Crack In The World

Cast: Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, and Kieron Moore

Director: Andrew Marton      

96 minutes (U) 1965

101 Films Blu-ray region B 
[Released 5th August]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Steven Hampton  

This disaster movie begins, like other epic genre dramas of its era, with official visitors arriving at a super-science complex, where a matte painting of a somewhat mysterious but nonetheless impressive building offers unique imagery. Men in suits accompany the blonde with a dazzling smile, to inspect the plans and customised hardware for Project Inner Space. The dying Dr Sorenson (Dana Andrews, Night Of The Demon, 1957), and his wife Maggie (Janette Scott, The Day Of The Triffids, 1962), another scientist on this project, are preparing an experiment, intending to harness geo-thermal power from the Earth’s core. 

The movie’s theme of penetration into the unknown, here via industrial testing, is using a nuclear bomb to burn through the otherwise unbreakable layers of the planet’s mantle in order to release sufficient heat, as molten rock, likely to solve all of the world’s demands for cheap energy. An intelligent deployment of its explanatory details ensures this rather action-oriented story distinguishes itself from most of the straight-forward, and typically unimaginative, disaster movies (like Earthquake) that followed in the 1970s. However, its drama is still driven by the romantic passions of a convenient love-triangle, that includes the project’s dissenting voice of Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore, previously paired with Scott for DOTT), who is much younger and considerably more virile than the aged and regretful Sorenson. It’s Rampion who quits his job here and travels to London to warn Sir Charles Eggerston (Alexander Knox), of his own theory about the geological risks of Project Inner Space, and his assessment of global risks proves to be an accurate doomsday prediction. 

One particular scene stands out in terms of scientific rigour. When Dr Rampion’s theory is evidently proven coherent and factual by unexpected results, Dr Sorenson quickly admits his now undeniable mistakes in calculating the extraordinary hazards of a daring project. Obviously, it does not solve the immediate dangers now facing humanity, but changing his mind fits in closely with how the checks and balances of science should work, ideally, in the real world, without any inflated egos, or consideration of lost profits, getting in the way of any further decisive options. From that point onwards, the team’s response to an environmental crisis is managed by both men, working together on new plans to save the cracked world. This consensus helps to dispel the movie world’s mad-scientist mythology of a lonely tortured genius whose overbearing will rejects any challenge from rationality. Cooperation, not competition, is shown to be the only way ahead to get the best results.   

Andrew Marton’s Crack In The World follows the planet-wrecking formula of earlier spectacular catastrophe pictures, When Worlds Collide (1951), and British classic The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961). Made on a surprisingly modest budget, this SF movie uses stock footage of volcanic eruptions and flowing lava, edited-in to add exatr veracity to a series of increasingly dramatic special effects. Shot on locations in Spain, standing in for the east-African coast, and some islands in the Indian Ocean, where the heroes survive quakes, floods, and a climactic struggle to escape from the collapsing underground base, Crack In The World boasts landscape scenes on a studio-set lit with all the burning reds of hell during the movie’s astonishingly sudden creation of a second moon, emerging out of the Earth’s crust and spinning away from the broken ground, up into orbit. Indeed, this movie’s apocalyptic finale provides some of the most awesome, and profoundly alarming, visuals in stylised genre cinema, until such modern productions as Alex Proyas’ visionary adventure Knowing (2009).