Only the stars survive: disaster movies in the seventies

Abstract

‘Disaster movies’ were a phenomenon of the early and mid 1970s, and for a time it looked as though they might prove an enduring feature of the world movie market: they had done extremely well at the box office in both the United States and Britain, and a definite cycle of films could be identified. The cycle, however, seems to have terminated early in 1977 with the second sequel, Airport ‘77 , to the movie that apparently started it all at the beginning of the decade. Since then, there has been the occasional echo – in, for instance, the ill-fated Cassandra Crossing , some scaled-down TV movies (Flight to the Holocaust, Smash-up on Interstate Five) , and a sequence or two in the otherwise straightforward thriller Roller coaster — but it is certainly no longer possible to speak, as it was in 1974—5, of a flourishing cycle of films. Disaster movies, in other words, are now a part of cultural history. Their narrative strategies and devices, on the other hand, are still very much current: they exemplify a trend in popular – or ‘dominant’ – cinema. The term ‘disaster movie’ needs some definition: though never a true generic label like Western or Horror movie, it was nevertheless in fairly current use and endowed for a time with a definite if imprecise meaning by the cinema-going public. Someone going to see a disaster movie knew by and large what she or he was going to get.

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