The people who reduced Los Angeles to rubble in Earthquake must have worked off a lot of self-hatred: you can practically feel their pleasure as the freeways shake, the skyscrapers crumble, and the Hollywood dam cracks. Nothing in L.A. looks as if it were meant to last anyway; it isn’t a city you expect will sustain the ravages of time. When you peer up at glass houses perched on the edge of sandy cliffs, you feel that the people who put them there must have been stoned blind and giggling. Los Angeles, a mock paradise, is so perversely beautiful and so fundamentally unsatisfying that maybe just about everybody there secretly longs to see it come rattling down. In an earlier movie era, when a hurricane struck or a volcano erupted the scriptwriters always made it clear that the natural disaster was God’s retribution for the sins of the trapped people. But who needs a reason to destroy L.A.? The city stands convicted in everyone’s eyes. You go to Earthquake to see L.A. get it, and it really does. The picture is swill, but it isn’t a cheat, like Airport 1975, which was cut-rate swill. Earthquake is a marathon of destruction effects, with stock characters spinning through. It isn’t fun, exactly; it’s ejaculatory, shoot-the-works filmmaking carried to the borderline of satire and stopping just short. Universal Pictures, which produced both, is a microcosm of the old Hollywood picture factories, streamlined for TV-age profits and totally cynical. These pieces of contemptuous entertainment might be the symbolic end point of the studio factory system, and there is something peculiarly gratifying about seeing the smoking ruins of the city that movies like this come from.
Earthquake is Universal’s death wish for film art: these destruction orgies are the only way it knows to make money. The people who work on a picture like this are employees, and you can practically hear the executive producer, Jennings Lang, addressing them: There’s no room for talent around here; this is belly-busting hard work, and if you want to make movies, this is what you’ll do. And maybe the veteran director Mark Robson got into the spirit. He doesn’t seem to want to leave any possible calamity effects for other epics to come, and as the bodies keep jumping, falling, or being shot, buried under walls and girders, or drowned, you begin to feel that he’d really like to kill off the whole cast, along with the thousands of extras. Stars like Richard Roundtree (playing a black, second-string Evel Knievel) disappear in the confusion without so much as a sendoff to eternity. Walter Matthau, serenely swacked throughout, may survive, but the picture doesn’t care enough to make a point of it. A lot of well-known people are casually left in the debris.
The treatment of the film’s two principal stars, Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, could almost be the in joke of an industry that enjoys the idea of self-destructing. Gardner was one of the last of the women stars to make it on beauty alone. She never looked really happy in her movies; she wasn’t quite there, but she never suggested that she was anywhere else, either. She had a dreamy, hurt quality, a generously modeled mouth, and faraway eyes. Maybe what turned people on was that her sensuality was developed but her personality wasn’t. She was a rootless, beautiful stray, somehow incomplete but never ordinary, and just about impossible to dislike, since she was utterly without affectation. But to Universal she is just one more old star to beef up a picture’s star power, and so she’s cast as a tiresome bitch whose husband (Heston) is fed up with her. She looks blowzy and beat-out, and that could be fun if she were allowed to be blowzily good-natured, like the heroine of Mogambo twenty years later, but the script here harks back to those old movies in which a husband was justified in leaving his wife only if she was a jealous schemer who made his life hell. Ava Gardner might make a man’s life hell out of indolence and spiritual absenteeism, but out of shrill stupidity? Earthquake, though, isn’t the sort of project in which the moviemakers care whether the role fits the performer. They get what they want. Ava Gardner’s name lifts Earthquake out of the Universal-action-picture category.
Charlton Heston is the all-time king of prestige epics. However, the repressed acting, granitic physique, and godlike-insurance-salesman manner that made him so inhumanly perfect for fifties spectacles have also destroyed his credibility. He’s not a bad actor, but he’s humorlessly unresilient. He can’t open up: his muscles have his personality in an iron grip. When Universal uses him in its action-disaster pictures, which are all really the same movie, sold by the yard, he underacts grimly and he turns into a stereotype of himself. In Earthquake Heston plays a big-time engineer who married the daughter (Ava Gardner) of the boss (Lome Greene) and has fallen in love with a young screen-starlet widow (Genevieve Bujold), and when the city is all shook up he dashes from one heroic deed to the next, rescuing, rescuing, rescuing. He’s a dependably heroic joke. No one is expected to believe in the acts he performs: he’s a wind-up hero-machine, and ingenious special effects and trick photography can go on around him. At the end, the movie has the embarrassing problem of what to do with him to avoid the catcalls of a jaded audience, so it cynically trashes him along with Gardner and most of Los Angeles.
Heston’s fatigued heroism serves a function: it enables us to retain an amused, disbelieving view. So do the shopworn incidents (the chief seismologist being out of town and his young assistant’s warnings not being heeded; the workers on the dam lacking the authority to act in emergencies) and a poorly directed mad-rapist subplot involving Marjoe Cortner as a supermarket manager who lusts after Victoria Principal. The B-picture rituals keep everything unreal, so that, despite the “Sensurround” (rumbling noises on the track which make you feel that the vibrations will bring down the theater plaster), nobody’s likely to become involved enough to be upset. And you don’t go to this picture for involvement; even those who claim to be scared by it can’t mean that in any more than an ooh-scare-me-some-more way. You feel no pang when the various characters get hit: the whole point of a pop disaster epic is for the audience to relish the ingenious ways in which they’re brought down. When a drowned man pours out of a flooded elevator, you’re meant to gasp at the shock, not lament his passing. I was glad that Gabriel Dell (Roundtree’s manager and sidekick) was spared, because his acting had a little snap, but there was really only one person I didn’t want picked off — Geneviève Bujold, dressed whimsically, always in pinks — and that was because she had a funny scene at the beginning and I hoped (vainly) that she’d have another. She’s a witty comedienne, with a sense of style, and she’s able to use her French accent teasingly here (instead of fighting it, as she was forced to do in Anne of the Thousand Days). She brings a touch of class to Earthquake and lightens the load.
What we really kriow when we watch this movie is that the destruction orgy on the screen is only a jokey form of the destruction orgy behind the screen, and we begin to take a campy pleasure in seeing the big-name actors and the old plot situations — and the motion-picture capital itself — totaled. L.A. isn’t just the city that movies like this come from, it’s also the city that movies that mean something to us come from, but Universal’s callousness brings out a Roman-circus mentality in the audience, because actually that’s the only way to have a good time at this picture. People who wanted to enjoy the degradation of their old favorites used to have to go to the gossip rags, but why should the movie executives let parasites rob them of revenue? Now the movies build that function in. Though you may rather enjoy Earthquake, you’re not likely to applaud it, because you know that it’s decadence you’re responding to. Nero was considered crazy, but if he’d sold tickets and made money out of his pyromaniac spectacle, would he be considered smart, like Jennings Lang and the other executives who make profits out of financing bowdlerizations of old movies while refusing to finance new ideas?
They’re not unaware; they know what they’re doing out there. That’s why they’re rushing to open these disaster epics before the end of the year, fearing the public’s interest won’t stretch beyond that. Lew R. Wasserman, the board chairman of M.C.A., Inc., Universal’s parent company, who has just completed eight years as the chairman of the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, was honored earlier this month by his colleagues. Three hundred and fifty top people in the industry gathered to pay him homage, and Gordon Stulberg, the president of Twentieth Century-Fox, who presented Wasserman with a gift from the association — an 1861 Italian “megalatoscopio,” to add to his collection of motion-picture antiques — ventured a high-level sick joke: “We’ve come a long way to Earthquake and Towering Inferno.” It is reported that the assembled guests laughed like mad.
Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s book The Little Prince — a reverie about a pilot who crashes in the Sahara and is joined by an imaginative child from another planet — has a small, wan charm, but, translated from French into twenty-eight languages, it has been a worldwide best-seller, and many people have large sentimental attachments to it. The story’s not easily definable essence appears to be a quest for purification: the Holy Grail as the holy self. The first of the modern mystic-quest books to become a pop hit, The Little Prince inspires the devotion that Tolkien and Hermann Hesse inspire, and that Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may work up. The author-aviator’s envisioning himself as a princely child too pure to go on living is a distillation of melancholy, and maybe this movie musical was doomed for the same reason that so many people are drawn to the book — that the material is so close to self-glorifying, masochistic mush. The ineffable may be effective in print and on records, but it isn’t exactly the substance of musicals. Possibly something might have been made of the story if Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the script, along with the lyrics for Frederick Loewe’s music, had a more delicate feeling for poetic yearning, and if, possibly, he’d finessed the pilot’s tenderness with cool contrasts. Could the pilot (Richard Kiley) have been made a more blasé man of his time (the book came out in 1943), and given a sense of irony about his infatuation with the innocent child in himself? However one approaches the material, though, there is nothing to link the man or the child (Steven Warner) to the Big Broadway Sound of the Lerner-Loewe score. The songs — Broadway Academic — might just get by, but the orchestration is clinically insane: Kiley can’t sing alone in the desert without an instrumental warmup fit for De Mille’s Crusaders meeting the entire Northwest Mounted Police. Might the picture have worked better with a light, Parisian-American jazz sound? The alienation is so thin that it needs some counterpoint, and a sense of unanswered questions and hidden layers under what is given. The poignant, forlorn Saint Exupéry tone could be realized on the screen only if the script had a sensuous verbal line. Instead, it blunts the story, and the putdown humor of the lyrics might have been conceived for Ethel Merman to whomp out. The director, Stanley Donen, with his background in dance, may have hoped to capture the story’s rhapsodic blend of happiness and grief in choreographic terms, but what he worked from was an intractably graceless script. Worst of all, like most Lerner-Loewe musicals, this one lays on the songs and skimps dance possibilities. As in Paint Your Wagon and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, there’s no way for a director to bring Lerner’s material together, and in this one the director is additionally handicapped by being given too little to work with. The theme of this movie — the loss of imagination — must have paralyzed Lerner.
Donen gets an almost magically bright, glossy look in some of the Sahara scenes — the vast expanses are absolutely clear, as if painted with the purest of pigments — and he has a gentle touch. The desert sequences, which feature the growing affection between the pilot and the boy, set an emotional mood, but this is broken when the Little Prince tells the aviator about his life on his own, cottage-size planet and his visits to other miniature planets, each the domain of one symbolic villain — a king (Joss Ackland), a businessman (Clive Revill), a historian (Victor Spinetti), a general (Graham Crowden). These episodes push dated lessons on the evils of civilization, and Donen’s use of fish-eye lenses to bring the villains overpoweringly close doesn’t improve matters. A few of the earthly sequences in which the child visits other contacts he has made stand out because their theatricality indicates the direction the movie probably should have gone in. One of the wittiest aspects of The Wizard of Oz was the way Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion seemed to have the burlesque stage right under his paws, and here Bob Fosse, in his dancing role as a snake, suggests a low-down song-and-dance man from the night world of cooch shows. Hooded in a derby, with dark glasses and a cigarillo tongue, Fosse’s got wit in his hissing, shifty pimp’s menace; his number is a bit extended, but it’s the high point of the movie. As a fox who wants to be tamed, reddish Gene Wilder has dewy-eyed thoughts about that old standby the wisdom of the heart, and his dance sequence seems too imitative of passages in The Wizard of Oz, but he triumphs over some of his material, and there’s a wonderful shot of him, utterly still, staring at us, in a field of tall wheat.
Steven Warner is an English child who looks like Butch Jenkins come back in a tousled bouffant wig — with a wasting disease, however. He holds the screen affectingly and he seems right for the Saint Exupéry conception; he’s very pale and puffy-eyed and lost-kitten frail. Fortunately, he has a lovely, slightly harsh voice — half Cockney, half gentleman. After so many movie-musical disappointments with Alan Jay Lerner’s name high on the credits, I’ve begun to wonder if the energy he fails to put into his scripts goes into sheer hypnotism on the sets. His directors do things that they must know they shouldn’t. Before seeing this movie, I would have sworn that Stanley Donen, a man of taste, was incapable of the film’s final effect — a Heavenly Choir of bell-like laughter to signify that the Little Prince has ascended.
[December 2, 1974]