Some back-story might be a good idea here.
Grandiosity in movies can be its own reward; a lot of older pictures that probably aren’t great cinema still generate a lot of entertainment just for their oversized productions. 1969’s Krakatoa East of Java promises everything, delivers a lot less and yet always fascinated me. Movies of this kind are different today, when digital effects companies can deliver all manner of visual miracles for a set price. The director and actors need not even be present for amazing production shoots. That’s what makes us want to clap for the special effects in, say, 1986’s Aliens: when we see spaceships and bizarre aircraft and a fantastic tank rolling through an alien landscape, we know that somebody constructed, lit and shot all of it. It’s art-craft.
Once upon a time, producer Samuel Bronston rolled the dice on outrageously lavish super-productions with shaky international funding. His The Fall of the Roman Empire has scenes that use multiple thousands of costumed extras, in massive sets bigger than several city blocks. Was I too easily impressed? I don’t think so.
Bronston filmed in Spain, where a budget went farther than anywhere else with comparable studio resources. Making ‘arrangements’ with the Franco regime, he established a production center in Madrid with world-class crafts talent. The Spanish Fascists also rented out the armed forces, providing modern soldados to play Roman legions, and ex-Nazi aircraft to fill out the Luftwaffe squadrons of Battle of Britain. Nobody seemed to think any of this was politically dicey.
Bronston’s workaholic writer-producer Philip Yordan put together his own Spanish side productions at this time, often using personnel he’d imported to work on Bronston pictures. Most notable was the blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon, but ex- Allied Artists jack-of-all-trades Lester A. Sansom got involved as well, in different capacities. Krakatoa: East of Java began as a Philip Yordan production, like Battle of the Bulge and Custer of the West. Because their Crack in the World did good business worldwide, Yordan and company must have decided that an all-star period costume epic about a volcanic disaster was a great idea. Krakatoa: East of Java has innumerable commercial hooks: it’s like a Jules Verne story, but with romantic subplots and plenty of suspense. It’s a Titanic story crossed with The Last Days of Pompeii: the audience will wait through almost anything to see what blows up at the finish.
Filmed in 65mm, Krakatoa comes near the end of the Road Show craze. It never made it to provincial San Bernardino, along with The Charge of the Light Brigade, another film sold as a Cinerama production. The grandiose posters for these pictures were irresistible. I was assured that they all looked incredible in 70mm, spread out across the Cinerama Dome’s enormous screen.
The picture is entertainingly bad in the most unexpected ways — impressive production details are followed by total visual silliness. Earnest performances go for naught because of terrible writing and bad direction. Sometimes the movie can’t make up its mind what it is — our jaws drop when an anemic children’s song opens the picture. By this time our homegrown schlock-meister Irwin Allen had already made the proto-disaster epic Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I can just see him attending a matinee of Krakatoa and thinking, “That’s it! Just make everything ridiculous! I will become the king of disaster pictures!”
Krakatoa: East of Java jams four weak TV movie plots into a disaster format, doing none of them justice. In the early 1880s the tramp steamer Batavia Queen goes on a treasure hunt in the East Indies. With the island volcano Krakatoa threatening to erupt, Captain Chris Hanson (Maximillian Schell) rushes to recover a priceless treasure of pearls from a shipwreck. Hanson doesn’t believe in half measures. Young Rigby (John Leyton) has brought along an experimental diving bell (it has picture windows) to find the sunken craft. Pro salvage diver Harry Connerly (Brian Keith) is on board with his consort Charley Adams (Barbara Werle). Desperate to earn money, Harry doesn’t let on that his lungs are in such poor condition that he might not survive a deep dive. Also on board is the father-son ballooning team of Giovanni and Leoncavallo Borghese (Rossano Brazzi & Sal Mineo), who will try to spot the wreck from the air.
The lost ship captain’s widow Laura Travis (Diane Baker) is on board as well. She’s hoping that her lost son Peter (Peter Kowalski) will be found at a Catholic mission, as her husband has written. As if that weren’t enough, a team of pearl divers led by Toshi (Jacqui Chan) is on hand to search as well. A harbormaster in Singapore (Niall MacGinnis) forces Hanson to take on a load of prisoners, so the ship is full up. The prisoners’ leader Danzig (J.D. Cannon) was once an associate of Hanson’s, and the Captain unwisely gives him the run of the deck.
Krakatoa isn’t at a loss for incident. The ship weathers a number of crises before reaching Krakatoa, including a deadly mutiny. Laudanum abuser Harry Connerly suffers hallucinations, but is in good enough shape to try to rape one of the pearl divers. Charley accepts her husband’s behavior with a sigh. The Borghese’s balloon is drawn into the volcano’s crater and catches fire. The pearl divers take part only to clear a tangled oxygen line. The pearls are eventually recovered in a wholly unexpected way. Toshi falls in love with young Leoncavallo, however, and Laura and Hanson also appear to form a secure romantic future.
But as they say at Republic Pictures, then the volcano explodes. The Batavia Queen prepares to be hit by a giant tsunami wave, which breaks and rolls in the middle of the ocean, Ride the Wild Surf– style. The ship must then navigate a hellish passage between flaming rocks, while lava bombs rain down from the sky. Who will survive, and who will be burned alive?
Overall Krakatoa has everything required for excitement, and its name cast seem eager to score a popular success. They’re let down by a weak script that limps from one crisis to the next, failing to develop the characters. They also get little help from the interesting director Bernard L. Kowalski, who had an unpromising start with the Z-pix Night of the Blood Beast and Attack of the Giant Leeches. According to Tom Weaver, subsequent success in TV led to an ownership role in 1966’s Mission Impossible. Winning the helm of this monster 65mm production is an accomplishment not to be sniffed at. But Kowalski’s direction sticks with dull coverage. The few attempts at stylishness are awkward at best, as in Brian Keith’s hallucination scenes.
The movie overall lacks control. Brian Keith and Diane Baker overact, trying to make underwritten scenes amount to something. Rossano Brazzi and Sal Mineo seem just along for the ride; we scarcely see a build-up for the Leoncavallo-Toshi romance. Episodes like the prisoner revolt seem pre-ordained, generating little excitement. Several of the supporting characters come off reasonably well just because they’re not asked to do much more than watch from the sidelines, steer the boat and look concerned.
Star Maximillian Schell is largely untouched by the dramatic quicksand around him. Often accused of overacting, Schell’s Captain is a cool customer with a positive attitude. He offers occasional reassurances to Laura, while observing and gauging the other characters from an appropriate emotional distance. Even when the ship is bouncing around like a cork and firebombs are falling from the skies, Schell always looks like he can handle things. The film at least has a solid center.
The weak dramatics weren’t enough for the producers, who gave actress and dancer Barbara Werle a bizarre musical number — she raises her devoted husband’s spirits by singing as she undresses in their cabin below decks. It’s just awful, one of those scenes that any sane person would take out. Perhaps Krakatoa couldn’t afford to lose any running time, and still call itself a quasi- Road Show attraction.
Marc Lawrence is the ship’s first mate, and hovers quietly on the sidelines. Among the crew is the young Geoffrey Holder (Live and Let Die), but he’s given nothing to do or say. Holder’s wonderful laughter might be able to out-shout the volcano; putting him in a film and not using his voice is an act of criminal stupidity. Actor John Leyton (The Great Escape, Von Ryan’s Express) polishes his diving bell but otherwise is a non-entity too. Everybody is under-used. A typical Kowalski’s scene crowds them all into the boat’s dining hall, listening to somebody make a speech.
Who was in charge? Cinerama co-producer William R. Forman’s only previous credit was the mostly un-released Cinerama production The Golden Head, which is reportedly nigh-unwatchable. Associate producer Lester Sansom had plenty of experience in the low-budget trenches before apparently joining forces with Philip Yordan. According to sources, Cinerama forced Yordan out of the picture right after the special effects were completed, and the production proceeded with a new screenplay. My guess is that Bernard Gordon’s script was rewritten by Clifford Newton Gould, who at the time had very few credits.
The production has the benefit of sunny Spanish skies, lots of water and the use of a real steamship. Top Spanish cameraman Manuel Berenguer is in charge, but almost all of the lighting is flat and high key. With the added detail of 65mm, we find ourselves noticing shortcomings in the period costumes. Ms. Baker and Ms. Werle’s hairstyles are also a little on the fake side, which is not good. This may be a big show, but it looks like a rush job.
The spectacular effects go a long way toward offsetting these drawbacks. The real Krakatoa hissed and threatened for four months and then let loose with four increasingly gigantic explosions, the last of which created a pressure wave that blew out sailors’ ears at a great distance. The sound could be heard thousands of miles away. In this show the Batavia Queen is just offshore! We’re lucky that the real pressure-explosion of Krakatoa didn’t ‘crack the world’ in a similar way — it erased an enormous island, forming a vast underwater crater. Did Krakatoa ‘loosen’ the Pacific Rim ring of faults and volcanoes?
Given the alarming effects we see, nobody reacts as they should. The volcano is in full-on eruption mode from the first scene, with schoolchildren in class literally on the slope of the cinder cone mountain. They keep singing over the noise just outside their window. Impressive miniature pyro effects are seen every few minutes, which diminishes the impact of the eventual big (single) explosion. After listening to the booming sound effects all that time, our ears are already worn out.
In charge of the all-important disaster visuals is the legendary Eugèné Lourié. After collaborating with Ray Harryhausen and being sidelined into directing the monster movies The Colossus of New York, The Giant Behemoth, and Gorgo, the French production designer found ready employment with the big Spanish movies of Philip Yordan. Lourié pulled off effects miracles in the volcanic Crack in the World, which surely pegged him as the man to make Krakatoa erupt.
The problem is that Lourié is asked to do too much. Perhaps fifteen or twenty full minutes of the show are devoted to his effects shots. The close-ups of the eruption are marvelous feats of miniature pyrotechnics, with colorful blasts of flame and hurled stone looking quite dramatic. Long shots are good too, but the mattes involved are a little shakier. The object was of course to do everything in the camera, as most European optical work was never very good. I’m ready to be corrected, but the only fully tricked-out 65mm optical printer I ever heard of was in Los Angeles, at Linwood Dunn’s Film Effects of Hollywood. MGM and Fox had fancy 65mm matte setups but I don’t think they had full-on optical printing at that gauge.
This a must-see picture in which to ponder old-school epic disaster effects. The Spanish miniature makers crafted a great ship model and reasonably good models of a sea village and some rocky volcano-scapes, but all of them are given far too much screen time. Miniatures dominate scenes that are minutes long, allowing some illusions to break down. Excellent in some shots, the boat looks like a toy in others. We’re told that one problem was that the 65mm cameras available couldn’t run faster than 72fps. The slow-motion scale effect is not always enough. The effects are asked to do too much, without help from the director. I guess this makes sense – if the information I have is accurate, the final screenplay was written after the effects were in the can.
Curiously, the main explosion event is just a lighting effect in a long shot of the ship. I guess it’s one of those things that is just too big for audiences to fully appreciate. In the actual photo evidence of Mt. St Helens, even half of a mountain blowing up doesn’t convey the scale of the cataclysm. Eugèné visually expressed something similar in Crack in the World, where for a couple of seconds we feel as if a huge chunk of Africa were being flung into the sky.
There’s an excellent seventy- or eighty-minute action spectacle in Krakatoa: East of Java. With everything trimmed to the bone, we wouldn’t have time to ponder the lack of dramatic urgency, or question why Barbara Werle is doing an impersonation of Julie Andrews.
The most salient precedent for this movie is Republic’s long-forgotten 1952 thriller Fair Wind to Java. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole thing but I caught the fantastic finale several times on TV (in B&W). A pirate adventure with Fred MacMurray and Vera Hruba Ralston, it concludes with heroes and villains climbing an endless staircase up the side of Krakatoa, just as it is about to blow. They never reach the inviting palace at the summit. Dozens of movies big and small use volcanoes as a lame way to rush to a conclusion, and volcanoes always seem to erupt right on a screenwriter’s cue. Martin Scorsese called Fair Wind a personal favorite, and he, UCLA and The Film Foundation reportedly restored it in 2006. So where is it? It’s really not been seen since the 1970s. Are the first sixty minutes really terrible, or something?
I don’t know if second-unit director Frank Kowalski is the brother of director Bernard L., but he has a list of great credits going back to the 1930s and eventually worked as Sam Peckinpah’s right-hand man on several pictures. He also penned the story for the daring Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Source: Wide Screen Movies Robert E. Carr and R.M. Hayes, McFarland 1988.
