Deluge (1933)

Long before the likes or Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin built careers out of wholesale on-screen destruction of major American cities, there was Felix E. Feist’s Deluge, a film long thought to be lost, which lays waste to New York in primitive if spectacular style before settling down to become a disappointingly routine melodrama.

Based on a best-selling novel by the once popular but now almost forgotten British novelist S. Fowler Wright it wastes absolutely no time in setting up the impending disaster, the first few minutes being a frenetic whirl of worried meteorologists, sermonising priests and desperate scientists (among them Edward Van Sloan from Dracula (1931)) warning of an unprecedented weather system descending on the United States. Los Angeles disappears first, represented by a single wobbly building collapsing, before the film peaks way to early with the spectacular submergence of New York City by a tsunami following a devastating earthquake. In the aftermath, Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer) has lost his wife Helen (Lois Wilson) and two children and is living in a cabin in the flooded landscape around the former city. Elsewhere, two brutish thugs, Jepson (Fred Kohler) and Norwood (Ralf Harolde), are holding Claire (Peggy Shannon) prisoner the two men bickering about which of them is going to “have” her first. She escapes and swims to freedom, winding up unconscious on the beach near Martin’s home. He takes her in and although still grieving the loss of his family, a relationship develops. But in a nearby town where survivors are trying to rebuild society, Martin discovers that Helen and the children have survived. As he struggles with his feelings for the two women, Martin helps the townspeople defend themselves against Jepson and his new gang of marauders.

Deluge isn’t quite the first large-scale disaster film (August Blom’s Verdens Undergang/The End of the World had depicted the destruction of society thanks to a passing comet as early as 1916) but it was the first American example and certainly the first from a major studio, in this case RKO who spent a lot of money terrorising New Yorkers in 1933 what with Deluge and King Kong. Unfortunately, like a lot of disaster movies, it peaks early, the destruction of New York coming 15 minutes into the film, leaving us almost an hour in the company of the well-acted and likeable lead characters (Shannon is particularly good) who struggle to find much of a story to support them. It’s standard issue post-apocalyptic melodrama stuff though at the time audiences wouldn’t have been as familiar with the trope as we are today.

Even for a pre-code film that wasn’t overly shy when it came to depicting Norwood’s lecherous attack on Claire, the ending of Fowler Wright’s novel was never going to fly in 1933. Originally, it ended with Martin, Helen and Clair e coming to an arrangement and preparing g to face the future in a cosy ménage a trois. Screenwriters Warren B. Duff and John F. Goodrich can’t quite bring themselves to go that far and the film ends rather abruptly with a noble act of sacrifice and the restoration of something like the old order that feels clumsy and unrewarding.

The levelling of New York, though primitive by today’s standards (the shots of panicking New Yorkers horribly superimposed over stock footage and effects shots are frankly awful) but in 1933 they must have been breathtaking and have inspired everything from Deep Impact (1998) to 2012 (2009), San Andreas (2015) to Geostorm (2017) and any number of interminable Asylum or SyFy knock-offs. RKO made some of the film’s huge effects budget back by selling these sequences off as stock footage to Republic and they turned up again in films and serials like S.O.S. Tidal Wave (1939), Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. (1941) and King of the Rocket Men (1949). The detailed models and effects were the work of a trio of pioneering technicians, Ned Mann and William N. Williams.

Deluge was the first feature film for Feist who became a hard-working director of mostly B-movies, his only genre film including Donovan’s Brain (1953) though the final days of his career found him directing episodes of The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968). This relative newcomer, with only a short film to his name at the time, can’t quite muster the excitement that the film needs though he and his director of photography Norbert Brodine, a silent era veteran, conjure up some lovely shots of the wetlands (and the almost inevitable Bronson Canyon) that stand in for post-apocalyptic New York.

Deluge is not a great film by any means (the non-stop musical accompaniment written by Val Burton will drive you to distraction) but it is an interesting one if only for its rightful reputation as the first of the big Hollywood disaster films, an Italian dubbed print discovered by Wade Williams in 1981 in the basement of a home owned by producer/director Luigi Cozzi being for many years the only way to see it, subtitled in English. In 2016 an English language nitrate print was recovered and restored. Today Deluge looks crude, a little preachy and more concerned with the love triangle than with the bigger themes that the story is begging to be explored but it remains a fascinating film, a pioneer in a genre that would keep on popping up to enjoy renewed popularity ever decade or so from the 1970s onward.