Earthquake (1974)

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Posted By: brian@brianschell.com February 17, 2023

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

This is a big and epic disaster. The portrayal in the movie, not the movie itself which is pretty good. The horror comes from the high body count and the fact that things like this can and do happen in the world.

Synopsis

As credits roll, we see flyover shots of Los Angeles, ending on a lingering shot of a big dam. We cut to Stewart Graff, who argues with his wife, Remy, which seems like a regular thing. She overdoses while he’s in the shower, and that’s a regular thing too. This has happened numerous times before, so he knows the procedure. There’s a small earthquake, and she freaks out– she was faking the whole thing. We soon see that Graff works for Sam Royce, his father-in-law.

The maintenance crew up at the dam feel a tremor and start doing a routine inspection. Max soon finds Fred drowned in an elevator shaft– something’s flooded. Meanwhile, Officer Lou Slade and in his police car, chasing down a bad guy. Stewart stops off at Denise’s house, and we see that she’s an actress wanna-be. She’s Stewart’s friend’s widow and mother to Cory.

Over at the Seismological Institute, Walter Russel hears about the elevator shaft thing. He whines that the boss is out of town, and he thinks there’s gonna be a big earthquake today. The boss, Dr. Adams, is out in the field and can’t check his computations. Dr. Adams, meanwhile, is working inside a big crack in the ground– a fault line. Another tremor happens, and he and his assistant are buried alive.

Motorcycle daredevil Miles gets ready for his act and begs for some money from Lou. Miles wants Rosa to be his groupie for the show. He describes his show to her, and we see loops, jumps, and flaming rings. He claims to be way better than Evel Kneivel. He does a practice run, and that goes badly on the first try, but he gets it the next time.

The men at the dam find some anomalies. The seismologists realize that Dr. Adams is dead and Walter Russell may be right, but if they say anything, there’ll be mass panic. They decide to call the mayor, who activates the National Guard but doesn’t make the predicted quake public. Jody is a grocery store manager who gets called for National Guard duty.

We learn that Stewart and Denise are a bit more than friends. Stewart talks to clients about buildings, paying extra for earthquake safety features.

Sam, Stewart’s boss and father-in-law asks about Denise, and he clearly suspects Stewart is cheating on his daughter, Remy. Remy knows, too, and arranged for her father to give Stewart a promotion if he’ll stay away from Denise. Remy and Stewart fight.

The big earthquake hits. Miles’s show is destroyed. Rosa’s in a theater that collapses. Bridges collapse, power lines break and towers collapse. A house on a hill almost rolls over Denise. Stewart and Remy try not to get crushed in their office building as people fight over the elevators. Some people learn not to take the elevator in an earthquake. There are an excessive number of scenes of destruction as we see characters dealing with the quake.

The city is left a burning, crumbling disaster. Inside the tower, Sam Royce tries to calm everyone down, but that’s a tough job. The people can’t get out because the stairway has collapsed. He comes up with the idea to lower an office chair tied to a firehose to lower people down to where Stewart is. He lowers dozens of people down safely, and then when he’s alone, he dies of a heart attack. The doctor doesn’t tell anyone about the deaths to avoid a panic.

The guys at the dam argue about something being broken in the relief valves– it won’t budge! They eventually open the gates, which starts to flood the LA River, which is where Denise is searching for Cory. She finds him lying unconscious next to some high-voltage power lines– as the flood waters approach. Miles and Sal are driving by and hear Denise screaming– she can’t get out of the river spillway. They pull Denise and Cory out just before they’d be electrocuted.

Officer Lou barks that many of the police were killed when the police station collapsed, and he starts barking orders to the civilians, who are mostly panicking. Jody and the National Guard show up and start helping people. When Stewart goes off to find Denise, he and Remy argue some more.

Rosa gets arrested for stealing a donut, and Jody recognizes her. He gets her released, but not because he’s a good guy. Cody catches his annoying roommates looting and shoots them all. Once the other soldiers are gone, he brings Rosa food and tries to undress her.

Officer Lou flags down Stewart’s car and uses it as an ambulance, so most of the characters wind up at the parking garage that’s being used for an emergency hospital.

There’s another quake, and lots of people at the hospital die. Jody’s company decides he’s crazy and abandons him as Lou and Stewart hear Rosa screaming. Lou ends up shooting Jody. This time, the experts find that the dam has started to leak.

Stewart hears that Sam Royce and Remy are trapped beneath the hospital in the sub-basements, which will flood if the dam breaks. He and Lou go down into the sewers to try and save the people down there. Meanwhile, the dam breaks apart, spilling zillions of gallons of water down the mountain toward the city.

Stewart breaks through the wall, letting Denise, Cory, and seventy other people out. We get more shots of violent flooding going on all over town. Stewart and Lou finally get everyone else out of the parking garage and work their way out of the tunnels. There’s a backup as people climb out of the sewers, and soon they hear water coming.

The water floods the sewers and washes a bunch of people away, including Remy. Stewart jumps back in to save her, and they both drown. Lou looks for them, but they’re gone.

Commentary

There’s a lot of mayhem and goings-on during the actual earthquake scenes. Just when things start to calm down, there’s another aftershock. This might be the most “disastery” of the disaster films based on the destruction shown.

Charleton Heston, as Stewart, was originally supposed to survive the flooding and be with Denise, but he thought that was “immoral” and insisted they change the script to kill him. Originally, mostly-unsympathetic Office Lou was supposed to die in a redemption arc, but they switched it around so Lou lived and Stewart died.

The acting is fine, but some of the situations are a little contrived, such as Stewart/Remy/Sam/Denise all being interconnected and important players in the story. Office Lou looks like a real jerk, so they had to give him a little dog to save. Lorne Greene gets to die heroically, something he never got to do in Bonanza, but probably wanted to after fourteen years playing the same character on that show.