Earthquake

Earthquake

1974 "When the big one finally hits L.A."
Earthquake
Earthquake

Earthquake

5.9 | 2h3m | PG | en | Drama

Various interconnected people struggle to survive when an earthquake of unimaginable magnitude hits Los Angeles, California.

View More
Rent / Buy
amazon
Buy from $14.69 Rent from $3.99
AD

WATCH FREEFOR 30 DAYS

All Prime Video
Cancel anytime

Watch Now
5.9 | 2h3m | PG | en | Drama , Action , Thriller | More Info
Released: November. 15,1974 | Released Producted By: Universal Pictures , The Filmakers Group Country: United States of America Budget: 0 Revenue: 0 Official Website:
Synopsis

Various interconnected people struggle to survive when an earthquake of unimaginable magnitude hits Los Angeles, California.

...... View More
Stream Online

The movie is currently not available onine

Cast

Charlton Heston , Ava Gardner , George Kennedy

Director

E. Preston Ames

Producted By

Universal Pictures , The Filmakers Group

AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

All Prime Video Movies and TV Shows. Cancel anytime.

Watch Now

Trailers & Images

Reviews

virek213 For much of the 1970s, the disaster film genre was alternately one of the most popular genres with film audiences, and one of the most reviled in terms of what movie critics thought. Essentially, it involved a whole lot of people caught up in some kind of cataclysmic event, be it natural or man-made, sometimes, as in the case of the AIRPORT movies, involving passenger planes. Indeed, both AIRPORT (released in early 1970), and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (released at the end of 1972) were the starting point for the genre, which relied on a combination of soap opera plots, big-name stars, and incredibly spectacular special effects. the peak of this genre came near the end of 1974 with the release of three films. AIRPORT 1975 and THE TOWERING INFERNO were two of them. The third one was EARTHQUAKE.Though every bit as melodramatic in terms of acting and subplots as other films in the genre, EARTHQUAKE also posits a highly realistic premise: that in the very near future, a major earthquake will strike Southern California and cause incredible damage, destruction, and death. It also speculates on the possibility of predicting where and when one will hit. In essence, this means that EARTHQUAKE would also qualify itself as being a science fiction film of sorts for that very reason alone. Charlton Heston portrays an architect intent, when he isn't fighting with his wife (Ava Gardner) or dallying around with a younger girl (Genevieve Bujold), on ensuring that any future high rises in Los Angeles not only meet but also exceed current building codes (as he points out, in the 1971 Sylmar quake, buildings that merely met the codes collapsed). George Kennedy portrays a toughened L.A. cop forced to spring into action when the massive temblor and its aftershocks tear through the heart of Los Angeles. Barry Sullivan, Kip Niven, and Donald Moffatt portray seismologists who have the information in their hands about the possibility of such an earthquake but who act upon it only after one of their colleagues is killed in a mysterious accident along a fault line near Fresno. As night falls on a metropolis devastated by the 8.3 temblor, a lot of other things happen: Kennedy has to rescue a close friend (Victoria Principal) from a deranged National Guard officer (Marjoe Gortner); people have to be rescued from an underground parking garage that has been severely damaged by an aftershock; and people have to be rescued from a collapsed shopping mall by Heston and Kennedy before the Hollywood Reservoir Dam crumbles.By the standards of 21st century special effects, EARTHQUAKE looks admittedly very dated; the matte paintings and the scenes of destruction are all two to three generations removed from today's CGI. And of course the soap opera plotting isn't exactly a plus; some of it veers close to laughable on a few occasions. There's really not much that either the cast of director Mark Robson (VALLEY OF THE DOLLS; PEYTON PLACE) can do about it. But the ten-minute sequence of the "Big One" is quite scary, and was even more so when the film was released in late 1974 because of the Sensurround sound process that Universal used to enhance the feel of being in the middle of it all. Not only did it scare a lot of moviegoers, but it also caused some slight (but actual) exterior damage to the theaters that showed the film. And however dated the special effects are, they are still fairly convincing; this, it is no wonder that EARTHQUAKE won Oscars for both Special Effects and Sound. At a cost of $13 million, much of it spent on the special effects and production design, it wasn't exactly the cheapest film in the world (already the average cost of a film was nearing $7 million), but it managed to gross around $80 million, at a time when the notion of a $100 million box office hit (or a film that cost $100 million just to make) was still something unknown in the movie business.Although, like a lot of 1970s disaster films, EARTHQUAKE largely faded from memory once the genre wore out its welcome at the end of the decade, later sci-fi and disaster films like DEEP IMPACT and "2012", just to name a few, helped revitalize the genre with the use of CGI. Gradually, however flawed it looked by the time those films came out at the end of the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, EARTHQUAKE assumed a greater prominence once again. It is no secret as to why that should be the case, what with a big host of stars, including Heston, who was at another commercial peak in his career in what he termed a "multi-jeopardy" film, leading the way. But the underlying theme of EARTHQUAKE is what keeps the film alive in our consciences: the very real possibility that Los Angeles may well be wiped off the map, if not by the dreaded San Andreas Fault, then by the myriad fault lines that crisscross the Los Angeles metro area itself, some that even seismologists don't yet know much about.
gavin6942 Various interconnected people struggle to survive when an earthquake of unimaginable magnitude hits Los Angeles.This movie is notable for the use of an innovative sound effect called Sensurround which created the sense of actually experiencing an earthquake in theaters. Due in part to this technology, the film won an Academy Award for Best Sound (Ronald Pierce, Melvin M. Metcalfe Sr.). Well done! Although relatively little happens for the first half, that does not seem to matter. We still enjoy getting to meet this motley cast of characters. There is some name-dropping (e.g. Zsa Zsa Gabor) to remind us we are in Los Angeles, and the action is well paced. I especially enjoyed seeing people fall off the tall buildings.
Lele Compare this movie with San Andreas (2015). They have the same theme, even the dam event and the lost girl and child drama. Earthquake is 40 years before and it cares for PEOPLE, where San Andreas cares for special effects and, no matter the thousands of dead, cares about the few main characters. This is silly and quite immoral too. In Earthquake you see people DYING as well as we did in the dramatic and hyper emotional shots of 9/11. Main characters die and some of them survive as it may happen in real life.I was 17 when the movie arrived her in Italy and I never saw it because... I didn't like Charlton Heston (and still I don't :)I am sure that even without Sensurraund I would have been very impressed by the special effects and sound and characterization of people, even the less important. Think about the tough moments between Rosa and the nut guy who tries to rape her or the LA officer who gets suspension because he punched the county officer.Plot and acting are not perfect but compared with San Andreas they seem like Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare!8/10
mark.waltz The heat and fault-lines of Los Angeles have made the city jokingly referred to as "Shake and Bake", and with a 1971 quake in recent memory, this Irwin Allen disaster epic (right on the trail of "The Poseidon Adventure") was definite box office magic. An all-star cast was assembled to take what little drama was there and make it more interesting, sort of a "Grand Hotel" weighed on the Richter scale. A few laughs (both intentional and unintentional) have made this a cult favorite with definite elements of camp giving it an almost midnight movie status.A romantic triangle (between husband and wife Charleton Heston and Ava Gardner and his mistress, Genevieve Bujold) is the foundation on which the story is created. Fortunately, that foundation wasn't used for the buildings in downtown L.A., otherwise they might have collapsed a lot faster. There's also a very young Victoria Principal as a troubled young lady who is the victim of an obsessive neighbor (the creepy Marjoe Gortner) and motorcycle stunt artist Richard Roundtree, and of course, that bar room drunk (Walter Matthau) who is too tipsy to notice the reason he can't swallow his shot is because the ground around him is shaking more than his alcoholic hands.Laughs come frequent here, not only with the unbilled Matthau (given credit under his real name to create a surprise cameo) but with Principal's very big afro and daddy's girl Gardner spouting insults at estranged husband Heston while papa Lorne Greene makes business deals as the earth collapses around him. There's the famous shot of a truck full of cows flying off a freeway overpass (the audience actually mooed when I saw this in a revival house) and several L.A. landmarks collapsing. It is just too bad that there has to be the soap opera set-up long before the shaking starts and that makes the film a slight bore.At the West Hollywood video store that I worked at, this film was checked out for weeks after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, as were other films like "San Francisco", "The Rains Came" and "Green Dolphin Street". L.A. residents needed some fictional shaking going on after that scary event which woke us up at 4:30 in the morning. "It's really a little sick", one of our clerks told a local newspaper who called us up to find out if the real quake had an influence on our customers' video habits. Sick or not, real life disasters sometimes call upon our adrenaline and desire to find enjoyment after those scary moments have passed.L.A. audiences too found it humorous to see the Beverly Center blown up after a volcano appeared at the La Brea tar-pits and exploded in the movie "Volcano". I had no idea that the theater I was going to where the movie was playing would end up being a part of the plot and joined in the audience by applauding when that sequence took place. "Earthquake" leaves the same sort of feeling, providing laughs of irony that still amuse us today.