I felt it was befitting to publish this as only just yesterday you may have heard was the day that New York shook, and though what was experienced was the closest courting with what could have been a bonafide epic disaster (Phew) I was personally fascinated to discover these here formidable fault lines that exist in the under-crofts of Metropolis and now to know up close and personal the tour de g-force, oh what it feels like to go a'whirl in a spin cycle at 200 MPH.
Disaster epics have long proven they were equally as successful as the general action pictures. They might have been classified as films that sought to live up to Sam Goldwyn's celebrated injunction to a scriptwriter : 'I want you to begin with an earthquake and work up to a climax.' Invariably they amassed a group of characters with individual and collective dilemmas and caused these problems to have a resolve in one way or another by a spectacular final holocaust.
The Hollywood special effects departments made a meal out of this, creating even more grandiose disasters. They succeeded in destroying the city of New York by tidal wave (Deluge,1933), San Francisco by substantial earthquake (San Francisco,1936) Chicago by fire (In Old Chicago,1938) the South Sea island of Manikura by hurricane (The Hurricane,1937), a Chinese province by locust invasion (The Good Earth,1937) and India's city of Ranchipur by a burst dam in 1939's The Rains Came.
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| The Night Chicago Died |
This formula would appeal to other countries particularly those with totalitarian regimes which employed the cinema to rewrite and re-stage dramatic episodes from their respective countries' past, imbuing often with nationalistic and militaristic messages.