There's a huge earthquake that devastates the world, and a follow-up tidal wave. Civilization ends, as does almost all of humanity. Sidney Blackmer is making his way alone since his wife, Lois Moran, and children vanished. Peggy Shannon shows up at Fred Kohler's shack in her underwear. When he menaces her, she swims off. Eventually she comes on Blackmer, who treats her like a lady in the lost world. Meanwhile, Kohler tracks her -- women are in uniquely short supply -- and meets up with a bunch of men who have been kicked out of a community severl miles off. They decide to kill Blackmer and figure out how to split Miss Shannon later.
I read S. Fowler Wright's novel about fifty years ago. I don't have much recollection of it, beyond the impression that it was a clunky novel meant to be in the H.G. Wells "scientific romance" style. The film version retains the clunkiness. Alas, most science fiction movies of the era have the same issue, as a marvelous situation is fitted into a standard plot -- often with El Brendel added for inane comic relief. The opening sequences, with the destruction going on, is marvelously epic, with fine miniature work by Ned Mann showing the destruction of Manhattan by water. The rest of it, alas, drops from the epic to the small, and that is quite a shock.
The performance are good, and the print from the French national archives as presented by Kino/Lorber demonstrates that black&white camerawork was just as good 85 years ago as it ever would be. While the verisimilitude is right, and the message that we must live our lives on a daily basis is true, the changes in scale, in a "For G*d, for country and for Yale" progression doesn't make good storytelling.
I read S. Fowler Wright's novel about fifty years ago. I don't have much recollection of it, beyond the impression that it was a clunky novel meant to be in the H.G. Wells "scientific romance" style. The film version retains the clunkiness. Alas, most science fiction movies of the era have the same issue, as a marvelous situation is fitted into a standard plot -- often with El Brendel added for inane comic relief. The opening sequences, with the destruction going on, is marvelously epic, with fine miniature work by Ned Mann showing the destruction of Manhattan by water. The rest of it, alas, drops from the epic to the small, and that is quite a shock.
The performance are good, and the print from the French national archives as presented by Kino/Lorber demonstrates that black&white camerawork was just as good 85 years ago as it ever would be. While the verisimilitude is right, and the message that we must live our lives on a daily basis is true, the changes in scale, in a "For G*d, for country and for Yale" progression doesn't make good storytelling.