Krakatoa, East of Java (1969)

The original disaster film which started the seventies craze? Not really - Airport, a fictional account of what could happen, was the big success a year later which got the seventies disaster cycle underway. This Krakatoa film is based on the real events of 1883, featuring a volcanic explosion and then a tidal wave. The film gives us a preview of events as the beginning credits end, showing some of the wave footage which we'll see in the final act. There are some errors in geography but what throws this into the standard disaster sf spectacle is the inclusion of various characters who get caught up in the disaster, forming the template that all disaster films follow. Most of the characters are aboard a steamer ship captained by first-billed Maximilian Schell and there's the requisite soap opera, which drags the ship, er, the film down.

Diane Baker co-stars as a married woman who had a fling with Schell and is looking for a lost son. There's also Brian Keith as a diver with many private demons, Rosanno Brazzi & Sal Mineo as a father-son team who use an observation balloon, J.D. Cannon as one of thirty prisoners that the captain is forced to transport, and John Leyton as the inventor of a special diving bell. Schell's big plan for this voyage is a salvage operation - he plans to retrieve a fortune in pearls from a sunken ship. There's a question about whether this cache of pearls really exists, causing brief tension, but what really makes things tense are some strange signs of the impending disaster: a huge flock of birds, a far-off explosion and a high-pitched sound that is probably steam escaping.
The film is slow-paced, dwelling too much, for example, on Keith's psychosis. The director, Bernard Kowalski, first made his mark in low budget stuff like Attack of the Giant Leeches (59) and then spent the sixties directing in TV, so this was a step up for him, but the conventionality of straightforward TV directing are apparent in this one - it's all rather mundane in style and plot. There are some thrilling moments when the balloon drifts out of control into the volcano and this does veer the film into sci-fi/fantasy, in a quasi Jules Verne vein.  Other thriller aspects come into play when the prisoners take over the ship and further fantasy in that Schell manages to take care of them all by his lonesome. Schell is stoic throughout - even when the volcano starts to erupt and may destroy his ship, he remains unphased.

Since the first 70 minutes of the film are concerned with the deep sea diving adventure, the actual elements of the disaster don't come into play until the last 3rd of the picture (I viewed a 100m. version). The captain, at least, knows ahead of time that a big wave is coming. Some people choose to take their chances on land, while most remain with the ship. The whole wave sequence is similar to the one in The Poseidon Adventure (72), since it also involves a ship taking the force of a giant wall of water. In this one, though, the wave also hits land. It was pretty spectacular for its time, though I'm not sure why the wave hits land first; we see the ship getting hit afterwards. BoG's Score: 6 out of 10