THE SCREEN

...Most critics, and some producers, assume that the characters and story in these disaster films are superfluous...

...Airport '75 does not even qualify in this league because it is only about how a disaster is avoided, not how one occurs...

...One cannot imagine anybody's going to see a disaster film done like This Is Cinerama, as a sort of grandeur without any plot at all...

...Yet in the end Newman's Inferno turns out to be a great, above-ground inversion of Dante's, where men were given punishments to fit their crimes...

...By working intensely in a confined area, the disaster in Inferno seems far more catastrophic than the devastation of all southern California does in Earthquake...

...In the process he even wins the friendship of the fire chief whose men have had to pay for his sins...

...The disaster is everything, the plot nothing...

...We do identify with the characters in these films, but who wants to go swirling down the tube with Charlton Heston out of loyalty to a nagging, graspy, overweight wife...

...By these lights, Earthquake should be the best of the current lot because it destroys a whole city...

...The only standard of comparison that might apply is bigness, which is the only standard that applies with any Hollywood spectacular...

...Every time he is interviewed, which is as often as he can possibly make it, Allen emphasizes the stars and story in his film over the chills and thrills...

...The fire occurs in a skyscraper that he designed and whose faulty wiring is, he himself admits, a result of his own negligence in supervising the construction...

...Like everything else in these films, then, the desired response is primitive too: to identify with the hero...

...To be helpless before the titanic forces of nature, as we are in earthquake, fire, or flood, is the primordial experience...

...its disaster can only be greater, more widespread, more devastating...

...Having made our commitment to Heston earlier when we thought he would get Genevieve Bujold, we feel betrayed, played for a sucker, at the end...

...Since anything enjoyed on this elemental level where disaster films reach us precludes critical choices, one disaster film ought to be as good as another...

...In Earthquake Charlton Heston is a veritable Job smitten by an act of God despite his righteousness...

...In a disaster flick the medium and the message are perfectly matched because the message also appeals to us on a very primitive level...

...For my money, though, Earthquake is not the best of the lot nor is the difference between it and Inferno merely the difference between things being knocked down and things being burned up...

...It appears that a disaster is really much more satisfying when its victims are not just a condensation of society, as the urban cross-section in Earthquake is, but a metaphor for society, as the passengers on an ocean liner are, or the tenants in a skyscraper...

...Like other fiction films, disaster movies have to have a text as well as a context, a foreground as well as a background, characters as well as circumstances...

...If Richard Nixon and Paul Newman can get off scot free, then why not me...

...Even Irwin Allen, who started it all by producing The Poseidon Adventure, has shown his priorities in The Towering Inferno by taking personal charge of the second-unit direction...

...We go for the pleasure of watching our entire civilization be destroyed before our eyes, but we come out feeling much more upset than we ought to, much more uneasy than we ever thought the sight of our own ruination would make us...

...Yet when the quake comes he dies trying to rescue her, himself the victim of a disaster whose consequences he has only sought to avoid...

...He spends half the...

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...In Inferno, on the other hand, Paul Newman is guilty as hell...

...Allen may well be right about what goes wrong in Earthquake...

...In some ways the characters in Earthquake and Inferno seem to be alike, too, as if there were a standard set of archetypes one rented to make such films, or as if disaster could only affect a certain class of people...

...As we all enter a Depression that is probably, in the back of our own minds anyway, the real pay-off for the Vietnam war, any movie that promises us that men can escape the consequences of their greatest follies is bound to have what Variety calls "Big Bofo...

...As such, movies are also a natural medium for stories about great disasters...

...He knows that there has to be a certain antagonism between the story and the disaster, a kind of individual triumph in the one to offset the general loss in the other...

...The hope that he holds out to us is not that we can be heroic, but something much more modest, and much more seductive-the hope that we might all get away with a little murder as he does...

...What good is a cataclysm if it does not release us from a few such obligations...

...We show ordinary people becoming superheroes," he informed Time magazine...

...It is the experience buried down at the bottom of our collective unconscious somewhere, back at the very beginning of all our experiences, where movies like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno entertain us...

...All those flaming, plunging bodies, the work of the stunt men and the special effects, are where it's at...

...I wonder whether each of us who goes to Earthquake does not come away feeling a little depressed in the end...

...Allen also knows that in the end the story has to make the disaster stand for something larger, not seem something smaller than it itself would be in reality...

...The Towering Inferno only does in one building...

...True, Steve McQueen, in the role of the fire chief, does come across as the type of "superhero" Allen is talking about, but Newman is still the film's center of gravity...

...That is the new American dream we need these disaster movies to express...

...This has to be the oldest response to stories there is, the response men had when they first sat around open-pit fires and told each other stories in order to ward off their fear that another tribe or a savage beast attacking in the night would be the end of civilization as they knew it...

...Yet at the same time, Allen also overstates the case for his own film...

...One disaster film cannot really be better than another...

...The average guy comes out of the theater wringing wet and wearing a satisfied grin-he thinks he did it...

...Newman escapes this disaster of his own making unscathed, as does his mistress...

...film refusing to build a skyscraper that would not be quakeproof and being hounded by a bitchy, remorseless wife...

...Far from being our tribal nightmare, it is just the fairytale about the child that put its finger in the dike...

...Here men are exonerated for their crimes...

...The latter is what Earthquake does because its story has perfect strangers bumping into each other again and again as if Los Angeles were a small town...

...The wonderful thing that Inferno does for us, and Earthquake does not do, is let us off the hook...

...The hero in each film, for instance, is a successful architect-engineer who builds skyscrapers...

...Allen leaves the direction of principals like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen to one of his hirelings...

...In Inferno this does not happen, and the difference clearly lies in the story, which turns out to matter after all...

...His preoccupation with second-unit work notwithstanding, I think Irwin Allen has been pretty shrewd about his story as well...

...The idea was to enjoy the apocalypse, but somehow we have been cheated...

...It is not that movies are an anti-intellectual experience so much as a pre-intellectual one...

...Certainly a story line is not dispensable in these movies...

...Stars may be necessary, but not scripts...

...But the fates of these two men, in the face of their respective disasters, make all the difference...