Junk-quake & Flames

Growing up, I refused to see the multitude of disaster movies that plagued the big screens during the better part of the early to mid-1970s. Why have they recently slowly woven through my life with the connecting thread of George Kennedy? The year 1974 seems to be the apex when San Francisco in The Towering Inferno and Los Angeles in Earthquake blasted the screen. Tonight I am watching the later, albeit without the ground breaking Sensurround that accompanied it in theaters. How can you knock a movie that features both Marjoe Gortner and Pedro Armendariz Jr. (who, of course, is nothing compared to Pedro Armendariz Sr.)?

Most amazingly, it unravels the long standing riddle of the Hollywood Sphinx and the 1990s incident of the slapping of a police officer by Zsa Zsa Gabor. One of the earliest action sequences involves a crisis when a police car plows through Zza Zza's hedge and they are distraught. They knew what would follow.

Do these movies make us howl with laughter today because they are so horribly made, or because they so pathetically anticipate a reality that would so gruesomely be realized in the 21st century? Burning and exploding buildings, planes crashing without pilots to guide them and only the young and beautiful surviving. If you are Ava Gardner, a woman over 50 and not fit, you are doomed to be sucked into the sewers of Los Angeles. Same goes for poor Jennifer Jones, her Aqua-netted head bouncing off the gleaming windows of San Francisco's financial district's glistening towers as she meets the bitter fate of no longer being able to pass for 35.

I will only start to worry when these movies outnumber my Criterion collection library.