Boom, crash, aieeee, it’s Burl! Yes, those are the sound
effects typically heard in a disaster picture, and today I’m going to review
the biggest disaster of them all, Irwin Allen’s gigantic megaproduction When Time Ran Out…!
Like the previous Allen triumph The Towering Inferno, this one features Paul Newman wearing a
hardhat! (He also wears the hat from Hud,
ha ha!) But it must be said right off the top that this picture represents
neither Irwin Allen’s nor Paul Newman’s finest moments! You could watch The Silver Chalice a thousand times and
it still wouldn’t be as bad as When Time
Ran Out…!
Ol’ Burl does enjoy a disaster picture, ha ha, so I was
pretty sure I’d be able to overlook the inevitable dramatic, performative,
pictorial and structural flaws in this one and milk some good-time enjoyment
from it! But the movie is so absurdly top-loaded with soap opera that the real
disaster is not the flying fireballs, tsunamis or lava flows, but the slow
crushing weight of stilted melodrama! My gosh, there are probably more soap
suds in this picture than in all the Airport
movies combined!
The set-up is as follows: Newman is an oil man supervising a
drill site on a remote Pacific island that is definitely not part of the
Hawaiian archipelago! The island is owned by Newman’s oil partner Bob Spangler,
a hotelier played by the poor man’s Charleton Heston, namely James Franciscus,
who is married to Veronica Hamel, the daughter of his other business partner,
William Holden! Ha ha, with me so far? Franciscus is having an affair d'amour with an
island lady played by Barbara Carrera, and she in turn is engaged to Edward
Albert, the manager of the hotel who is secretly the half brother of Bob Spangler!
In the meantime, Burgess “Grumpy Old Men”
Meredith and his wife, retired high-wire walkers, are on the island for one
last fling before her heart gives out; and Red Buttons, a white-collar
criminal, has been pursued there by New York City cop Ernest Borgnine!
Ha ha, all of this takes a while to set up, and on top of it
you have the science lab at the opening of the local volcano crater and the
endless arguments about whether the volcano is going to blow! Bob Spangler is
the bad guy here, out-Hamiltoning both Murray Hamilton from Jaws and Linda Hamilton from Dante’s Peak in his energetic disavowals
of any possible disaster! But that’s okay, because in one of the movie’s best
parts, Bob Spangler, his hotel, his absurdly loyal wife, his thick-headed girlfriend
and all the silly guests who were dumb enough to stay at the hotel rather than
seek higher ground with Newman and most of the other stars, are wiped out
instantly by a giant lava bomb! Ha ha!
The thing with this picture is that, while there are a few
good bits here and there (the lava bomb, the tsunami that gets both Alex Karras
and his fighting cock, Pat Morita tumbling into lava, and a bit with a
precarious volcano elevator), even the disaster movie parts are so slowly-paced
as to be nearly as tedious as the romance-drama! The climax involves a lot of
slow creeping across a disintegrating bridge, and this seems to take forever!
And dramatically the movie is all askew: if you ask me, the real hero of the
picture is Burgess Meredith, not Paul Newman (who was by his own admission only
around to pick up a paycheque anyway), and the most touching relationship is
between Buttons and Borgnine! It’s got to be one of the very worst disaster
pictures ever made, ha ha, and it’s my privilege to give When Time Ran Out… a grand total of one unlucky bearded scientist!
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