Wise: Werth, where's your life jacket?
Werth: With my yacht.
Wise: It's the anniversary of both the launch of the Titanic and the Johnstown Flood which makes it highly probable that something disastrous is going to happen today.
Werth: You can't avoid disaster, Wise. But you can prepare yourself by indulging in some classic disaster flicks and gleaning some tips for making it out alive.
Wise: San Francisco (1936) is one of the first great disaster flicks, setting the template for all the films that follow its lead. The film opens on New Year's Eve 1904, and stars Clark Gable as Blackie Norton, a casino owner from the wrong side of town, and Spencer Tracy as his best friend Father Mullin who happens to be the local parish priest. Blackie has no time for religion, but he is determined to spend his wealth trying to make things better for anyone down on his luck. After a fire ravages a run-down boarding house, Blackie offers a job to displaced chanteuse Mary Blake (Jeanette MacDonald) who has dreams of singing in the local opera house.
Soon, the two fall in love, but Mary flees into the arms of Jack Holt (Jack Burley), the richest man in town, when she realizes that she'll lose good-girl image if she becomes Jackie's bride. What she doesn't know is that her new beau made his fortune building shoddy tenements, leaving the city vulnerable to catastrophe.
Werth: Never date a contractor.
Wise: When that catastrophe strikes in the form of the famous San Francisco earthquake of 1905, the city is thrown into chaos and only those with quick wits and good morals survive. Gable plays a variation of his famous tough-guy persona, but he's also a man on a spiritual journey.
Contemptuous of religion, the tragedy forces him to confront both despair and the threat of losing the two people he loves most. Cast in the familiar role of the understanding clergyman, Tracy has less of an emotional arc, but his palpable chemistry with Gable makes them believable lifelong friends. MacDonald was the biggest star of the three at the time of the film, and it's interesting to see how MGM's star diva stepped away from the operettas for which she was famous and into a grubby, frontier town.
Werth: "As she stood in the ruins and sang. A-A-And saaannnggg!"
Wise: To be honest, for years I thought San Francisco was something of a joke, based mostly on the fun Judy Garland made of it when she sang the title song. But it's actually quite moving, full of the spectacle and big emotions that have become characteristic of this type of film. Nothing about it is subtle, but it's full of passion, of Clark Gable's snarls and tenderness, of Spencer Tracy's wry morality, and the peculiar—yet compelling—sight of Jeanette MacDonald stooping to a project she clearly felt beneath her, but still having a grand time.
Werth: San Francisco must be ground zero for cinematic disasters because Irwin Allen's hit epic, The Towering Inferno (1974), is also set there. Architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) is ready to leave the rat race behind after designing a 138 story skyscraper for building guru Jim Duncan (William Holden.)
But he soon uncovers some shady building practices that Duncan's son-in-law, the corner-cutting queen Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain in a rare unlikeable role) has been implementing to lower costs and pocket kickbacks, threatening the safety of the building. Unfortunately, while a red carpet opening event is in full swing on the top floor, an electrical box in a storage room that just happens to contain buckets of flammable material, a wall of Krylon spray-paint cans, and what looks like someone's discarded wedding dress bursts into flame and an evening of blazing terror in the world's tallest building begins.
Wise: Shelley Winters' swim team gold ain't gonna fix this mess.
Werth: After striking box office gold with The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, Allen stuck to his hit-making blueprint and stocked Inferno with just about every star in Hollywood. Aside from Newman and Holden, there's Steve McQueen as tough-as-nails Fire Chief O'Hallorhan; Faye Dunaway as Roberts' over-sexed wife; Fred Astaire as a dapper, washed-up con man;
Jennifer Jones as an art tutor with cheek implants that would make Madonna jealous; Robert Wagner as an executive who dips into the secretarial pool; and even O.J. Simpson as a take charge security officer who can't resist rescuing a kitten.
Wise: Making this scene the most ironic in Hollywood history.
Werth: All of those stars certainly attract attention, but unfortunately, there are too many of them to allow much character development. Newman and McQueen mix up a welcome testosterone cocktail whenever they are together, but for the most part the fragmented stories don't allow for the cohesion that Allen achieved in Poseidon. Inferno is too complicated and too cynical to achieve the heartfelt catharsis of its predecessor, but that doesn't stop it from being a hoot.
Like a cinematic flume ride, Inferno flies through its sometimes ridiculous plot providing the audience with the thrills it desires—mainly stars (and extras) screaming, falling and burning... in a couple cases all three at the same time.
While it falls short of the heights achieved in Poseidon, Inferno earned eight Oscar noms, winning three—including one for best song, "We May Never Love Like This Again" which, if you think sounds familiar, it's because it was both written and sung by the same folks who brought you the Oscar-winning song from Poseidon, "The Morning After."
Wise: With all this talk of disaster, maybe we should check out this week's premiere of After Earth.
Werth: I'd rather sit through the San Francisco earthquake... on fire...
Wise: Check back next week for more earth-shaking Film Gab!
Wise: I'm really sorry, Werth.
Werth: Sorry? Why? Did you not send your condolences to the family of Deanna Durbin?
Wise: While it's sad when anyone with a connection to old Hollywood passes on, I never really understood Durbin's appeal. She was all eyebrow and tremolo to me. But I'm apologizing because I forgot to bake a cake to celebrate Mary Astor's birthday.
Werth: Astor is one of my favorite actresses from the Golden Era. Not as well remembered today as some of her contemporaries, Astor was a cinematic workhorse starring in films from the silent era until her final role in 1964 in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte.
Wise: Obviously collateral damage from the Davis/DeHavilland brawl.
Werth: Astor turned in one of her most memorable performances in the 1941 hard-boiled classic, The Maltese Falcon. Based on Dashiell Hammett's popular detective novel, Falcon stars Humphrey Bogart as iconic gumshoe Sam Spade. Spade receives a visit from the lovely Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Astor) who hires him and his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowen), to tail a man who's done her wrong. When Archer turns up with lead in his guts, Spade becomes embroiled in a crime ring in search of a valuable statue.
Wise: If only he had checked Amazon first.
Werth: The film is full of a who's-who of Forties character actors. Sydney Greenstreet is a delight as The Fat Man, a chortling, criminal Buddha, earning himself a Best Supporting Actor nom in his first film. Elisha Cook, Jr. is appropriately twitchy as a young gunsel who is just itching to plug Spade.
Peter Lorre is creepily sinister as Joel Cairo, a lilting-voiced two-timer whose card smells of gardenias, and who practically fellates a cane in Spade's office. Warner Bros. only hinted at this gay character, Hammett's book outright calls him a "queer."
Wise: I wonder if there's an "It Gets Better" video for people who want to marry their walking stick.
Werth: Bogart had finally gotten a star turn the same year in High Sierra after 27 years of making films, and with the popularity of Falcon, he reached superstar status. Of course, one year later he would become a Hollywood legend in a little film called Casablanca. Bogart's detached and world-weary, good guy persona was a winning combination for the actor, and his gruff and tart delivery of the rat-a-tat dialogue shows the intelligence and charm behind his baggy-eyed exterior.
Astor plays with and against her good-girl screen image as a patrician, elegant woman whose every line is a lie, her delivery correctly sounding like a performance. But rather than just playing the duplicity of the role, Astor's eyes capture a genuine desperation that make this role one of her best.
Falcon was John Huston's directorial debut and he made the most of it, earning Academy noms for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and helping craft the cinematic look that would come to be called film noir.
Wise: Astor plays a smaller, though no less vital role in A Kiss Before Dying (1956) as the mother who inspires Robert Wagner's murderous desires. Wagner plays Bud Corliss, an Army vet and college student who discovers that his rich girlfriend Dorie (Joanne Woodward) is pregnant, but instead of eloping and risking her father's wrath (and disinheritance), he plots to murder her, disguise it as a suicide, and marry her sister Ellen (Virginia Leith) instead. He nearly succeeds, but Ellen, following a few clues and with the help of the hunky nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) of the chief of police, discovers the shocking truth.
Werth: I've got a few shocking truths to show Jeffrey Hunter.
Wise: In just a few short scenes, Astor creates a portrait of a woman whose own frustrated marriage forced her to focus her attentions on nurturing her son, only to realize that her efforts have bred a killer. Astor, who spent much of the 1940s playing wholesome maternal figures, most notably in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Little Women (1949), dials up her performance just enough to make her virtuous screen persona turn slightly off-key. It's all very Freudian, and A Kiss Before Dying fits neatly into a continuum of murderous mamma's boys from the post-war period of Hollywood that culminated with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).
Werth: Did they smell of gardenias?
Wise: Director Gerd Oswald employs an effective strategy in the making of the film: his characters barely speak above a whisper, creating tension by forcing the audience to the edge of their seats. He also stages long takes with little action, but framed at off-kilter angles, telegraphing both his killer's skewed outlook on life as well as the precarious position of his innocents. (It's hard to believe this is the same guy who put Bunny O'Hare on the screen.)
But Robert Wagner is the real revelation here. To those of us who know him from the latter half of his career playing dashing buffoons in TV series like Hart to Hart or the Austin Powers films, it's a shock to see him slender and beautiful and full of malice.
Werth: Some would say enough malice to shove his wife off a boat.
Wise: Let's leave the Hollywood conspiracy theories for next week's Film Gab.
