What Mark Robson built in 1967’s Valley of the Dolls — a quintessential L.A. — he tore down less than a decade later with Earthquake, his penultimate picture as director. Released at the height of Hollywood’s disaster craze, the movie beat The Towering Inferno into theaters by one month, but lost to Irwin Allen’s flame-broiled spectacle in three categories at the Academy Awards. Often wrongly assumed to be an Allen production, Earthquake has the next best thing: Jennings Lang, the man behind the Airport franchise.
Co-scripted by The Godfather author Mario Puzo, Earthquake’s main plot concerns ace construction engineer Graff (Charlton Heston, who headlined Airport 1975 just one month prior) and his sham of a marriage to a miserable, pill-popping harridan (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel) who happens to be the daughter of his boss (Lorne Greene, Battlestar Galactica). Graff nonagressively puts the make on a co-worker’s widow (Genevieve Bujold, Dead Ringers) on the day that “the big one” hits the Golden State. (With a split-nearing couple also at its epicenter, 2015’s San Andreas practically qualifies as a remake.)
Intermittently intersecting subplots involve an idealistic cop (George Kennedy, also fresh from Airport 1975) suspended for damaging Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hedges in a car chase, a would-be Evel Knievel (Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree) perfecting a stunt on a rickety wooden ramp, and a shopkeeper-turned-soldier (former evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) who gets all handsy and rapey with a busty customer (Victoria Principal, TV’s Dallas) for stealing a donut in the aftermath. The only thing more perverse than Gortner’s mentally unhinged character is Principal’s comically large Afro.
She’s not the only chalk-white cast member sporting a ’fro; in a pseudonymous credit, Walter Matthau appears as a drunk decked out in pimp duds. Occasionally, he awakens from his shot-glass stupor to mutter a now-dated famous name without comment, e.g. Bobby Riggs. To borrow a popular Internet phrase I cannot stand, yet is wholly appropriate, I can’t even.
While Earthquake is generally remembered today for its much-hyped, low-frequency Sensurround process that enabled audiences to “feel” the tremors, its visual effects remain impressive — well, most of them. When the earth initially starts a-rockin’, Robson warps the frame, which looks as phony as the illustrated blood spatter that later closes an ill-fated elevator ride. Luckily, those cheats are the exception to the epic rumble of rubble that retains the power to jolt. So does a rather pessimistic ending. —Rod Lott