Charlton Heston as Stewart Graff | Directed by Mark Robson | 1974
In the mid-1970s, Hollywood discovered that audiences would pay to watch a city fall down, provided a familiar star was there to help pick up the pieces. Earthquake, directed by Mark Robson and released in November 1974, is the grandest and most shameless example of the disaster genre — and Charlton Heston, as construction engineer Stewart Graff, is exactly the star it needed. He plays a man who has spent his career warning that Los Angeles buildings should be constructed to survive a major quake, and who then has to live through the catastrophe he predicted. It is a role tailor-made for Heston: a professional, a sceptic, and, when the ground shakes, a man of action.
The film opens on an ordinary Los Angeles morning, and Robson takes his time introducing a large ensemble cast. Graff, a former university football player turned engineer, is unhappily married to Remy, played by Ava Gardner, the daughter of his boss, played by Lorne Greene. He is drawn to Denise Marshall, played by Geneviève Bujold, a young actress and the widow of a colleague, whose son he has befriended. Around them orbit a policeman played by George Kennedy, a stunt motorcyclist played by Richard Roundtree, a grocery manager played by Marjoe Gortner, and a host of others whose stories will collide when disaster strikes. This slow, soap-opera build-up was typical of the genre: audiences needed to know the characters before the film could threaten them, and Heston’s calm, authoritative presence holds the disparate threads together.
When the earthquake finally arrives, it arrives with a gimmick that became famous in its own right: Sensurround, a low-frequency sound system that literally shook cinema seats and made audiences feel the tremor in their bodies. The effects, which won a special Academy Award, remain impressive: buildings collapse, a freeway overpass crumbles, a dam cracks, and the city is flooded as well as shaken. Albert Whitlock’s matte paintings and the miniature work give the destruction a scale that still holds up, and John Williams’s score — written in the same year as his work on The Towering Inferno — drives the panic without ever overwhelming it. Robson, a veteran director of glossy melodramas, understands that a disaster film is only as good as its human stakes, and he keeps cutting back to Graff and the people he is trying to save.
Heston’s performance is the film’s moral spine. Graff is not a superhero; he is an engineer who understands structures, and his heroism consists of practical knowledge applied under pressure. He knows which buildings are unsafe, he knows how to move through rubble, and he knows when to risk himself for others. Heston plays him with a minimum of fuss, letting the physicality of the role — jogging at dawn, climbing through wreckage, carrying the injured — speak for itself. The love triangle with Remy and Denise could easily have become melodramatic, but Heston and Gardner play it with a weary realism: these are adults whose marriage has curdled into resentment, not villains and victims. That realism makes the climax, in which Graff makes a fateful choice in a flooding basement, genuinely affecting rather than merely spectacular.
Indeed, the ending is notable for a piece of Hollywood history. In the original script, Graff was to survive and build a new life with Denise. Heston objected, arguing that it would be wrong for his character to walk away from his dying wife and start again as if nothing had happened. At his insistence, the ending was changed: Graff dies trying to rescue Remy, while the policeman played by George Kennedy survives. It is a strikingly selfless decision for a star of Heston’s stature — to ask for his character’s death rather than a happy ending — and it gives Earthquake a gravity that many disaster films lack. The hero does not conquer the disaster; he is consumed by it, like so many ordinary people in a real earthquake.
The film was a huge commercial success, taking far more than its budget at the box office and confirming the disaster genre as the defining popular form of 1974, alongside Airport 1975 and The Towering Inferno. Critics were less enthusiastic, complaining about the thin characterisation and the formulaic plot, but audiences did not care: they came for the shaking seats and stayed for the stars. Heston, who had already headlined Airport 1975 earlier that same year, became the unofficial face of the genre — the man you wanted in charge when the world fell apart. His presence reassured audiences even as the screen showed them their worst fears.
Today, Earthquake is best watched as a piece of 1970s popular culture: a film that took a real anxiety — Los Angeles sits on the San Andreas fault, and a major quake is a matter of when, not if — and turned it into mass entertainment. Its warnings about building codes and urban planning were, in their way, serious, and Graff’s arguments with his father-in-law about cutting corners feel uncomfortably contemporary. Heston’s contribution was to make those arguments human: a professional who cares about doing the job properly, in a city that too often prefers to do it cheaply.
For Past Tunes readers, Earthquake is also a reminder of how versatile Heston’s 1970s stardom was. Within a single year he could play a detective in a dystopian future, a cardinal in seventeenth-century France, a pilot in a hijacked jumbo jet, and an engineer in a collapsing city — and make each of them believable. Graff may not be his most subtle creation, but he is one of his most representative: the competent man in an incompetent world, doing his best when the ground itself gives way beneath him.