Earthquake (The Filmakers Group, Universal, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched the 1974 disaster film Earthquake on Turner Classic Movies last night (Wednesday, June 17) as part of a night’s tribute to disaster movies in general. I’d seen it before but not since the late 1980’s, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I watched it on a commercial TV showing on the Mexico-based Channel 6. Earthquake, produced and directed by my old friend Mark Robson (a graduate of the Orson Welles and Val Lewton schools of filmmaking) from a script by George Fox and (of all people!) The Godfather creator Mario Puzo (apparentliy Puzo did the first draft, got recalled by Paramount to write The Godfather, Part Two,, and Fox was called in to finish it), was released by Universal in 1974 and was the first film to feature a new technique called “Sensurround.” This didn’t affect the visual portion of the film at all but involved dubbing a low-frequency rumble to the soundtrack so the theatre seats would shake. The ads promised, “You’ll Feel It as Well as See It in Sensurround!” In a number of older theatres (including Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, when the film was previewed there), that proved literally true; as bits and pieces of the molding started to fall off the roofs of badly maintained movie houses, audience members could have been forgiven for thinking they were really being victimized by an earthquake like the one in the film. Though John Gabrish and I were watching it on an ordinary 1.33:1 aspect ratio TV, we were listening to the soundtrack on a local FM radio station that simulcast it to give at least part of the impression of “Sensurround.” Earthquake came in the middle of a disaster-film cycle which, as I joked at the time, seemed to be the major studios’ attempt to get people to go to movies again by systematically scaring them away from any other form of entertainment. “You want to go on an ocean cruise?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Poseidon Adventure.” “You want to go to San Francisco and look at the tall buildings?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Towering Inferno.” “You want to go to L.A.?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Earthquake.” “You want to go to a beach resort?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Jaws.” “Oh, hell, then let’s just go to a movie.”

I wasn’t that impressed by Earthquake when I saw it in the late 1980’s but I liked it a lot better now even though it’s still not a great movie, and given that it was made when the whole idea of the genre was spectacular action scenes, the more spectacular the better, it didn’t play to the Lewtonesque less-is-more aesthetic that was Robson’s greatest strength as a director. Like most of the major disaster films of the time, Earthquake has a multi-character plot line and an all-star (at least sort of all-star) cast. Charlton Heston stars as Stewart Graff, a former college football star turned construction engineer for a company founded and headed by Sam Royce (Lorne Greene). He’s also married to Royce’s daughter Remy (Ava Gardner, considerably seedier than she was in her glory years), though they’re unhappy together and she demonstrates this by faking a suicide attempt (not for the first time) in the film’s opening scene. Graff is having an affair with Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), widow of a man who died on a previous construction job Graff had assigned him to. Denise has an 11-year-old son named Corry (Tiger Williams) whom Graff presents with an autographed (by Frank Gifford) football. Meanwhile, Los Angeles police officer Lew Slade (George Kennedy) is in trouble with his superiors over a car chase he was involved in; the would-be thief (Bobby Ferro) crosses the city line into L.A. County and then crashes the car into a hedge belonging to a rich person’s mansion. Slade then punches out the L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy who won’t allow him to give chase, and for that he’s suspended by his superior on the LAPD and ends up in a bar, still in full uniform in the middle of the day. Another storyline deals with Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), a motorcycle stunt rider who’s trying to be the Black Evel Knievel (the name is actually checked in the script). He’s worked out an elaborate stunt that involves riding on a loop, then accelerating on a roller-coaster-style ramp, and finally crossing through a hoop of flame. His manager, Sal Amici (Gabriel Dell from the old Bowery Boys films), needs a can of butane to make the hoop burn and bums $10 for it from Officer Slade. Quade (or Roundtree’s stunt double; this film featured 141 stunt people, a record to that time) successfully executes the stunt but then his attempt to repeat it for a Vegas promoter falls victim to the first of several big earthquakes in the film, which destroys the elaborate equipment.

Sal had enlisted his sister Rosa (Victoria Principal, who apparently auditioned for the part with her normal hair but arrived at her call-back with a shorter “do” coiffed to resemble an Afro; Robson was so impressed with her new hair she got the part), to parade at Quade’s big audition wearing a T-shirt with his logo and showing off her breasts, but the strait-laced Rosa bailed and went to a movie (the Clint Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter) instead. There’s also a supermarket manager named Jody (Marjoe Gortner) who tries to get Officer Slade to bust the group of Hare Krishnas who are chanting and singing outside his store. Slade refuses, asking Jody, “You got something against God?” – an in-joke reference to Gortner’s past as a traveling evangelist (a career he was literally born into because his parents were also traveling evangelists and mashed up “Mary” and “Joseph” when they named him). Jody lives in a building with three other young men and is training to be a bodybuilder, which has led him to adorn the walls of his room with photos of musclemen and has led his roommates to Queer-bait him. There’s also a scene at the California Institute of Seismology in which a junior seismologist named Walter Russell (Kip Niven) insists on the basis of his boss’s theories that L.A. is ready for a truly massive earthquake, only in the boss’s absence the place is being run by Dr. Willis Stockle (Barry Sullivan), who refuses Russell’s entreaties to go to L.A. Mayor Lewis (John Randolph) to ask for a major evacuation order. When word comes through that Russell’s boss has been killed in Fresno by a preliminary earthquake, Stockle takes Russell’s warnings seriously, but Mayor Lewis insists that he doesn’t want to panic the population unnecessarily, though he’s concerned enough he calls out the National Guard. Jody is a Guardsman and his unit is one of the ones mobilized – as he puts on his uniform his roommates taunt him and say he’s about to go out and play at being a soldier. Finally there’s intrigue around the big Mulholland Dam outside L.A. that supplies most of the city’s drinking water; a man is found drowned to death in an elevator shaft, and the dam starts developing visible cracks. Then the big earthquake (measuring 9.9 on the Richter scale, bigger than any actually recorded quake) happens and the city is thrown into turmoil.

The National Guard sets up an emergency medical station in the Wilton Plaza parking lot and its basements, until an aftershock destroys most of Wilton Plaza. I especially liked the sudden appearance of Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors, as the doctor in the emergency scenes. I suspect he got the part from having played the doctor Diahann Carroll’s nurse character worked for in the TV series Julia. There are thrilling scenes showing the evacuation of the Royce Construction building using an elaborate makeshift system Graff works up consisting of an office chair with arms and a firehose; Royce himself is successfully rescued but dies later of a heart attack in Wilton Plaza. Officer Slade commandeers Graff’s specially designed vehicle and presses it into service as an ambulance. Miles Quade’s vehicle also gets used as an ambulance, and among the people he and his crew rescue are Denise Marshall, though it's not until several reels later that she and her son are finally reunited. Jody busts Rosa for stealing a doughnut from a now-deserted deli and insists he’s got a right to hold her in custody for looting, but not surprisingly it turns what he really wants is Rosa’s body (she was a regular at his supermarket and he’s got a major crush on her). Ultimately Jody goes crazy out of lust and Officer Slade shoots him before he can do the dirty deed on Rosa. Ultimately the Mulholland Dam gives way and floods the city (Anton Chekhov, call your office!), sweeping away both Graff and Remy. That wasn’t in the original script; Charlton Heston insisted on rewriting the ending so both he and Ava Gardner’s characters would die. (Perhaps he was thinking of the sudden shock audiences had felt when Gene Hackman’s character died at the end of The Poseidon Adventure.) The original ending would have killed off Remy but left Graff alive and paired him with Denise. One of the most interesting aspects of Earthquake is the musical score by John Williams; it opens with some surprisingly atmospheric and musically advanced cues (anticipating some of the equally interesting cues in films like Jaws and E.T., both scores that are far more complex than the Big Tunes everyone knows) that do an excellent job of scene-setting. Though it’s still not a great movie, I liked Earthquake considerably better this time around even though the special effects, which won a special Academy Award, were variable. Some of them were utterly convincing; others, particularly the suburban houses that get smashed to bits during the Big Quake, looked like crudely constructed cardboard models. Apparently the technicians at Universal invented a device that could make an entire camera body shake instead of just jiggling the lens, as had been done in previous earthquake films, but they didn’t use it all that effectively. Still, I thought Earthquake worked as cheesy entertainment.