City Beneath the Sea (1971)

          Two aspects of producer Irwin Allen’s cinematic identity converged in this campy sci-fi movie, which was made for television as the pilot for a series that never materialized. The project echoes Allen’s past, because Allen produced the 1964-1968 adventure series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as well as the 1961 theatrical feature from which that series was adapted. Yet City Beneath the Sea also hints at Allen’s future, because the picture is a disaster saga, and Allen’s name became synonymous with the disaster genre once he unleashed The Poseidon Adventure (1972). City Beneath the Sea scores as high on the Cheese-O-Meter as anything Allen ever made. The narrative is silly, the performances are robotic, and the storytelling is primarily designed to showcase elaborate costumes, sets, and special effects. That said, City Beneath the Sea is brainless fun, with laughably one-dimensional characters struggling to survive a series of absurd crises. Every scene bursts with exposition, because screenwriter John Meredyth Lucas struggles to include all of the pulpy plot elements provided by Allen, who is credited with writing the story. Seen today, City Beneath the Sea feels like a relic from a distant time, because the pristine design style represents a mid-century-modern vision of the future. “Sleek” is the watchword, and nobody on this production was afraid of using bright colors.

          Set in 2053, the movie begins with the U.S. President (Richard Basehart) demanding that former Navy Admiral Michael Matthews (Stuart Whitman) return to duty as commander of Pacifica, a huge underwater research installation. Here’s the laugh-out-loud premise: The U.S. has been transferring its cache of gold from Fort Knox to Pacifica because of seismic activity near Fort Knox, and now the U.S. has learned that it must also transfer a huge store of fissile radioactive material to Pacifica for safekeeping, because only proximity to gold keeps the material from exploding. Oh, and a giant meteor is about to crash into the Earth, with Pacifica the likely ground zero, so the dozens of people living underwater must abandon the station as soon as the gold and radioactive material are secured in a meteor-proof vault. As if that’s not goofy enough, City Beneath the Sea features an “aquanoid,” a mutant who can breathe either air or water. Woven into all of this hogwash are the various cardboard characters one always finds in Allen’s pictures: The stalwart hero blamed for an accident he didn’t actually cause, the bereaved widow whose recriminations crush the stalwart hero beneath a mountain of guilt, the duplicitous lieutenant planning an evil scheme, and so on. (As for that evil scheme, it’s a brazen gold heist, since City Beyond the Sea clearly needed even more plot material.) In addition to Basehart and Whitman, actors providing the film’s wooden performances include Joseph Cotten (who appears in just one short scene), Rosemary Forsyth, Robert Colbert, and Robert Wagner.

City Beneath the Sea: FUNKY

1980 Week: When Time Ran Out . . .

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting title for the final big-screen release from producer Irwin Allen, who became synonymous with the disaster-movie genre after making The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). By the time this enervated flick hit cinemas with a resounding thud, time had indeed run out for Allen’s formula of jamming as many movie stars as possible into melodramatic epics about mass destruction. The disaster this time is a volcano that threatens to consume an island in the Pacific, so the usual Allen contrivances seem especially silly. For instance, tanned B-movie stud James Franciscus plays the requisite cold-hearted businessman who tries to convince island residents that the volcano’s not going to erupt. Really? Then what’s with all the lava and smoke, to say nothing of the corpses left over from scientists conducting tests in the mouth of the volcano? Similarly, the endless scenes of people climbing hills and crossing ravines—running from lava as if the stuff possesses malicious intent—are ludicrous. And while much of the cast comprises such second-stringers as Edward Albert, Barbara Carrera, Alex Karras, and (of course) Allen regular Ernest Borgnine, Allen clearly wrote big checks to get a trio of major stars involved. William Holden plays a hotel owner more concerned with his love life than his professional obligations, Paul Newman plays a heroic oil-rig boss who spots trouble that others can’t recognize (naturally), and Jacqueline Bisset plays the woman caught between them. Never mind that late-career Holden looks so desiccated from alcoholism that he seems more like Bisset’s grandfather than her would-be lover. Anyway, it’s all incredibly boring and shallow and trite, with any potential for excitement neutralized by indifferent acting, leaden pacing, and questionable special effects. Not even Bisset’s spectacular cleavage or Newman’s irrepressible charm can sustain interest. Instead of being a disaster movie, When Time Ran Out is merely a disaster.

When Time Ran Out . . .: LAME

Flood! (1976) & Fire! (1977)

          After the success of his lavish blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), producer Irwin Allen tried to keep the disaster-movie momentum going, but most of his subsequent flicks ended up getting made for television on pathetic budgets. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Allen refused onscreen credit for producing the first of these also-ran projects, Flood!—the exclaiming title of which promises more excitement than the movie delivers.

          A random gang of actors, most of whom were on their way down the Hollywood ladder at the time, portray residents of a small town called Brownsville, which gets submerged when the local dam succumbs to pressure after heavy rainfall. Since the movie features an idiot politician who refuses to acknowledge the potential for danger until it’s too late, calling Flood! trite would be giving the thing too much credit. Furthermore, the special effects, normally Allen’s hallmark, are laughable. One silly gimmick involves placing a container of water in front of the camera, then shooting over the container toward a nearby building, as if this bargain-basement illusion can persuade viewers they’re beholding a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Worst of all, the movie is dull and slow, despite the hearty efforts of actors including Richard Basehart, Robert Culp, Barbara Hershey, Martin Milner, Cameron Mitchell, and Poseidon Adventure survivors Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowall.

          Allen’s next TV endeavor, for which he actually did take onscreen credit, nearly earns its exclamation point. Fire! stars Poseidon Adventure veteran Ernest Borgnine, whose campy acting style always enlivens silly movies, and the simplistic plot gets the job done: When a convict on a labor crew working in a mountaintop forest starts a fire to obscure his escape attempt, the conflagration spreads toward a resort town, forcing guests and locals to flee. Meanwhile, easygoing local Sam (Borgnine) sticks around to help with the evacuation because he’s in love with the local hotelier (Vera Miles). The cast is unimpressive (Alex Cord, Patty Duke, Erik Estrada, Donna Mills, Lloyd Nolan), but Allen and his director, Earl Bellamy (who also helmed Flood!), get the formula right in terms of meshing melodrama with nature-gone-wild tragedy. It helps that the movie relies on practical effects, with real buildings and trees burning on camera, rather than chintzy tricks. Fire! is terrible, of course, but it delivers the goods.

          Clearly, however, the bloom was off the rose, so even though Allen oversaw three additional made-for-TV disaster flicks, they suffered ignoble fates. With C-listers like Bert Convy starring, Allen’s production Hanging by a Thread, in which people flash back to their pasts while trapped in a cable car, aired to no acclaim as a two-night miniseries in late 1979. Next, the self-explanatory The Night the Bridge Fell Down was shot in 1979 but not broadcast until 1983. Then, after Allen’s final big-screen disaster movies, The Swarm (1978) and When Time Ran Out . . . (1980), the end of his cycle finally came with Cave-In, a long-winded TV movie about just what the title suggests, which aired in 1983, shortly after The Night the Bridge Fell Down. (All made-for-television titles available at WarnerArchive.com)

Flood!: LAME

Fire!: FUNKY

The Towering Inferno (1974)

          The biggest box-office success of 1974 and in many ways the climax of the ’70s disaster-movie genre, The Towering Inferno is terrible from an artistic perspective, featuring clichéd characters and ridiculous situations spread across a bloated 165-minute running time. Still, it’s fascinating as a case study of how Hollywood operates. First and most obviously, the movie represents producer Irwin Allen’s most successful attempt to mimic the success of his underwater thriller The Poseidon Adventure (1972), because Allen outdoes the previous film with bigger spectacle, bigger stars, and bigger stunts.

          The movie also reflects movie-star gamesmanship. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman agreed to costar, then fought for primacy within the story, each demanding exactly the same number of lines in the script. Even sillier, their agents arranged for the actors’ names to appear in the credits in the same size type but at different heights, so each would have “top” billing even when their names were side-by-side. Furthermore, the movie demonstrates the ease with which greed trumps pride in Hollywood. A pair of books with useful narrative elements involving burning buildings were owned by different studios, so Allen persuaded Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. to co-produce the movie, an industry first; each studio sacrificed the integrity of its respective brand for half of a sure thing.

          Somewhere amid the power plays, an actual movie got made, and The Towering Inferno is the epitome of what later became known as “high-concept” cinema. It’s about a big building on fire, and that’s the whole story. Sure, there are mini-melodramas, like the romantic tribulations of the folks trapped inside the building and the macho heroics of an architect (Newman) and a fireman (McQueen), but the thing is really about the excitement of seeing which characters will get burned to death, which will fall from terrible heights, and which will survive.

          The plot begins when an engineer cuts corners in order to rush the opening of the Glass Tower, a skyscraper in San Francisco. Once the inevitable blaze erupts, further shortcomings in the building process complicate efforts to rescue trapped occupants. (Elevators, helicopters, rope bridges, and other contrivances are utilized.) As per the Allen playbook, an all-star cast trudges through the carnage, trying to instill cardboard characterizations with life. Richard Chamberlain plays the short-sighted engineer, Faye Dunaway plays Newman’s love interest, William Holden plays the oblivious builder, and Robert Wagner plays a smooth-talking PR man. Others along for the ride include Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Dabney Coleman, Jennifer Jones, O.J. Simpson, and Robert Vaughn.

          The Towering Inferno is a handsome production, with director John Guillermin and cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp using their widescreen frames to give everything a sense of opulence and scale. Additionally, Allen (who directed the action scenes) knew how to drop debris onto stuntmen. Nonetheless, The Towering Inferno is humorless, long-winded, and repetitive. Amazingly, the movie received a number of Oscar nominations (including one for Best Picture), and won three of its categories: cinematography, editing, and original song. In Hollywood, nothing earns praise as quickly as financial success.

The Towering Inferno: FUNKY

The Swarm (1978)

          Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, was well into the unintentional self-parody phase of his career by the late ’70s, less than a decade after he first started mining mass misfortune for mass entertainment. Instead of the towering infernos and upside-down cruise ships of yore, he restored to demonizing insects in The Swarm, an undercooked comin’-at-ya picture in which killer bees, mostly depicted as animated blotches roaming across the skyline, attack a small town in the Southwest before heading to Houston. Filled with all the usual tropes of Allen’s pictures, from large mobilizations of rescue forces to trite melodramas playing out against the backdrop of tragedy, The Swarm also features one of Allen’s trademark hodgepodge casts.

          Michael Caine, starting his slide into ridiculous paycheck gigs, stars as a bug specialist who takes command of the government’s response to the bees, and he’s accompanied by Richard Widmark (as a general who wants to blow up everything in sight), Henry Fonda (as a wheelchair-bound immunologist), Richard Chamberlain (as a Southern-fried scientist/crankypants whose sole function seems to be scowling at Caine), and Katharine Ross (as a scientist/love interest who gets stung by more than Cupid’s arrow), plus Patty Duke Astin, Olivia de Havilland, Bradford Dillman, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray.

          Even though a few elements are respectable, like Jerry Goldsmith’s exciting score, The Swarm is, well, swarming with ludicrous highlights, because the movie’s so preposterously straight-faced it plays like a comedy. The plotting is, of course, extraordinarily stupid, with Caine regularly leaving his post as the government’s top man during a major crisis to run inconsequential errands with Ross so they can share cutesy patter while driving around the countryside. Better still, from the perspective of amusing awfulness, is the outrageously limp dialogue, which nails the audience with clunky exposition as mercilessly as the bees zap their victims. “Just because you’re the mayor of Marysville, that doesn’t make you an engineer,” Johnson barks to MacMurray, who replies, “Look, nobody asked you to leave Houston and come here to retire, you know.” Ouch.

           In its most hysterically insipid moments (which are, sadly, outnumbered by long stretches of flat tedium), The Swarm approaches full-on camp, like the bee attack on a nuclear power plant or the colorful bit of Caine running through the small town, screaming, “The killer bees are coming! Everybody get inside!” (On a less amusing note, Widmark takes to referring to the Africanized bees as “Africans,” leading to icky lines like, “By tomorrow, there will be no more Africans in Houston!”) The movie’s best moment, though, is undoubtedly the scene in which Caine coaches a young bee-sting victim through a bout of hysterics by convincing the boy that the giant bee floating in front of his head—depicted, with goofy obviousness, by a giant superimposed bee—is a hallucination.

          For good or ill, The Swarm is no hallucination, because this two-and-a-half-hour venom blast of a gloriously bad creature feature really exists. And, yes, you read that right: Though originally released at 116 minutes, there’s an extended version of The Swarm clocking in at 155 minutes. Rest assured the whole damn mess was endured for the sake of this review. Anti-venom, please!

The Swarm: FREAKY

The Poseidon Adventure (1971) & Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979)

          For some reason, I’ve always remembered a remark that Will Smith made around the time he broke through as a big-screen star with 1994’s Independence Day: When asked how he got so much mileage out of so little screen time, Smith explained that he studied Ernest Borgnine’s performance in The Poseidon Adventure because of how vigorously Borgnine attacked every scene. Smith was onto something, because even though Irwin Allen’s production of The Poseidon Adventure deserves its reputation as one of the cheesiest movies of the ’70s, it’s undeniably compelling for the same reason that Borgnine’s supporting performance is effective—the picture will do anything to get a reaction. Based on a novel by Paul Gallico, the story about a luxury liner turned upside down by a giant rogue wave is silly, because it presumes that the liner can stay afloat long enough for survivors to seek rescue through a hole in the bottom of the hull, but the movie is jam-packed with action, melodrama, romance, schmaltz, and spectacle. What’s not to like about unpretentious hokum that intercuts shots of gussied-up New Year’s Eve revelers singing “Auld Lang Syne” with vignettes of the ship’s stoic captain (Leslie Nielsen!) watching watery doom approach a few decks above their heads? Perfecting the disaster-movie template established by Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure offers a slapdash ensemble of familiar faces romping through one overwrought crisis after another. In sheer paycheck-cashing mode, Gene Hackman plays the hero of the piece, a swaggering priest who rediscovers his purpose in life by leading a band of hearty survivors to possible salvation; his performance is so faux-intense that it’s embarrassing and thrilling at the same time. Lending campy gravitas are Borgnine and other showbiz veterans, including Jack Albertson, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, and the flamboyantly buoyant Shelley Winters (“In the water, I’m a very skinny lady!”). Meanwhile, Carol Lynley, Pamela Sue Martin, and Stella Stevens shriek their lungs out in various states of soggy undress.
          The soap-opera storylines are drab, like the one about marital strife between a crass cop (Borgnine) and an ex-hooker (Stevens), but the fun of the picture is watching broadly sketched caricatures clash with each other against a backdrop of death and devastation. Allen spent a bundle on massive sets that could be flipped upside down and flooded, so what’s happening onscreen feels real because the actors actually got soaked, and drowning is such a universal phobia that it’s impossible not to sympathize with the characters’ anxiety. On top of everything, there’s a sky-high kitsch factor, especially when Lynley lip-syncs the movie’s atrocious but Oscar-winning theme song “The Morning After”—so whether you embrace the flick for its legit thrills or its unintentional humor, The Poseidon Adventure is a great ride.
          Allen reprised the story several years later, when his career was faltering; the sleep-inducing Beyond the Poseidon Adventure stars a bored Michael Caine as a sea captain who tries to salvage loot from wreck of the Poseidon shortly after the last moments of the original movie. Peter Boyle, Sally Field, and Jack Warden join the festivities, with Karl Malden playing Caine’s salty sidekick and Telly Savalas portraying the main villain. Unfortunately, the direction and script are so lifeless that even the colorful cast isn’t enough to keep the sequel afloat—Beyond the Poseidon Adventure is a grade-Z heist picture that merely happens to take place on an abandoned boat.

The Poseidon Adventure: GROOVY

Beyond the Poseidon Adventure: LAME