You know disaster movies, the ones where a grizzled man finds himself amidst a fiery catastrophe and has to rescue others, usually family members being among them. Some recent examples are San Andreas and Skyscraper. But the genre is really not what it used to be. In the 1970s, it was huge and spawned many famous hits, most of which were absolutely awful.
Airport
The golden age of disaster movies is considered to have started with Airport, released in 1970. It’s about a crazy man who gets on a plane with a bomb after evading authorities, . Then the pilot, played by Dean Martin, has to land the damaged plane in Chicago with many runways being closed because of snow (of course). The movie got poor reviews when it came out, but, perhaps due to rose colored nostalgia, it now has an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie grossed $500 million inflation adjusted and so began the disaster movie fad.
The Poseidon Adventure
1972’s The Poseidon Adventure more truly originated the basis for disaster movies. This is because the disaster is ongoing throughout most of the film, unlike Airport where we’re spending most of the time just waiting for the bomb to go off. Also, there’s no real villain here, it’s all an act of god as a tidal wave topples over a cruise ship and everyone needs to get out. This is considered one of the better 1970s disaster movies.
The Towering Inferno
1974 was arguably the peak of the golden age, no less than 3 blockbuster disaster movies were released that year, and I shall cover them in order of quality from best to worst. The Towering Inferno is widely considered the best of the disaster movies from the era. It stars Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as they fight a blaze that consumes a brand new skyscraper in San Francisco on its opening night and threatens to kill everyone at the grand opening party. Fun fact: Newman and McQueen kept arguing about who got top billing, so a compromise was reached which can be seen in this poster: McQueen’s name and photo would be to the left of Newman’s, but Newman’s was higher. Towering Inferno wound up being the highest grossing movie of 1974.
Airport 1975
Don’t ask me why a movie called Airport 1975 was released in 1974. Despite its name, the movie has almost nothing in common with the first one, sharing only one actor, George Kennedy. A 747 is landing in Salt Lake City but the cockpit is then rammed by a Cessna after its pilot has a heart attack. With the First Officer dead and the Captain blinded and injured, they need to do something. Because this is the 1970s, the female lead, Flight Attendant Nancy Pryor, portrayed by Karen Black, is a panicky and hysterical person and the plane is doomed until Charlton Heston is brought in by helicopter to save the day. A lot of this would get parodied, right down to the singing nun and the little girl waiting for a kidney transplant. The reviews were once again poor with New York Magazine’s Pauline Kael saying it was “cut rate swill” "produced on a TV-movie budget by mercenary businessmen". But audiences loved it enough to make it the 7th highest grossing movie of 1974.
Earthquake
Earthquake took the disaster movie concept to new highs, or lows. Instead of the disaster being limited to a plane, a building, or a ship, it occurs across all of Southern California. A 9.6 magnitude earthquake destroys Los Angeles and presumably everything surrounding it. Once again, Charlton Heston and George Kennedy starred. And they were joined by an ensemble cast that included Ava Gardner and Lorne Greene. The movie was, there’s no other word for it, terrible. The acting sucked, the plot was not engaging, and Lorne Greene was only 7 years older than Ava Gardner despite the former being cast as the latter’s father. The special effects were however widely praised, this was the first movie to use sensurround which made the earthquake rumbling seem more real. A low point was the use of a cartoon like splat to depict the deaths of office workers when their elevator hit the ground.
And here’s the rest of the quake
The End of the Golden Age
The fad soon wore itself out. Stuff like The Swarm (1978) and Meteor (1979) did poorly at the box office despite huge budgets. As I said, most of the movies were panned by critics and it’s not much of a surprise they didn’t have staying power. Many of the cliches were mocked and one movie in particular took advantage.
Airplane!
Airplane! was really the result, not the cause, of the end of the Golden Age of Disaster Movies. It used many plot elements from Airport 1975 in particular: the disabled crew (this time by fish, not a Cessna), the panicky flight attendant, her boyfriend happening to be a pilot who lands the plane in a super tense scene. It was a surprise box office hit in 1980.
Conclusion
So that’s the Golden Age of Disaster movies. It was a series of extremely high budget movies that relied on special effects and manufactured tension to get around poor acting and lazy plots, and for a while earned big returns. It became an object of mockery and it would be a while before Hollywood got back in it.