Another fine Sci-fi overachiever bounces back in a new encoding, much improved. Andrew Marton’s daring adventure / disaster / eco-apocalypse sees scientists attempting to exploit the heat at the Earth’s core — and almost splitting the planet in two. It’s high jeopardy for Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore and Alexander Knox; Eugène Lourié’s designs and special effects are breathtaking. With good extras from Gary Gerani, Tim Lucas and Stephen R. Bissette.

Crack in the World
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1965 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 96 min. / Special Edition / Street Date May 13, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Dana Andrews, Janette Scott, Kieron Moore, Alexander Knox, Peter Damon, John Masefield.
Cinematography: Manuel Berenguer
Art Director & Special Effects Director: Eugène Lourié
Special effects: Alec Weldon
Model construction: Charles-Henri Assola
Costumes: Laure Lourié
Film Editor: Derek Parsons
Original Music: Johnny Douglas
Screenplay Written by John Manchip White, Julian Halevy (Zimet)
Produced by Bernard Glasser, Lester A. Sansom, Philip Yordan
Directed by Andrew Marton

Prolific writer, producer and dealmaker Philip Yordan lucked into a gold mine when he became one of the main operatives for Samuel Bronston’s massive epics produced in Spain in the first half of the 1960s. An entire studio was built, including artisan workshops to manufacture sets and costumes. Money went everywhere and the accounting was loose. While helping to ramrod production, Yordan took writing credits on Bronston’s  King of Kings,  El Cid,  55 Days at Peking and  The Fall of the Roman Empire … and also found the time to produce his own smaller productions filmed in Spain,  The Day of the Triffids and  The Thin Red Line.

As the Bronston organization sank into the quicksands of insolvency, Yordan launched another ambitious science fiction project, helped by associates from the Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray epics. One of the best of ecological nightmare movies,  Crack in the World doesn’t use a giant monster to make its point about human meddling with Mother Nature. A group of idealistic geologists accidentally open up devastating fissures in the earth’s crust that threaten to tear the world in two.

The plot mixes disaster and soap opera in unequal measures. In Tanganyika, the terminally ill Dr. Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) goes forward with his reckless Project Inner Space despite the misgivings of his younger, more cautious assistant Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore). Inner Space plans to drop a nuclear warhead into a deep well shaft, to punch through a final barrier deep within the earth. If Sorenson can bring superheated core magma to the earth’s surface, mankind will gain an unlimited power source. Rampion believes that a blast that deep will weaken fault lines in all directions, causing a cataclysmic geological chain reaction. But Sorenson forges ahead out of pure hubris, determined to become mankind’s savior before he dies. Stephen also wants to justify himself to his young wife Maggie (Janette Scott), who was once Rampion’s lover.

The blast seems wonderfully successful, until earthquakes and volcanic eruptions open up the Macedo Fault, which extends from near the Inner Space lab out into the Indian Ocean. Ted Rampion tries to stop the moving split by using a second nuclear weapon to blow a stopgap in an island volcano. The crack instead doubles back along another fault line, forming a giant circle that will close back at the project. The scientists evacuate the subterranean lab but Sorenson refuses to leave. As lava flows threaten the lab, Ted and Maggie have no choice but to take the two-mile elevator ride down to try to change Sorenson’s mind.

Crack in the World’s outlandish concept widens into an ever-escalating spiral of excitement and jeopardy. Unlike so many earlier disaster thrillers, it delivers on its advertising promise of worldwide calamity. Although scientific advances have made the story concept obsolete — Crack in the World precedes the adoption of the  Plate Tectonic theory — the fantastic geological events are clear and understandable for any audience … nuclear meddling will rip the world apart, in an entirely unexpected way. You know, like Global Climate Change.

Every scene builds on the excitement. Rampion’s deep-sea submarine locates a fiery rupture at the bottom of the ocean. Scientists descend into an active volcano with a bulky nuclear bomb, trying to properly position it before their special suits melt from the intense heat. The film’s one unforgivably juvenile image is a conventional missile positioned upside-down over the Inner Space bore hole. Will hitting the barrier harder make the nuclear explosion more effective?  To give the obsessed Sorenson something to do while searching for an answer to the calamity, the script has him looking at file footage of nuclear explosions. Can’t go wrong with more explosions!

Although a few dialogue lines are unintentionally funny, the performances are consistently earnest and professional. Dana Andrews is sympathetic as the scientist who puts personal pride ahead of the world’s security. Corporate greed has no part in the cataclsym, just scientific hubris. Sorenson’s grant supervisor back in London is played by Alexander Knox, the misguided mastermind from Joseph Losey’s  These Are the Damned. Knox no longer raises radioactive children; he instead green-lights a crazy plan as if approving a new freeway offramp.

Kieron Moore and Janette Scott had helped out Philip Yordan on  The Day of the Triffids, performing in added sidebar scenes to pad out the show’s running time. Here they get to be dynamic action scientists, racing across the African landscape in a Range Rover. The muscular Moore has a tad too much testosterone bottled up, and Scott gets an unintentional laugh screaming like a ninny when escaping from an elevator shaft two miles deep. But the couple make an excellent Adam & Eve on the run from a colossal eruption, kicking down a chain link fence to escape a fiery Garden of Eden. Filmed at Madrid’s Bronston studios and on location in Spain, the movie manages a convincing African locale. Is the one view of some African tribesmen watching, a stockshot borrowed from another movie?

Andrew Marton was an ideal directing choice for a movie in need of a high energy level. The screenplay is good, but Marton’s camera angles are better, and he does well balancing complicated special effects with the romantic-scientific love triangle. It can’t have hurt that actors like Dana Andrews and Alexander Knox didn’t really need much in the way of direction. A second-unit director on other people’s epics, Marton was responsible for the memorable action scenes in everything from Ben-Hur (1959) to Cleopatra (1963), as well as bringing in plenty of pictures on his own. Crack in the World is graphically precise and hasn’t an ounce of narrative fat. Several shots place the actors near dangerous-looking action. Even the cutaways to volcano stock shots have impact.

The film’s equally important contributor is Eugène Lourié, a genius designer and creator of superb special visual effects. Lourié had been an ace art director on a number of French film classics of the 1930s and ’40s, including world classics as prestigious as  The Rules of the Game. When he became a director, he found himself typecast as a maker of monster movies. His first success was the Harryhausen film  The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which he more or less remade twice, as  The Giant Behemoth and  Gorgo. Several years later, he handled the special effects sequences for the volcano-based disaster picture  Krakatoa East of Java, but Crack in the World remains a career highlight. It’s likely that Lourié’s designs dictated the action montage work of director Marton. By the 1970s Mr. Lourié was art directing for TV. I met him briefly in 1978, when he held a pitch meeting for the effects for the TV show Supertrain. Unless the IMDB is wrong, he didn’t get the job.

Crack in the World employs numerous opticals and traveling matte shots but some of its most impressive images, such as the vista of the twin lava flows converging on the Inner Space Project, are clever stage illusions produced with very large minature landscapes. The film’s many explosions are some of the best ever … Lourié’s superior design and planning make the most of fancy pyrotechnics and multiple high-speed cameras. Substantial explosive charges must have been used for the large-scale detonations — the Inner Space launch pad, an entire volcanic island. The only disappointment is an unwelcome cut to another stock shot of a nuclear bomb explosion.

The main lab set is a brilliant  hanging miniature. Sorenson’s underground lab is a bold concrete construction, the kind of thing that Ken Adam might make for a 007 movie. The upper part of the lab is a foreground model neatly aligned with the live-action set. The 007 people must have been impressed, as the exact same design concept shows up again in the Roger Moore spy epic Moonraker, for the underground headquarters of the arch-villain Drax.

Miniature maker and effects specialist Charles-Henri Assola is credited on both Crack and Moonraker. He also created special effects on Georges Franju’s  Eyes without a Face (the surgical scenes, maybe?) and worked with Eugène Lourié and Alec Weldon on  Battle of the Bulge … the Cinerama epic with lots of large-scale model Panzer tanks.

Lourié’s deep sea submersible sequence is a riot of colorful bubbles. Nobody forgets his scene in the interior of the volcano, or the spectacular scenes of destruction that follow. Several chapters end with the detonation of something BIG, and the sense of disaster elevates with each new disaster. At the climax, the sense of claustrophobic panic is overpowering: whichever way the hero and heroine turn they’re confronted by towering volcanic eruptions and collapsing ruin of the Inner Space headquarters.

The climax is the awesome spectacle of a 20,000 square-mile slice of East Africa hurled into the sky. Several shots attain the feeling of chaotic planetary apocalypse missing from movies like  When Worlds Collide and even  Deep Impact. Twenty years later, when the editors for Nicholas Meyer’s nuclear holocaust thriller  The Day After needed abstract images to express obliterating fire and force, they made use of Crack in the World’s climactic upheaval. Johnny Douglas’s majestic music score adds greatly to the sight of billions of tons of fiery rock and earth exploding into outer space.

Philip Yordan often hired blacklisted writers, but not always under their own names. For Crack in the World, the name Julian Halevy was an alias for Julian Zimet, an associate of the likewise blacklisted writer Bernard Gordon. Yordan had brought them in on some of the big Samuel Bronston epics. In an interview in Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle’s  Tender Comrades (St. Martin’s Press), Zimet details his mistreatment by the government. For not cooperating with the HUAC witch hunters, the U.S. State Department found ways to both deny him a passport and block his employment abroad.

It would seem that someone — Philip Yordan himself — couldn’t resist turning Crack in the World’s story structure into a big joke about SEX. The impotent Sorenson can’t impregnate his wife Maggie, and he can’t stave off the rugged competition represented by his scientific rival Rampion. To compensate, Sorenson sublimates his sex drive into his work. His upside-down phallic missile ‘impregnates’ the earth like an atomic sperm plowing into a terra firma ovum. This isn’t a case of over-interpretation: the graphic symbol for the ‘Inner Space’ project just happens to be a red triangle piercing a blue globe. At one point the masculine Rampion alerts his staff that his bomb needs extra insulation — to prevent a premature explosion!

Sorenson imagines himself a sexual Prometheus, bringing unlimited power (potency) to our energy-starved (flaccid) male-dominated world. He instead precipitates a global cataclysm: Mother Earth has her own agenda. The sterile Sorenson succeeds in fathering a new moon, although like most useless drones, he perishes after fulfilling his function. Crack in the World concludes with a powerful image of the newly-chastized couple, standing tattered but still alive astride a fiery volcanic landscape. The message seems to be that men are the despoilers of the earth, and that even their most noble efforts are based on vain dreams of power and immortality. Either that, or the movie is about the need to invent Viagra.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Crack in the World is a new HD Master from a 4K Scan of the film’s original negative. It’s a marked improvement on the older Olive Films disc, one we happily screened many times. We immediately notice better and brighter colors, and an image that’s sharper and more stable. Most surface dings are gone, although occasional built-in schmutz remains on some opticals.

A few cutaway shots in the submersible sequence appear to have been lost, views of Kieron Moore through a viewing port. They’re replaced by poor quality substitutes, but they don’t harm the suspense.

Johnny Douglas’s bombastic music score lends the proceedings a grand dimension, smoothing over the occasional oddball dialogue line. The music is loud and strong — we always liked Douglas’s basic theme. We experienced Crack in the World at the perfect age, 13 years, and were gripped by every melodramatic turn in the plot. The show played like a big-budget sci-fi thriller from ten years previous, sincere and non-ironic. The feeling is boosted by Paramount’s original trailer, which uses the same authoritative-sounding narrator as that for the original  Invaders from Mars.

The movie was a moderate success on its first release, double-billed in my town with United Artists’ other end-of-the-world disaster thriller, John Sturges’  The Satan Bug. Both films starred Dana Andrews, and both featured a futuristic underground science lab. That afternoon had everything to dazzle a 13 year-old moviegoer. Whenever the French fantasy magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique did a piece on science fiction, Crack in the World would be mentioned, with a heavy nod to the contribution of the talented Eugène Lourié.

The older Olive disc had no extras, a problem rectified by Kino’s Special Edition. Gary Gerani’s animated audio commentary benefits from access to John Manchip White’s overlong first draft script, which Gerani describes in detail. It would have to be an epic on the scale of  Gorath, with an expanded story involving multinational cooperation. In that first script, the effort to stop the film’s crack involves dropping nuclear bombs into a dozen volcanos.

Gerani tells us that Philip Yordan initiated the project at Allied Artists, and later moved it for a better deal at Paramount. He tells us that actors Kieron Moore and Janette Scott were not a married couple, as is sometimes reported. Sorenson’s doctor is played by Alfred Brown, who Harryhausen fans will recognize as the sailor Harufa from  The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

Gary Gerani also relates the film’s final images to his own work: in addition to his screenwriting work, Gerani created trading card series for the Topps company. He says that Crack in the World’s ‘Earth will abide’ finish inspired the proposed finale for an unfilmed movie planned by Tim Burton, based on Gerani’s bubble gum card series  Dinosaurs Attack!  It instead ended up as the final image for Burton’s  Mars Attacks!  Gerani tells the full story on a page at Nathaniel Thompson’s essential page  Mondo Digital.

Gerani dedicates his commentary to the late film collector Mike Hyatt, citing Mike’s obsession with restoring Yordan’s The Day of the Triffids. Mike had his own 35mm Technicolor print of Crack in the World … which we saw screened at the American Cinematheque on August 4, 2007, with another collector’s 35mm print of  Blood and Roses. I believe that was the evening that Mike introduced me to Alan K. Rode.

Kino’s second authoritive extra is a two-part video ‘sidebar’ conversation between the elite fan spokesfolk Stephen R. Bissette and Tim Lucas. A combined 70 minutes or so of lively discussion fills in numerous gaps in our knowledge about a movie that was neither highly promoted or written about in its day. The conversation is a recorded online hookup (Zoom?) from Lucas and Bissette’s respective workstations, so our only disappointment is not being able to read the spines of all the books and discs that surround them.

They start by talking about the film’s relatively mature love triangle, and cast about for more relevant connections to other films (and genres) than I could have. Bissette has a good knowledge base for talent like Andrew Marton, who we are told was the de facto director for big chunks of 55 Days at Peking.

They’re of course impressed by the film’s dynamic thrills and unique special effects. Even Tim sees the quality edge of the Lourié effects over Mario Bava, whose art went in a different direction, away from photo-real illusions. They also get into the sex subtext of science ‘raping the world.’ Above all, they seem impressed by the film’s coherent love triangle, something unexpected in a sci-fi adventure. The final ‘Adam and Eve’ images may be a cliché, but they’re more than justified.

Both sidebar commentators remember Crack in the World from childhood, as an impressive matinee attraction. Lucas stresses the film’s uneasy finale, that seems headed for the total destruction of the planet. He thinks the movie deserves to be held in a higher regard by Sci-fi fandom in general.

The one thing the disc lacks is a Crack in the World original trailer … it’s pretty good.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Crack in the World
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Gary Gerani
Longform Sidebar Zoom discussion / analysis by Tim Lucas and Stephen R. Bissette (Two parts: 37:04, 32:19).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 19, 2025
(7299crac)

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