Andrew Marton’s literally world-shattering disaster epic is still a lot of fun but it’s not perhaps quite as exciting – and is certainly a lot less plausible – than it seemed as an impressionable child when it seemed to turn up on British television all the time. As a child it was a rollicking action adventure film and we didn’t notice the slow bits – as an adult the plot drags a bit and the scientific implausibilities are eye-watering.
A team led by the terminally ill Dr Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) has been working in Tanganyika on Project Inner Space, an operation to drill down into the Earth’s core to tap geothermal energy. The project has stalls when the drill hits an impenetrable layer of rock and the team decide to use a nuclear warhead to blast their way through against warnings of the project’s chief geologist Dr Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore). But the detonation causes a massive crack to appear in the Earth’s crust, a crack that speeds around the world, eventually splitting a huge chunk of the planet off into a new moon.
Hugely ambitious and visionary but with science that is, at best, very dubious indeed, Crack in the World is surprisingly just a bit dull at times. We don’t remember the dull and rather soap-opera-ish love triangle between Sorenson, his wife Maggie (Janette Scott who had previously worked with executive producer Philip Yordan on The Day of the Triffids (1963)) and Rampion (she wants a baby, her husband hasn’t told her that he’s dying of cancer) from those wide-eyed childhood viewings but as an adult they’re hard to ignore. The cast are all fine performers but inevitably get lost amid the huge set-pieces, imaginatively and convincingly rendered through the excellent sets and special effects by Eugène Lourié, himself no stranger to big-scale destruction having previously directed and the giant monster films The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Gorgo (1961).
When we get to the fun stuff, the film really takes off with huge explosions, life or death races against time, daring submarine dives and destruction on a massive scale. As brain dead eye candy it still works admirably and as a a disaster movie it was a bit ahead of its time, certainly anticipating the globe-spanning disaster epics of the post-Millennium like The Core (2003), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), Geostorm (2017) et al.
Today the wild climax is utterly absurd but as an impressionable child it was jaw-dropping and represented everything that seemed so enticing about science fiction. Sticklers for scientific accuracy will have fits trying to get their heads around the madness. Pockets of hydrogen won’t go off like nuclear bombs as suggested here, the Earth’s crust doesn’t work the way screenwriters Jon Manchip White and Julian Zimet seem to think that it does (despite the production having a geologist on hand as adviser), Moore and Scott, surveying the new Eden like a new Adam and Eve, are standing perilously close to the chunk of Earth that splits away to form the new moon and emerge with barely a hair of place, there’s a strange bit of business wherein Andrews and Moore studiously watch footage of nuclear explosions running backwards for no particularly good reason and nuclear weapons themselves are bandied about with alarming abandon.
But the huge set pieces are undeniably a lot of fun, the Spanish locations (it was shot near Madrid) are nicely used and if you can ignore the egregiously dim witted science and get through the soapy relationship stuff there’s a great deal still to enjoy about Crack in the World. The practical effects are pleasingly “there” unlike a lot of the weightless, disconnected feeling CGI scenes of later disaster films and Manton wholeheartedly throws himself into the chaos and mayhem, giving us cheesily cheery shots of squirrels emerging from their burrows in the aftermath of the disaster, a gripping descent into an active volcano to plant yet another of the nuclear bombs that the science team seem to have a handy supply of and not giving a single damn about plausibility or logic.
The EOFFTV Review 