such as Earthquake could manage to wrangle awards, acclaim, and success. Aside from winning a special Oscar for its cutting edge special effects, Earthquake also received Golden Globe nominations for both its lovely John Williams score and for Best Motion Picture-Drama, losing to Chinatown in the latter category. Meanwhile, audience reaction to the movie was so strong that extra footage featuring Principal’s character and another subplot not featured in the original release were shot two years after Earthquake left theaters so that its television debut could be extended over two nights. It takes a split second to let it sink in just how much of a phenomenon that movie actually was. For the record, the televised version is here, but is better left unwatched thanks to its incredibly dated content. Whether they meant to or not, other efforts, such as Volcano and San Andreas, have tried in vain to replicate the impact and success of Earthquake. Yet those attempts failed to give equal time and care to both the personal and spectacle the way Robson’s film did. For all the attempts at creating the ultimate disaster epic, nothing will compare to one of the most genre-defining entries and the man who brought it to the screen.
Earthquake is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Shout Select.