Wake Up and Watch This!

In the mid-70s, it was rare to go anyplace relaxing, like to a beach or a swimming pool, and not find someone reading a paperback copy of Robin Cook’s bestseller Coma. The (then) sort of provocative cover of a nude, muscled figure, dangling from wires, always caught my attention. I didn't read the book until quite a few years later after a friend reminded me of the film version and I had enjoyed that so much the first time I'd seen it.

The story concerned a female intern at a major hospital who starts to question the number of patients who wind up comatose in the wake of supposedly minor procedures. Naturally, this being prior to or on the cusp of The Women’s Movement, she can’t seem to get anyone to go along with her suspicions and, in fact, runs into considerable opposition from a collection of stubborn, sexist, male doctors, including her own boyfriend who works at the same hospital. Eventually, she investigates on her own, leading her on a suspenseful ride from which she may not return!

Adapted into a film in 1978, the creepy, paranoid story transferred well to the screen and remains a pretty good nail-biter even now. Not for those who fear the medical profession, this creepy thriller takes its time getting started, but later kicks into high gear. It creates a mood and builds suspense to an almost unbearable degree.

It’s sort of a statement in itself of going against the expected grain that, for the film version, the heroine, long-haired, blonde Susan Wheeler, was instead portrayed by elfin, brunette, less conventional looking Genevieve Bujold. Whether intended or not, this decision gave the film another layer of tension and despair as seeing such a petite, almost frail-looking person such as she taking on the big guys is far more effective than if a taller, stronger-looking actress had been cast. (Her spunky determination goes a long way in helping me to forgive a wretched hairstyle that is occasionally augmented by a heinous little barrette!)

Appearing as her boyfriend is Michael Douglas, at the time a known personality for his work on TV’s The Streets of San Francisco, but not yet the A-list actor he would become in the 1980s. It’s almost odd now to see Douglas in a role that’s rather peripheral to the main action (almost the “girlfriend” part), but he invests it with conviction and even a certain amount of threat and malice.

The rest of the supporting cast is top-notch. Craggy-faced Richard Widmark is perfect as the confident, condescending and curt Chief of Staff. He manages to expertly represent the “glass ceiling” sort of attitude that women faced then (and sometimes do now) while slathering onto it an “I’m here for you” smarminess.

Also performing effectively in just a couple of scenes (one of which is wordless) is Rip Torn. Like most others in the film, he has an aura of mystery and untrustworthiness that adds to the general unease of the hospital. Neither Bujold nor the audience knows who she can trust. Our own hesitance and fear of such places and situations help create a feeling of unease.

Best of all is the brief, but unforgettable, appearance of Elizabeth Ashley as the world's most intimidating nurse. In her opening scene she blinks exactly once! (Yes, I counted…) Her voice is a monotone terror and her stare is up there with Medusa's. The section that contains her is surreal, but arresting, and very campy! As a film viewer, I have a tendency to grab on to one performer in a movie and obsess about him or her. Miss Ashley, even with her limited screen time, earned a place in my own (imaginary?) Cinema Hall of Fame for her hysterically bizarre, haughty, intimidating performance as Nurse Emerson. That voice, always a distinctive one, is divinely rude here.

The film (directed by former medical student Michael Crichton, who wrote many sci-fi novels and directed several other films) has a blatantly frank point of view. People eat sandwiches while they are examining cadavers. Brains are sliced like deli meat. It's all very clinical and unsettling to non-medical viewers.

Though the big set piece is a visit to the austere and forbidding Jefferson Institute, there are several other highly charged moments including a duct hole exploration and a chase through a seemingly abandoned hospital. The chase contains several creepily creative aspects along the way. Hit-man Lance LeGault makes a sinister pursuer as well. In an unusual move (but one which adds to the clinical feel of the early scenes), Jerry Goldsmith's clanking score doesn't take center stage until late in the film, but it’s wonderfully nerve-wracking when it needs to be.

Adding to the fun is a series of small appearances by people new to the business like Lois Chiles, Tom Selleck and Ed Harris. The first two portray patients and acquaintances of Bujold’s while Harris is a technician. Most viewers spotting him in this exclaim their surprise that he has (some) hair. Another striking thing about the film is that it is rated PG and yet contains some fairly graphic imagery and even fleeting nudity. I think we were generally less uptight about the body in those post flower-child/pre-AIDS days. Until PG-13 came along in 1984, PG films were allowed a little more leeway than they probably would be now (see also Mommie Dearest’s famous, “Don’t fuck with me fellas!” line in the PG rated biopic.)

"Let's Get Ready to Rumble!"

At the height of the disaster movie craze in 1974, Universal Studios got in on the action with Earthquake, billed as “An Event…” The event in question was a fictional earthquake that nearly leveled the city of Los Angeles, all presented in the new gimmick called Sensurround. Sensurround involved booming speakers with vibrations that mirrored the action on screen, making it seem like audiences were really experiencing the tremors themselves. (The system was only used two more times, in Midway and Rollercoaster, before being retired.)

Far more electrifying than Sensurround, or than any other effect in the movie, is the performance of Miss Ava Gardner as Remy Graff! Gardner, who was in semi-retirement at the time, took the role merely because she felt like spending the season in L.A. However, if you think she phoned her performance in and grabbed the money, think again. She acts, ACTS, A-C-T-S in all of her too few scenes and every frame of her portrayal is jaw-droppingly mesmerizing.

She plays the melodramatic and suicidally-inclined wife of Charlton Heston who can’t seem to hold his attention unless she’s screaming “Godammit!” at him or otherwise grasping at him and trying to control his life. She affects a captivatingly bizarre accent, calling her father Lorne Greene (infamously only seven years her senior in real life) “Dodd” and “Fathah!” 52 years-old at the time of filming, the movie originally included a subplot about her having had an abortion the previous year and Heston’s outrage over it because she knew he wanted children! Um, do we think these roles were, perhaps, written with younger people in mind?! That scene was cut out completely and others were trimmed before release. Sadly, they have never turned up as extras on a DVD, nor were they inserted into the TV version (which was expanded with hideous, newly shot footage of Debralee Scott on a plane and Victoria Principal wandering around.) A lobby card does exist with Chuck, Ava and family doctor Lloyd Nolan in the midst of a discussion about the lost fetus.

Ava portrays here a popular type of the time that has since, unfortunately, fallen out of fashion. This would be the middle-aged, foul-mouthed, booze-loving shrew! I live for characters like this and learned all of my best cuss words from them. I’m talking about Stella Stevens in The Poseidon Adventure, Lee Grant in Airport ’77 and the delectably nasty Miss Gardner in this film. Some of her choice lines include, but are not in any way limited to: “Christ. If it wasn’t 7:30 in the morning, I’d have a drink!,” “BASTARD!!,” “You’re really going to see that Marshall BITCH aren’t you?” and “Laura, where’s my fathah? Laura! MY FATHAH?!”

Gardner stunned the director Mark Robson when she determined that she was not only going to personally film sequences that included heavy falling debris, but also take part in the dangerous, draining and uncomfortable flash flood sequences that mark the climax of the picture. She was quite the trooper here, throwing all vanity to the wind (though, perhaps, not quite as far as Miss Shelley Winters did when she shot the world an underwater glimpse of her drawers in The Poseidon Adventure!) Gardner barely has a word to say in the last third of the film, conveying most of her thoughts through facial expression. She also has one gloriously hysterical moment careening back and forth in a daze as an aftershock shoots through the underground (!) parking lot in which she’s taken shelter. These are the sort of film clips that need to be placed in a Hall of Fame. Take heed AFI, with your dreary lists!

Though this movie could hardly be described as “good,” it is mostly entertaining thanks to some interesting visual effects, some excellent, some not (the “not” including a truckload of plastic cows going over a bridge and an elevator crash that involves a blob of red paint coming over the screen!) This is a “box movie,” one of those 70s gems that features small headshots of the stars in a row of boxes at the bottom. George Kennedy (Heston’s buddy from Airport 1975, which was filming simultaneously with this) plays a cop who has a run-in with a car thief and winds up socking a fellow officer in the face in the front yard of a celebrity who would later go to jail herself for a similar offense – Zsa Zsa Gabor! (Miss Gabor is only mentioned, not shown.)

Lang, the producer of this film (which, by the way, was the fourth most successful film of its year despite an atrocious script – credited to Mario Puzo, but barely resembling what he wrote) had a wife name Monica Lewis. Lewis had been a singer and movie starlet in the 50s, but now, as the spouse of a high-ranking movie executive, was able to win roles in the films he was bankrolling. For about a dozen years, she did either bits or featured parts in movies of his (most amusingly in The Concorde: Airport ’79.) Here, she’s Greene’s loyal secretary who is on the receiving end of one of history’s greatest bits of knee-slapping dialogue as he barks, “Barbara, take off your pantyhose, damn it!” (He needs them to use as a makeshift safety belt on a makeshift chair lift in this makeshift movie!)

Another cast member of note is Victoria Principal as the big-busted sister of an entertainment promoter. In an effort to spread the word about her brother’s act (Richard Roundtree playing a motorcycle daredevil named Miles Quade), she wears a snug promotional t-shirt over her braless chest. For reasons that film historians are still delving into, she also has on a massive curly wig throughout the film that not even the earthquake can knock off. Perhaps that is what wig-wearing nutjob Marjoe Gortner sees in her as he plays a National Guardsman with a power trip kink.

Still one more prominent female cast member (you know, Poseidon is all about the ladies in films, unless there’s a hunk present, which, in this case, there really isn’t!) is Genevieve Bujold. An actress not expected to be found in a disaster movie, she did the film in order to avoid being sued for an uncompleted contract with Universal. She has a memorably suspenseful scene dangling from a collapsed bridge over a spillover drain as live electric wires dance menacingly. She has a son who, thankfully, avoids the usual trappings of being an obnoxious brat throughout because he’s mostly unconscious.

Disaster nut that I am, I attended the Earthquake attraction at Universal Studios in Florida and practically licked a framed 8 x 10 of Ava that was posted in the lobby area. They asked for volunteers to be part of the attraction and my hand was up before the announcement was even finished. I made my way to an escalator and feigned reaction to imaginary tremors while they projected falling debris around me on a monitor for others to see. Taking a page from Gardner’s book, I threw myself into it so much that I broke my sunglasses in half! However, for thirty seconds, I was the star of my own disaster flick!