entertainment
Hollywood adage crumbles in movie disasters
By Greg Lukow
You've got to give Irwin Allen credit.
There's a Hollywood adage about good movie
making; something about giving it class, a lot of stars,
and doing whatever it takes to do it right.
Allen, producer and action-sequence director of
that multi-million dollar movie pyre, The Towering
Inferno, at least comes close. When compared with
the other two recent disaster releases, Earthquake and
Airport 1975, his picture looms high above. But not
far enough to keep me from talking about them all
together and getting the silly things out of the way.
Plot minimal
Airport 1975's plot is minimal: small aircraft pilot
has heart attack (we'll run across a lot of them) and
flies head-on into huge jetliner; hysterical stewardess,
Karen Black, takes over controls, and all aboard are
saved only after some ticklish mid-air heroics by
gritty Charlton Heston. This plastic movie is one big
yawn with the only real interest coming from picking
out all the stars and a myriad of other not so famous
names but instantly recognizable faces.
George Kennedy plays the worrisome airline
executive (his wife and son are on board, naturally);
Gloria Swanson plays herself, gabbing endlessly about
past glories and the old days with Cecil B. De Mille
(now there's someone who really knew how to make
this kind of schlock); Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. as the
bleeding, groaning pilot; Linda Blair (of The Exorcist
fame), playing the effervescent teenager desperately
in need of a kidney transplant yet always keeping a
smile on her face (I liked her better with scabs); and a
homely Helen Reddy in an amazingly embarassing
Gosh-I'm-making-my-first-movie-isn't-this-a-lot-of-fun
role as a singing nun (now that's an original idea).
But what good are name actors when their only
purpose is to fill stereotyped spaces that don't even
make good bit parts? Their dialogue is limited to
things like "We're all going to die!" and other little
squeaks in the background. They don't do anything
so there can't be any chemistry between them,
something we should expect from any star-studded
cast worth its salt. They're only wooden pegs,
effortlessly sitting in their alloted round voids.
Effects laughable
As bad as all this is, the technical effects are just as
laughable. Some completely uncalled-for shakey
camera work looks like the crew was still making
Earthquake (Universal produced both pictures and,
although it was released later, Earthquake was
actually filmed first). Unbelievably bad matte shots
make the plane look like it is flying high above the
clouds one moment and 100 feet off the ground the
next.
Airport 1975 is'a shambles, the ultimate example
of how thrilling boredom can be. What's frustrating
isn't that the producers offer up this kind of
entertainment for the masses, but that they should do
it in such a cheap, empty way, throwing out bad
scripts, empty-headed directing (Jack Smight, for
what it's worth) and fudging on every moviemaking
tradition. I've seen TV movies 10 times better.
Earthquake, the ultimate in epic movie
masochism, has an even more blatantly melodramatic
story line than Airport 1975, but it is saved by some
monumental, if hokey, special effects that bring
about the leveling of Los Angeles, and, of course, by
that headache-inducing demonstration of woofer
power, Sensurround. If nothing else it will satisfy
your curiosity and if a person's in the right mood it
can be a fun movie. At the showing I attended
everyone was quietly laughing and talking among
themselves (you could yell among yourselves during
the quake scenes and not bother anyone) and at least
semi-enjoying all the campiness. Somehow these little
sidelights slip the movie into that it's-so-bad-it's-good
category, as opposed to Airport 1975, which is so bad
it's really bad.
Filling space
Heston and Kennedy are once again filling in
spaces in this one. Ava Gardner and Lloyd Nolan are
the token old movie stars. Ava plays Heston's
rich-bitch wife who can't live civilly with him but is
outraged by the fact that he's seeing a much more
appealing Genevieve Bujold on the sly. Lome Greene,
Heston's boss, plays the kindly business executive
who suffers the token heart attack; and Marjoe
Gortnor is a psychopathic gun-nut who adds the
sourest note to the movie. There are others, but you
get the idea.
Bujold deserves hearty plaudits for putting up with
the biggest set of hair-raising predicaments since Pearl
White panicked her way through the silent serials. I
was surprised, however, that the producers missed a
great exploitation opportunity by putting slacks on
her instead of a short dress. All that climbing and
everything. . .(remember Carol Lyhley in The
Poseidon Adventure?)
The special effects here get the job done, mostly in
miniature (including a 50-foot-wide dam break filmed
in slow motion). As for Sensurround, for the first half
minute it's exciting; after 10 minutes it is
overbearing.
Smattering of class
Which brings us to The Towering Inferno, that
135-story high glass deathtrap produced by Allen
under a joint collaboration of Warner Bros, and 20th
Century Fox. Like the other two disaster pictures,
this one has its share of dumb moments, but like its
predecessor The Poseidon Adventure (another Allen
idea), it has a smattering of class amid all those
stereotypes and crusty cliches. It has real stars like
Newman, McQueen and Faye Dunaway. It has Fred
Astaire dancing with Jennifer Jones. It at least gives
us a small dose of insight into some of the characters;
when they're sacrificed we've come to know them
just enough to feel a small pang of regret.
The film also has some impressive sptdal effects;
we know how it's done but it looks good anyway. It's
a much longer movie but doesn't waste nearly as
much of our time. It has 50 more cliff-hanging
moments and 90 less of those incredulous "Oh my
Gods!" spoken by bug-eyed, gaping stars in the other
two pictures. All in all it makes Earthquake and
Airport 1975 look like home movies in comparison.
But it has its choice moments too including a lot
of dumb-dumb lines and a fire that takes all day to
break out of a storeroom and then has an amazing
knack of skipping a dozen floors at a time on its ever
upward ascent. There's one precious moment at the
film's end when a fat woman suffers the movie's (you
guessed it) token heart attack. The ambulance men
are unprofessional but kind hearted enough to hold
back clapping the oxygen mask on her so she can gasp
out a few encouraging words to a friend.
So much for disaster movies. Until some long
dormant volcano suddenly pops up in the middle of
Flaggstaff, Arizona, I hope that's the end of them.
am
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page twenty
daily nebraskan
monday, january 13, 1975