Mark at the Movies

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The SteynOnline Friday Feature, our weekly movie column, is on hiatus for a while, but keep an eye on our bookstore for a forthcoming anthology of Mark's movie writing. In the meantime, here's an essay on the 1990s mini-revival of the defining genre of the 1970s, which you can find in the book Mark Steyn From Head To Toe:

IF ANY SCENE sums up the disaster-movie genre it's Shelley Winters swimming underwater through a flooded corridor in The Poseidon Adventure, her cheeks puffed out like a blowfish, dress billowing up over flailing thighs. Newsweek ungallantly observed that she's "plump enough these days to sink an ocean liner all by herself", but Miss Winters insisted that "I put on all this weight for the movie!" and her deal required the studio to pay for post-shooting sessions at a fat farm. If they did, they deserved a refund. Shelley stayed plus-sized and (just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water) resurfaced in Tentacles, in which she got the better of a giant squid.

Unlike Shelley, the disaster movie itself shrivelled away to nothing. It was the only new film genre to emerge from the 1970s, and, like everything else from that decade - Abba, Jimmy Carter – it's been dusted off for the Nineties. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) is usually reckoned to be the original disaster movie, though you could make a case that the prototype was San Francisco (1936), in which Jeanette MacDonald's singing sets off the 1906 'Frisco quake.

A quarter-century later, Jan De Bont's attempted revival of the genre, Twister, preserved most of the essentials of the form, albeit without Shelley's flailing thighs and with one or two variations. In these films, man's ambition is derailed by an appalling natural disaster - a ferocious tornado, a tidal wave, an erupting volcano, OJ Simpson's acting. A propos the latter, unlikely as it seems, terrified people once placed 911 emergency calls and hoped OJ would turn up in time - as opposed to these days, when terrified people call 911 because O J has turned up. But back in 1974, in The Towering Inferno, OJ was the fellow you cast if you wanted someone to play a security guard who rescues two children and a cat from a blazing bedroom.

It's always two kids. One is never enough. Shelley Winters established the tradition in The Poseidon Adventure, and, by the time Burgess Meredith carried a brace of moppets across a burning bridge in When Time Ran Out, it was de rigueur. By this stage, in defiance of the old showbiz saw about children and animals, most big-time movie stars were insisting on contractual guarantees that they be allowed to rescue two infants and a family pet. Invariably, going back for the dog proves the hero's undoing. In Twister's opening sequence, it's the pooch that does for dad.

That's the funny thing about the multi-million-dollar blockbuster. It spends a fortune re-creating all the clichés we took for granted 20 years ago. For example, Twister has the bit where the telegraph lines come down and electric wires dance in lethal convulsions across the highway - just like Earthquake (1974). There's also the moment when some humdrum everyday item becomes technologically vital. In Twister, it's Coke cans - which, frankly, is a bit tame. In Earthquake, Lorne Greene, in the midst of the rubble that has buried every green lawn, barks at his secretary: "Take off your pantyhose, dammit!" And, with her nylons providing the final crucial link in an elaborate pulley system, he ferries everyone to safety. Well, not everyone. Traditional examples of the genre are like a sort of all-star balloon debate, in which the best a supporting actor can hope for is to hang in there a little longer than his billing merits.

Irwin Allen, father of the disaster movie, made his first all-star grab-bag in 1957. In The Story Of Mankind, Hollywood's biggest names played history's most fascinating figures: Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc, Harpo Marx as Sir Isaac Newton, Dennis Hopper as Napoleon. By the Seventies, he'd figured out that there was far more money to be made getting Hollywood's biggest names to play cardboard characters of no interest whatsoever. As far as casting is concerned, the trick is to match the star with the most unsuitable occupation: Dean Martin as a pilot, Charlotte Rampling as a marine biologist, Jacqueline Bisset as anything. And if you're wondering what all these people do in a volcanic eruption or a dam burst, that's easy: they work out their personal problems. Nothing like dodging molten lava to fix up your marriage or cure you of substance abuse.

Twister doesn't mess with this convention: at the start of the movie, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are on the brink of divorce; luckily, a huge tornado blows in and reconciles them. You'll notice that Twister has dispensed with the all-star format: Helen Hunt is a pleasant enough actress from a nondescript sitcom; Bill Paxton is one of those actors you never remember, or, if you do, it's because you're mixing him up with Bill Pullman (the one in Independence Day).

As the presence of Shelley Winters in Tentacles confirmed, the Seventies disaster movie spawned an even more lucrative sub-genre in underwater disasters – deep-sea epics of fish with chips on their shoulders. In the wake of Jaws came Barracuda, Tintorera, Orca and The Deep. Eighties environmentalism left the fish pic beached by the tides of political correctness - so we wound up with Free Willy, in which the killer whale is the good guy and the plot revolves around getting him back in the water. Fish aside, the problem with the genre was that there was only room for one movie per disaster. Irwin Allen recognised this in 1974. While he was adapting a book called The Glass Inferno, he learned that Warners had bought the rights to a similar book called The Tower. Cannily, he suggested a merger: The Towering Inferno. Variety suggested they go a stage further, combining The Towering Inferno with Earthquake and calling it Shake'n'Bake. Disaster movies spluttered on until When Time Ran Out (1980), by which time it had.

Typically, the British didn't notice, and it fell to Lew Grade to make the most spectacular disaster movie ever: Raise The Titanic! "It would have been cheaper if we had," said Lord Grade afterwards. It lost $29.2 million, which would have made it the all-time box-office disaster. But Grade's film was so disastrous that even that distinction eluded it: the same year, 1980, Heaven's Gate came along and blew $34.2 million.

If you want proof that Hollywood has recovered its sea legs since Lew Grade went down with all hands, look no further than James Cameron's next big-budget epic: Titanic. He's got Kate Winslet (Sense And Sensibility) and Leonardo DiCaprio (from Romeo And Juliet ), but it's still early days. Shelley Winters as the iceberg?

from Mark Steyn From Head To Toe

February 2, 2012

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