It initially seems obtuse, if not downright callous, to talk about movies in the midst of the horrific nightmare that has befallen New Orleans this past week. But after giving it some thought, it must be said that motion pictures have a long history of capturing tragedies both natural and man made while honoring those who lost lives and loved ones. Depending on the circumstances, films that document disasters can enrich and inform, or they can exploit and trivialize. Unfortunately, most disaster - or “splat” - films not only exploit, but do so quite badly.
Why this is is something of a mystery. After all, as this past week has shown, hurricanes, mass floods and similar calamaties are natural fonts for intense and compelling drama. Both the best of human nature - such as the people bravely treading waterlogged New Orleans to find citizens trapped in their homes and ship them to safety - and the worst - the lootings, shootings, physical assaults and overtaking of parts of the city by gangs of armed thugs - are on display for audiences to be gripped by. Instead, Hollywood has, with few exceptions, treated disasters as bedrocks for star-studded soap operas that wind up inspiring more laughs than the 1980 parody “Airplane!”
The “Airport” series, which inspired that quite intentional comedy, were the most prominent products of the splat movie boom, which reached its zenith in the 1970’s. The four entries that spanned that decade rolled out every category of thespian from Burt Lancaster and Jack Lemmon to Jimmy “J.J.” Walker and Charo ... and with George Kennedy providing cigar-chomping support in every bloody one of them. A few attempts to revive and improve upon the concept of air calamity have been made in the decades since, but the results have only been marginally better. Only the 1996 Kurt Russell vehicle “Executive Decision” and this year’s Wes Craven thriller “Red Eye” come anywhere close to conveying the effects of a plane in peril.
Better were those pictures that have dealt with the most infamous ship disaster of all time, the sinking of the “unsinkable” Titanic in 1912. The best of these is the 1958 feature “A Night to Remember.” Based on Walter Lord‘s book of the same name, it rendered actual events and figures from the disaster, conveyed by an impressive cast of British stalwarts led by Kenneth Moore, as the ship’s captain, under Roy Ward Baker‘s crisp direction. “Titanic”, which preceded it in 1953, was more of a precursor to rumble and tumble flicks of the swinging seventies, the ship’s crew and passenger list being made up of B-grade hacks enacting largely fictional - and mostly ridiculous - ship board melodramas before the craft’s collision with the iceberg. James Cameron’s 1997 hit of the same name falls somehwere in between the two, it’s final hour pulsating with incredible special effects giving the closest approximation ever of being trapped in a sinking behemoth and being stranded in freezing ocean waters. Unfortunately, the preceding two hours have Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winselt acting out a romance straight out of the Nora Roberts canon.
Train disasters don’t exactly make headlines, though they can certainly cause devestation and death. The 1976 film, “The Cassandra Crossing” had a great plot line involving a fugitive carrying bubonic plague hiding out on a luxury train coursing through central Europe, whose passengers are forced to be quarantined in Poland and cross a potentially unsound bridge en route. Again, silly subplots and histrionics abound, but the central conceit keeps things on track. The picture is also blessed with one of the most distinctive cohabitations of actors this side of “Mother, Jugs and Speed.” This includes Martin Sheen as a polyester clad, heroin-tweaking gigolo who is being pursued by a DEA agent, disguised as a priest, played by O.J. Simpson.
O.J. also leant his, uh, rapier-like talents to the one truly good disaster movie Hollywood has brought us, and which also provided premonitions of the worst day in America’s history, twenty-six years hence. 1975’s “The Towering Inferno”, though it bubbled with a few of the soap suds characteristic of the genre (not to mention a song by Maureen “Morning After” McGovern!) had a central plot that was well handled and quite intriguing. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, headlining an unusually strong cast, save the guests of an opening night party, trapped on the top level of a 125-story skyscraper in San Francisco whose lower floors are engulfed by a raging fire started by faulty wiring. Director Irwin Allen, in conjunction with co-director Robert Guillermin, put one bright spot on his otherwise lamentable career by employing top notch special effects and pyrotechnics teams, and the ending of the film is not only thrilling - it actually makes a certain amount of logisitical sense!
1975 also featured the first major motion picture to focus on the catastrophic effects of an earthquake (as opposed to films, like “Short Cuts” and “The Two Jakes”. which use earthquakes as climactic plot devices). Titled, with breathtaking invention, “Earthquake!”, the movie employed impressive Sensurround audio and visual effects giving what to me, as the survivor of such a disaster, is an accurate illustration of the sensory aspect of being in an earthquake in Los Angeles. Alas the cast being shaken up by this temblor also tumble through perhaps the most laughable storylines ever featured in the splat milieu, with Charlton Heston, who would clench his jaws through many a cinematic apocalypse, standing firm. Only Walter Matthau, as a drunk too plastered to notice the devestation going on around him, provides any realism.
1997, a year in which disaster movies would be inexplicably revived after a sixteen year drought, brought a more respectful treatment of earthquakes, via volcanic eruption, in a film called - you guessed it - “Volcano!” While the story featured better production values and a superior cast to “Earthquake!”, it still had enough cookie cutter plotlines to fill a Hardy Boys novel. “Twister”, which spearheaded this odd extension of the “back to ths seventies” trend, came along at a time when Hollywood could more realistically portray tornadoes in all their terrifying power. Unfortunately, director Jan De Bont felt compelled to pay tribute to “The Wizard of Oz” by throwing in floating cows and flying oil trucks, all of them managing to narrowly miss the SUV driven by Helen Hunt and Bill Pullman whose star power protects them from getting anything more than their hair mussed by the funnel cloud.
The only major movie to deal with a disaster like Hurricane Katrina is 1998’s “Hard Rain.” Starring Morgan Freeman as a leader of a crew of bank robbers who lose their booty in the midst of a flood that affects an Indiana town, the film hosted impressive underwater and effects manipulated by a crew of technicians who were reportedly at serious risk of being electrocuted during the shoot, thanks to the combination of so much water and so much generated equipment. The risk they put themselves through was not entirely worth it, though, as “Hard Rain” never rises above simmer in the thrill gauge.
The above-and-beyond heroics of the tech crews in this and other disaster flicks may be a clue as to why so many of the movies cited here miss the mark. They are primarily conceived and executed by people who are expert at the technical aspects of conceving and executing a realistic natural disaster but are woefully ill-equipped to create characters and situations that are anything other than hackneyed. Possibly the one solution to this is to combine the talents of great speical effects coordinators and generators of thoughtful, incisive drama. So, perhaps there is a film out there for William Goldman, screenwriter for “All the Presidents Men”, and Hal Needham, director of “Cannonball Run” and other road hog classics, to collaborate on!
The future of disaster films also provides an interesting corollary to the initial query as to whether human tragedies like that in New Orleans are appropriate subjects for popcorn blockbusters. Oliver Stone is currently directing the first major motion picture about the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11. What is intriguing about this production is that a few months following the attack, Steven Spielberg pledged that he and his associates in Hollywood would not attempt any “docudramas” about the infamous day, fearing that even the most sincere attempt at recreating it would be disrespectful to those who died and their families. While one might criticize Spielberg, who has made no comment on Oliver Stone’s as-yet-untitled film, for backtracking on his declaration. I think the best response is to regard his pronouncement as words spoken in the heat of emotion soon after a life-changing apocalypse, and that one or more fictional treatments of 9-11 could be pulled off without exploiting the events or seeming indifferent to those who fell. Whether these pictures, including Stone’s, will suffer the Curse of the Splats remains to be seen.
Similarly, there is material for an equally powerful film capturing the upheaval by Katrina of a storied city that has forever lost its cultural greatness, and the controversy surrounding FEMA and other government agencies’ response to and planning for the crisis. Till then, all we can do is support and pray for the citizens of Storyville, and hope the only disasters of this scale that cross our paths in the years to come are only in the movies.
