DELUGE Review – ***

That Deluge can be seen at all is rather miraculous. While its famous sequence of New York being destroyed, first by earthquake and then by flood, was used as stock footage in several later films, the rest of the film was long thought lost, until a dubbed Italian release print was discovered in 1981 and later released on VHS. In 2016, a print with the original English-language soundtrack was discovered, restored, and released on DVD. It would’ve been enough that such a print even existed; that it was apparently in fine condition (the restored version looks pretty crisp overall) is a blessing.

It would’ve been even more of a blessing were Deluge truly great, or even especially good, but it’s certainly an interesting early example of the post-apocalyptic genre. To the alarm of scientists across the globe, barometers start plunging, after which an inexplicable solar eclipse occurs. Then earthquakes wipe out cities left and right, leveling buildings as if they were made of sand. Finally, floods wash them away, leaving what remains almost unrecognizable.

Caught up in this chaos are swimmer Claire Arlington (Peggy Shannon) and lawyer Martin Webster (Sidney Blackmer). Martin believes his wife Helen (Lois Wilson) and their two young children are dead, and makes a new home in a cabin, stockpiling supplies in a nearby tunnel. Claire, who had been visiting friends in the country, is found by the unsavory Jepson (Fred Kohler) and his cohort Norwood (Ralf Harolde). After Norwood attempts to assault her, Claire escapes while Jepson is fighting with Norwood, swimming for hours until she ends up on the shore near Martin’s cabin; Jepson, having killed Norwood, has pursued her in a rowboat, but Martin rescues her before Jepson can find her.

Jepson meets up with a gang of other roughnecks, while Martin and Claire begin to form a bond. Meanwhile, in a nearby settlement, Helen and the children are still alive, and she is under pressure from Tom (Matt Moore) to give up hoping for Martin’s return and marry him instead. At the same time, Tom and the other men of the settlement plan to track down the gang (who’ve previously been run out of town) and wipe them out. Their plans coincide with Jepson’s attempts to kill Martin and capture Claire, but they’re able to get the upper hand and wipe out most of the gang themselves shortly before Tom and the others arrive.

Back at the settlement, Martin discovers that Helen and the children are still alive, and while Tom accepts this turn of events, Claire – who has come to regard Martin as her own – is less understanding, and resents Helen despite Helen’s own considerable sympathy for Claire. Martin proves a capable organizer and is chosen to lead the settlement as they rebuild; Claire, realizing that her situation is hopeless, goes down to the sea and swims away as Martin watches helplessly.

Most viewers, like myself, will be drawn to Deluge by the promise of scenes of destruction and devastation. The film delivers on this…for the first 18 of its 66 minutes. The rest of the film is devoted to the process of rebuilding and the romantic entanglements which come to the fore in the last stretch of the film. To be sure, that seems to match what I’ve read of the source novel by S. Fowler Wright (notably subtitled “A Romance”), which is less about the destruction of modern society than how humanity survives without it, ideally establishing a better society in its wake.

Wright’s novel has some fairly powerful passages at the start which discuss that devastation:

To an observer from a distant planet the whole movement would have appeared trivial. There was probably no point at which land either sank or rose to one five-thousandth of the earth’s diameter. But water and land were so nearly at one level that the slightest tremor was sufficient either to drain or flood them.

The surface trembled, and was still, and the Himalayas were untroubled…and India was no more, and China a forgotten dream…

…It was as though it breathed in its sleep, but scarcely turned, and Southern Europe was gone, and Germany a desolation that the seas had swept over.

Ocean covered the plain of the Mississippi, and broke against the barrier of the Rockies. The next day it receded, leaving the naked wrecks of a civilization that a night had ended.

…the Saharan desert wrinkled into the greatest mountain range the world had ever seen, and the sea creatures of the West Atlantic learnt in bewildered death that the ocean had failed them.

Deluge, p. 1.

Evocative stuff, and if the film doesn’t show the global scope of the destruction, the scene where New York’s skyscrapers are shaken to the ground as people flee helplessly, after which the Atlantic surges in, burying the shattered remains of Manhattan, sweeping great ships along as if they were bath toys, does a reasonable job of living up to Wright’s description of how totally and impartially modern civilization is obliterated. In 1933, it probably seemed even more impressive, when it wasn’t as clear that those ships really are bath toys, or that the fleeing crowds are rather crudely combined with the crumbling buildings behind them (which were elaborate models, of course).

But Wright’s real goals become apparent when he shifts his focus, first to how the animals adapt to this catastrophe, then in comparing their relative ability to fend for themselves with the inability of modern humanity to survive without the support of technology and social mores:

Every natural law that their lives had denied and their lips derided was now released to scourge them. They had despised the teaching of the earth that bore them, and her first care was given to her more obedient offspring.

[…]

Released in a day from the most elaborate system of mutual slavery that the world has known, they were unused to the exercise of mental initiative, or to independent action. They were accustomed to settle every issue of life, not by the application of any basic rules, or instinctive preferences, or by the exercise of reason, but under the blind guidance of their specialised fellow-men, or by assiduous imitation of the procedure of those around them…

Deluge, p. 4.

Suffice to say, Wright had a low view of the state of civilization, and the film, rather thankfully, doesn’t bash modern society so much as it depicts the chaos which ensues when that society crumbles. In particular, the status of women in these after-times is rather alarming; men like Jepson treat them as property, but even in the settlement a “law” is adopted requiring all unmarried women to take a partner, which Tom uses to pressure Helen. It’s not as trenchant a treatment of the theme as Mad Max: Fury Road would offer 80 years later, but it should give any viewer the willies.

On the other hand, it’s a bit tricky to parse the film’s own gender politics. Martin may not be the vicious brute that Jepson is, but he still puts some pressure on Claire to become his lover, and once she – previously something of a free spirit – embraces him, she’s as attached to him as if they’d been married all along. Helen is, of course, perfectly understanding that her husband fell in love with another woman while she remained faithful, but Claire, caught between love and the lingering institutions of marriage and parenthood, won’t give up so easily.

Martin is generally depicted as a noble and capable man, and given some of his actions, it’s hard not to feel uneasy about this. But the ending, in which Claire takes to the sea once more, leaving behind the new world Martin so earnestly hopes to build, leaving Martin himself behind as he stands helpless on the shore, makes you wonder if the film isn’t subtly critiquing Martin’s ostensible nobility, with Claire fleeing the re-establishment of hypocrisy in his elevation to community leader. The more I think about it, the more I think Deluge makes for – or has the seeds of – a knotty little morality play.

That said, it’s still not all that good of a film. Felix E. Feist’s direction is decent, and Norbert Brodine’s cinematography is quite solid; the image of Martin, alone on a desolate plain, is truly striking, and there’s some nifty lighting in the night-time scenes. Ralph DeLacy’s sets, especially of the settlement, at once recognizable and obviously damaged, are truly impressive. And, of course, Ned Mann’s effects, if hardly seamless (especially compared to King Kong the same year), remain fascinating to watch. That authentic footage of earthquakes and hurricanes was neatly woven into the film doesn’t diminish what Mann and his team achieved.

It’s the script, by Warren B. Duff and John F. Goodrich, and the editing, by Martin G. Cohn and Rose Loewinger, that really let the film down. There’s a lot of jumping around from scene to scene and from setting to setting, often without much rhyme or reason. The geography of scenes is often unclear; how is Martin, who wasn’t all that far from Helen and the children when the devastation reached them, unable to find them again, especially since they survived? For that matter, how far is the settlement from his cabin? It doesn’t seem all that far – how has no one from the settlement happened upon him by now?

And the characters are not too well established; we get only a brief introduction to Claire before she’s found by Jepson, and not much introduction to Jepson himself – it’s hinted that he was a fugitive in the before-times, but it’s never made clear. Also omitted are what would seem like vital scenes, like Martin and Helen actually being reunited, or him explaining the situation with Claire. These are the problems you run into when you compress a full-length novel into a 66-minute film, but I’m not sure why the filmmakers decided to make it so brisk; after all, it was a fairly ambitious and expensive production for the time. That they found time to include a couple of cringe-inducing comic bits with a black townsman (Fred Toones) doesn’t help.

The acting, at least, isn’t too bad. Blackmer would later achieve fame as a character actor, often in darker roles like Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, and it’s tempting to say that his casting also hints at complexities in Martin’s character which account for some of his less admirable behavior. Whatever the case, he’s solid, bringing a certain gravitas to the role that a more traditional leading man might not have offered. But it’s Shannon that really commands one’s attention, with her sharp wit, free spirit, and unapologetic self-possession. She’s a distinctly pre-Code character, introduced as she’s having her leg greased up for a publicized swim and spending a decent amount of time in her underwear. But even without the titillation, Shannon brings a spark to Claire which the film definitely needs. (Sadly, her own career was hampered by her alcoholism, which led to her early death.)

I debated whether to rate Deluge as a high **½ or a low ***. I’m going with the latter; the more I think about it, the more I think there’s just enough beneath the surface to get it just that little bit higher. I would already have recommended it for genre fans, but anyone interested in pre-Code Hollywood should also take a look, as the very premise would probably have been heavily watered down a year or so later. Plus, we’re damn lucky to be able to see Deluge at all; you might as well.

Score: 65