In which we discuss Heatwave!, Hurricane, and The Elevator.
Our retrospective of the disaster cinema of the 1970s left its main phase back when we arrived at 1980, whereupon we treated with Irwin Allen's final effort, When Time Ran Out..., as well as, of course, the parody that was disaster cinema's own disaster, somewhat killing the genre off for years to come, Airplane!; after that, there was no real compulsion to be even more thorough than I already had been, as there would only be side-quests left anyway, and these were to be completed at leisure and for their own pleasure: Airplane II: The Sequel; the original disaster cinema parody, The Big Bus; and one day, I swear I'll get to the Japanese branch of the genre. For now, there's this. Obviously, nobody is forcing me, and I doubt it would have occurred to anybody to even ask me, to backtrack through the television movies of Jerry Jameson. But I did anyway. (Then again, there was that guy who kept at me, justifiably enough, for like two years to finally get to Raise the Titanic.) Initially, this was supposed to be a stopgap for the lull in reviews this late July—minimalist reviews, cross-posted from Letterboxd and cleaned up. Well, they're not going to be maximalist. But the main thing is that later on I still want to tell you about Starflight One, a very cool TV disaster movie from all the way out in the wilderness of 1983, this being a telefilm directed by, you guessed, Jerry Jameson; and if that was to have a place here, then it only feels right to deal with all of his other disaster telefilms, of which there were at least three and perhaps six, depending on your definition of "disaster movie." (ETA: oh, for hell's sake, there's seven.) We'll be going broader with that definition than I actually believe is correct, but there are so many fuzzy lines in life, aren't there? To be clear, this does not open the way towards a pathologically completionist "all disaster films of the 70s, even the TV movies" campaign, or at least I hope it doesn't.
No, this is all about Jameson, a filmmaker I have, for reasons somewhat mysterious even to myself, always somehow felt a special affinity for. He's not a "name" by any serious metric ("is" is correct, however; he's still alive and was active till at least 2015), and he has never, to my knowledge, made a masterpiece or even a full-on great movie (though he's come close). The vast bulk of his work was on episodes of television shows, beginning as an editor on The Andy Griffith Show back in 1964 and rapidly advancing into production-related positions on numerous series, and while his first theatrical credit dates back to 1972, with the gnarly-sounding exploitation film Brute Corps, he only occasionally left TV. Most of his movies are telefilms and the most famous ones (though by no means the majority of the approximately thirty-three movies he made for TV) are these disaster telefilms—plus he also worked on Magnum, P.I., good man—but of course his claim to any lasting fame is Airport '77. (His biggest claim to lasting infamy is the aforementioned Raise the Titanic.) And there has always been something about that that stuck in my craw: the guy who directed the best iteration of the 1970s' most prolific disaster film franchise, which was also one of the vanishingly few actually-successful disaster films of the late 1970s altogether, still hadn't "made it." It's conceivable he wasn't even invited back to do The Concorde: ...Airport '79, and after Raise the Titanic, which wasn't even his fault, he sunk back into televisual obscurity. I mean, it's fine work for a director to have, but someone ought to take his side. So let's take his side. Or try to: it's a certainty that not all of these six seven are going to be good.
It's no herculean task to do the synopsis for Heatwave!: in Los Angeles, there is a heatwave, and it's gotten nasty; Frank, a junior broker (frequent Mystery Science Theatre 3000 punching bag Ben Murphy) and his pregnant wife, Laura (Bonnie Bedelia), leave town as the heat shuts down his work, causes supply chain and utility disruptions, and ultimately blacks out the city. They head for her parents' empty cabin in the mountains, whereupon they run out of gas, hike the rest of the way, experience friction with other humans while also generating a cis-apocalyptic community out of them, and then Laura goes into labor a whole lot earlier than a woman would probably want to do while she's out in the woods with no electricity or transportation and it's in the midst of a deadly heatwave.
It is, anyway, thrilling enough to keep your attention for a span, and yet (titular exclamation point! notwithstanding) if you were to assume that a heatwave would not lend itself very well to disaster movie spectacle—especially on a non-Irwin Allen TV budget, so wildfires aren't really in play—by the end of Heatwave!, I'd have to admit that you'd be proven right. It's a very low-key kind of disaster, but for a goodly while, it works okay, thanks to a diligent physical production that allows you to believe that Murphy and Bedelia truly are soaked and miserable, as (for all I know) they may well have been, as certainly a lot of that hike doesn't look comfortable. Jameson is doing a solid job with the low-concept he's been tasked with visualizing, insisting upon its tangibility by way of simple tricks—while we're still in the city, using grim cutaways to a bank's time and temperature display as a structuring device that keeps the sensation of danger escalating even as Frank and Laura try to ignore it throughout the first act; whereas both in and outside of the city, he takes frequent advantage of dozens of shots of the most profoundly evil-looking sun—and the age of the videotape in its available presentation probably even helps Jameson out a bit here, with the way it turns everything into hazed blobs with a sort of blaring quality to the colors. And so, throughout, there's a fine sense of the heat slowly boiling the world, accompanied by an unshowy but unmistakable moral degradation arising out of the general societal breakdown. (I really like the glib asshole trader guy, for instance, who's unworried as long as business keeps humming along, but who is then confronted with absolute spiritual desolation, bordering on catatonia, as he beholds his holy stock ticker going black.) The story ultimately takes a much more optimistic swerve, which I think is lovely—even if that's arguably less "fun" than Murphy fighting for his babe(s) for the last drink of water in the reservoir, or however one might have initially assumed this would play out. Right-sized for what it is, too (sources will describe it as 90 minutes, but that's the TV programming slot, and it's only 71). Again, compare Irwin Allen and his three hour TV epics about broken-down alpine tram cars.
Score: 6/10
Jameson made four five movies in 1974, and The Elevator is easily the best of them. I mean that as a sincere compliment even if Heatwave! and (as we'll see) the subsequent Terror On the 40th Floor and Hurricane aren't setting the highest bars, and even if the hysterically bad The Bat People aka It Lives By Night, Jameson's one theatrically-released film of 1974 and his own MST3K punching bag (which would've undoubtedly been improved by Ben Murphy), is setting no bar at all. The Elevator was also an important film for Jameson: it was his first gig for William Frye, presumably setting him up for that producer to award him the director's job on Airport '77 (and, ultimately, Raise the Titanic); and there's even a marked similarity of approach, each film concerning a disaster that's exacerbated by a violent in-progress heist, though as far as distinctions go, Airport '77 goes entirely "disaster movie" by its second half while The Elevator is swinging harder at "single-location thriller" and is so brief it practically can't have a "second half." As I give you credit for figuring out on your own, The Elevator is about an elevator that breaks and threatens the lives of the people inside it; the wrinkle is that they're trapped in an elevator with an unraveling criminal (James Farentino) who's just robbed an insurance company upstairs for a briefcase full of cash, resulting in a murder, and his sociopathic partner (Barry Livingston) and co-conspirator girlfriend (Carol Lynley) want him and that briefcase, and at least the former isn't happy with the prospect of leaving seven witnesses behind.
It's a simple little yarn, but about as well put together as you could hope for: with just the one "actual mistake?" exception (which may have just been a commercial break), it's a frightfully snappily-edited thing, just slamming on the gas immediately with its cross-cutting, show-more-than-tell opening that weaves in and out of the heist and the various character introductions (Airport 1975's J. Terry Williams worked on it, and would reunite with Jameson for Airport '77, so the rhythms are indeed familiar, in a good way); it's got a swell thriller score, courtesy John Cavacas (also of Airports 1975 and '77) with some weird chimes in places and a terrific harpsichord jam that really gets your attention; Jameson is using as much location footage as his small-sets-and-miniatures scenario and his 65 minute runtime allows; and he's getting the best work I've seen him get out of his soon-to-be-customary telefilm cinematographer, Matthew F. Leonetti, who's capturing those locations with a grungy tactility and tendency towards bleeding light sources that cuts very productively against the "luxury futurist building" setting in the same ways the script increasingly reveals it as a giant hunk of junk, giving the picture a grim and depressive cast. Jameson and Leonetti are also getting a lot out of the claustrophobia and the dark confines of the elevator, jamming the cast into paradoxical singles, often from unusual or unpleasant angles amidst unusual and unpleasant lighting, that contrive to isolate them despite the larger part of his principal cast of ten being crammed into the same box. For instance:
Then there's that one hell-of-a-shot, where Jameson compresses as many faces as he can into the tiny escape hatch, a miniscule diamond within a black square that, by virtue of television, is already small, all of them screaming and pleading for their lives.
As for that cast, it is a stacked one, including both Myrna Loy and Roddy McDowall, each (especially McDowall) doing some rather strong work—with obviously not-that-much—as a gregariously lonely old lady and an unhappily prim building supervisor, respectively. Fellow Old Hollywood aristocracy Teresa Wright is also present, but doesn't make half as much of an impact as her peers, and even in her best moment, she's just the instrument for it, with her doctor husband (Craig Reynolds) holding her while his nurse/mistress (Arlene Golonka) is forced to endure the crisis alone, pointedly looking away, which is—rather gratifyingly, in the context of any disaster movie—the closest we'll get to closure on this subplot, which is allowed to drift off into irresolution. In fact, that's something that happens with more than just this subplot. It's probably a result of the savage efficiency of an even-shorter-than-usual telefilm, but it's honestly an interesting way of presenting the human dimension of a disaster film, "actually, it didn't solve our interpersonal problems." On the other hand, sometimes it does, and the worst line in the movie involves the youngest of the lift passengers (Don Stroud) learning a lesson about avarice of somesuch shit, because the money hasn't helped the robber get out of the elevator, which is about as forced as it sounds like. Meanwhile, I'm unfamiliar with Farentino, but he gets a surprising amount of mileage out of going absolutely feral the instant the elevator breaks, and while I might've appreciated a more gradual process, it's prompted by the additional burden of already being afraid of confined spaces, so combined with the stress of being an accomplice to murder, I can't say it doesn't track. (And you know, it's worth noting that Irwin Allen must've been paying attention because he would soon be ripping this off: two of his disaster telefilms, Cave-In! and The Night the Bridge Fell Down, use basically the exact same dynamic of dickheaded losing-it criminals, but not nearly as well.)
Even so, maybe it's a shame that Farentino's crook can't keep his cool, because you can perceive a truly macabre crime film that wants to rise out of this material; indeed, towards the end it at last begins to address the coldly rational calculations that you, as a viewer, are already making on his behalf. But of course it's going to be held back, and even on the level at which you have to meet a 1974 TV movie, the script doesn't wrap things up elegantly. It's more like its ending just kind of spills forward, rather than really escalating towards a crescendo. Yet even when it stumbles (slightly) at the finish line, there's some really good, unique stuff here: there's a vein of extremely dry humor in this that I don't necessarily associate with Jameson, but it's him, because it's all directorial, notably how the most annoying sound in the world (some kind of mobile garage cleaner) is made to be a source of genuine hilarity in context as it just whines over a scene for something like a minute and a half; likewise, there's a terrific ironic button on Farentino's thread of the plot, practically a cartoon sign gag. One of my favorite things in the movie is the very ending, too, a strange (but effective, and sort of miserably funny) down beat for Loy that is very close to the diametric opposite of what you'd ever expect this kind of movie would do with her. All told, a fine piece of work—a modest vindication of my instincts about this whole "Jameson" thing, which might be the single nichest mania I've ever indulged here at Kinemalogue.
Score: 7/10
Then again, there's Hurricane. Airing nine months after Heatwave!—which, in a bizarre turn, or maybe purposefully because in the middle of winter a heatwave would sound nice, was broadcast in January—at least we can say Hurricane was more "appropriately" timed, arriving nine months later in September and, thus, right in the midst of hurricane season. Your mileage may vary on how appropriate this actually is: Tropical Storm Alma had just killed 51 people, most of them by way of a plane crash; you could, hypothetically, have been watching the movie in Louisiana the day Hurricane Carmen made landfall; within the week, Hurricane Fifi would render 150,000 Hondurans homeless and kill thousands, on top of annihilating the country's banana crop. In fairness, you could try to schedule around hurricanes, but you couldn't have really gotten more than ten or so months away from them no matter how hard you tried (and certainly not ten months now). This is hardly an argument against the artistic representation of hurricanes, but perhaps it does explain why Hurricane's title doesn't end in an jaunty exclamation point, despite coming from much the same place. Even so, the ABC Movie of the Week program, which had aired Heatwave! (and, for the record, The Elevator) and now aired Hurricane, offered Jameson as an up-and-coming master of disaster the opportunity to get the jump on Irwin Allen, whose own televised elemental diptych of Flood and Fire would have to wait till 1976 and 1977 respectively. The good news is that Heatwave! beats both of those more-polished, more-expensive telefilms; the bad news, though, is that their average is probably even lower. Hurricane is kind of awful, it turns out, not even as good as Allen's initial pair of bad TV disaster films.
I'll have to be tentative on the rating, but I think I'm adjusting for the available presentation, which is incredibly poor, such a blue-black mush that the movie comes off badly-edited even if it actually isn't, cuts (up to and including scene transitions) just sloshing into one another, quite possibly through nobody's fault but time and videotape and the inevitable recourse to stock footage for a cheap disaster movie about hurricanes in 1974. (That said, it's worth stating, without comment, that Williams edited Heatwave! and The Elevator, but not this one.) But even the most pristine presentation probably wouldn't get this up to "actually good": it's a 70s disaster film of no great imagination, obviously, and that could go a few ways. Unfortunately, in this case it means a multi-threaded story composed of surface-level impressions of various disconnected hurricane victims, and it doesn't amount to much at all; the closest "real" disaster movie comparison would probably be the experiential City On Fire from later on in the decade, except that's incredibly insulting to City On Fire, and this TV movie is doing it mainly via stock footage montage, without the god-tier stuntwork, and with basically every strand of its multifaceted anti-dramatic story structure being uninteresting. There's three major subplots, and the two total duds comprise the one at the National Weather Service that's devoted largely to meteorologists litigating the correctness of giving hurricanes feminine names, and otherwise serves solely to explain from an unnecessarily top-down perspective that "this hurricane exists," and the one that's concerned with calling anybody who fails to evacuate in the face of a hurricane a subhuman moron. The latter gets very slightly more meat, mostly just by having a cognizable disaster movie theme, with a pair of married evacuees getting sucked into a "hurricane party" being thrown by their neighbors, and so held there solely by social pressure, though that's enough to keep them there, anxious and unhappy, until it's almost too late. It's an idea, but better suited, I'd think, to an essay than a movie: it's obviously going to get repetitive almost immediately. However, surely the most-enjoyable, most-forcefully-composed scene that Jameson gets up to in the entire film, and so one suspects the one he had the most fun with given its fish-eyed lensing and quick-dollies onto stupidly shocked faces, comes when he finally gets to smash up the hurricane skeptic's house and execute some members of his family.
These are not, however, anything close to actual dramas. That leaves the A-plot with the WC-130 crew engaged in the tracking and rescue of another married couple (the film's "stars," Larry Hagman and Jessica Walters) from their boat, and this would be an okay D-plot in another disaster movie, but either thanks to the stark limitations of the scenario, a boat trapped in the eye of a hurricane, or because nobody was creative enough to come up with some fun, thrilling convolutions to lift that scenario out of the same repetitive stasis that every other part of this movie has, there's just not enough procedure in its procedural for it to be fully worthwhile—even though it is still the best thing going here. I'm also fairly certain that Jameson forgot to clarify that the "Navy" that the Air Force WC-130 pilot is talking to is on a submarine, or else he or his writers meant that to be "a twist," but, like, duh? The film is of value primarily as the genesis of Jameson's famous "thing" of maritime rescue, though it's not a patch on Airport '77. It's infinitely worse than John Ford's Hurricane, which ought to go entirely without saying; but hey, it's a hair better (mainly by being much shorter) than Jan Troell's Hurricane.
Score: 4/10
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