‘It was a
hurricane to blast you from the orchestra pit to the first mezzanine,’ said one
critic of the spectacular 15 minute storm sequence conjured up by the great
John Ford in his 1937 film, The
Hurricane. The story of how an unfeeling French colonial regime persecuted
a free-spirited native man, it won the Oscar for best sound.
But Ford’s
storm sequence was a mere taster for the genre where storms would really come
into their own – the disaster movie. The special effects teams for Roland
Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow had
to conjure up hailstones like grapefruit to fell people in Tokyo, a snowstorm
in Delhi, tornados to fling cars around in LA, a rainstorm that floods New York
City, and so on.
My new book,
Storm: Nature and Culture (Reaktion)
tells the story of the role played by storms in the movies, as well as
examining their place in art, literature, religion and history.
In films,
they are often a device for transporting the characters from a normal life to a
new, often threatening world. So, in The
Wizard of Oz, it is a tornado that
whirls Judy Garland’s character up from her Kansas home into the company of the
Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and a wicked witch.
More recently, in Life of Pi, the hero starts a bit less
conventionally – sailing from India to Canada with a zoo-full of animals, but
things get really extraordinary when a storm sinks the ship and he finds
himself in a lifeboat with only a hungry tiger for
company.
Another plot
function is confinement. In John Huston’s classic thriller Key Largo, a hurricane keeps an increasingly edgy gangster, played
by Edward G. Robinson, cooped up in a small hotel with his gang, his alcoholic
girlfriend, and the hero, Humphrey Bogart. The tension builds relentlessly
until Robinson gets his comeuppance.
The Day After Tomorrow tried to hammer home an environmental
message in a way some found crass, but just because a film is packed with
special effects does not mean it cannot tell an affecting human story.
In The Perfect Storm, a fishing boat perishes in a long and genuinely scary tempest
sequence, but the characters of the captain (played by George Clooney) and his
crew are well drawn, and there is an affecting ending when another skipper says
the men who died lie in a vast unmarked grave, with no headstones and nowhere
to lay flowers, and that their loved ones can visit them only in their hearts
and their dreams.
