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.

Breaking Bad again

Okay, so HERE'S the thing about Breaking Bad.

I had contrasted Walt's slide in violence and amorality with Ray Milland as a mild mannered father turned homicidal survivalist in Panic In The Year Zero.

Here's what more knowledgeable persons say about Walt White.

That he's arrogant, jealous and consumed with rage over unspecified things that happened to him in the past. He had started a business but walked away from it in a snit, then was enraged when his former business partner got rich on work that Walt had done for the company. He feels threatened by and mistreats poor Jesse even though the kid is no threat to anyone in any way.

See, that's what they needed with Ray Milland.

When his wife wants to go back to L.A. to find her mother who was there in the nuclear blast, Milland should have said something about how her mother never respected him because of his humble origins, even though he had to work harder than anyone else, and the fact that he worked for all he had rather than inheriting it somehow made people question his right to it. And he should have had some hostility toward his own children who reminded him of the upper-class teens who tormented him in high school.

If you want to see how that might have worked, look at Marjoe Gortner's performance in Earthquake. He's a mild-mannered grocery store clerk, harassed by his neighbors. And now he's in charge, in his National Guard uniform, carrying his M-16. He catches his neighbors looting and...