Finally…
So at last I got around to watching and writing up another crop of short reviews about films that don’t quite qualify as “disaster movies”.
The recurrent theme this time was films starting out in a way that got my hopes up, but then letting me down badly the further the film went on. Planes, trains, storms, floods, you name it—they just didn’t make the grade.
On the other hand, this exercise gave me the impetus to finally track down a copy of John Ford’s The Hurricane which, like San Francisco the year before, is not a disaster movie, but contains one of the greatest disaster sequences of all time—and all done with practical effects. CGI only wishes it could be this effective…
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Liz Kingsley is the insane genius behind And You Call Yourself a Scientist!
#1 by Ken on October 11, 2015 - 9:23 pm
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Well, as you point it, realism was easier back before actors’ unions and insurance companies started interfering with the director’s freedom to actually drown people in a flood.
#2 by lyzard on October 12, 2015 - 10:19 pm
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Oh, granted! But there are ways and ways of doing things. With San Francisco, for example, although there are disaster set-pieces, it’s the brilliance of the editing that makes it work.
I think water is the wild-card in this area: you always wonder how much real control the film-makers have. It was interesting to compare The Hurricane with Floods Of Fear, which has some excellent practical effects too, but without any sense that anyone was really in danger, which in the earlier film there certainly is.
I guess the upside of CGI is that mental “out”. CGI shark films never convince for a moment, but on the other hand you always have the reassuring knowledge that No Sharks Were Harmed, etc.
#3 by RogerBW on October 15, 2015 - 2:55 pm
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It occurs to me that in the 1930s it may sometimes have been considered impressive enough to use an aircraft as the setting for one’s story – and not feel the need to shoot it down or blow it up too. Certainly Death Flies East sounds from your synopsis as though it would work about as well on a non-stop train.
#4 by lyzard on October 18, 2015 - 10:09 pm
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That’s quite right. I’m interested in the gap between America and England in this respect, which is reflective of the relative size of the countries: in England a plane was a way of getting to a different country, not travelling internally; whereas in America you see the shift from trains to planes. Not that trains went away, but there was increasing excitement about the possibilities of air travel. There are a number of American films in which nothing goes wrong with the flight, rather the speed of travel is the focus.
The plot of Death Flies East would work on a train, but there is a race-against-time component that makes a plane necessary.
It wasn’t until after WWII that you see the same sort of excitement about flight in British films—mostly because of the development of jet technology. But then the Comet crashes occurred, which shifted perspective and gave birth to the disaster movie as we now know it. (With a helping hand from the Jack Graham bombing in the US, of course.)
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