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The 33 Greatest Disaster Movies of All Time
What makes cinematic depictions of catastrophe so compelling?
This 1936 production by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, the duo behind King Kong(another film hugely influential on the disaster genre), follows a desperate Roman blacksmith who becomes a gladiator, slaver, trader, and powerful businessman during the time of Jesus, then sees the error of his ways thanks to his exposure to Christianity on the eve of the devastation at Pompeii. But while it tells a fairly obvious story — Kit Harington’s young gladiator-slave falls for Emily Browning’s aristocratic beauty, on the eve of the decadent Roman city’s obliteration from a nearby erupting volcano — Anderson’s fast-paced, colorful film offers plenty of visceral thrills. In this classic musical romantic-drama, Clark Gable is saloon owner Blackie Norton, “the most Godless, scoffing and unbelieving soul in all San Francisco,” and Jeanette MacDonald is the angelic singer for whom he falls hard, and whose voice, along with the devastation wreaked by the 1906 earthquake, forces him to change his ways.
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