Deluge, 1933

Pre-code, 1933. Within the first few minutes, warnings are sent out for ships to return to port and for planes to land at the nearest airport. A terrible, terrible storm is brewing. There's an unexpected solar eclipse. Soon, the west coast is destroyed and submerged. New Orleans is no more. And now the east coast is in for it.

We see an elaborate model of New York City destroyed in a massive flood and earthquake.

They didn't waste any time. All this happened quickly.

The disaster scenes were re-used in other movies, but the film was lost for decades until the 1980's when an Italian-dubbed print was discovered in an Italian film archive. Later, they found a copy with an English language soundtrack and they were able to restore it.

 

The rest of the movie was about the survivors. There's a woman swimmer in a daring two-piece swimsuit whose attempt to break a world record was cancelled because of the apocalypse. She is taken in by two men holed up in a cabin. When they start fighting over her, she escapes by swimming away.

A nice guy lawyer finds her washed up on shore and takes her to an abandoned cabin he moved into.  

A mob of unemployed workers come after them. They already raped and murdered a girl. The lawyer turns out to be pretty good at stabbing people. You'd think a woman of her athletic ability would have been of more help.

65 minutes. Available on Pub-D-Hub.

A bit of a cop out at the end. The lawyer had declared his swimmer girlfriend to be his common-law wife, then he finds out his original wife and children are still alive. So now what's he supposed to do?

All-white except for two or three Black characters presented in a deeply offensive way.