rating:
company: Warner Bros. and
International Cinema Corp.
year: 1980
runtime: 109′
country: United States
director: James Goldstone
cast: Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset,
William Holden, Edward Albert,
Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine,
James Franciscus, Burgess Meredith,
Pat Morita, John Consodine
writers: Carl Foreman and
Stirling Siliphant (from a novel by
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts)
cinematographer: Fred J. Koenekamp
music: Lalo Schifrin
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Warner Bros. must have felt plenty gipped after successful film and television producer Irwin Allen jumped ship at 20th Century Fox and began making films under their banner.  Allen’s seminal disaster efforts The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno had grossed $200 million collectively just a few years prior, giving Warner plenty of reason to sink million after million into new Allen productions.  Allen was first put to work in the television market, where he conceived a host of derivative suspense pictures like Flood! and Cave In!, most of whose titles ended in exclamation points.  By the time Allen entered the big-budget world of theatrical pictures again things had changed.  The disaster craze had run its course, more or less, and the American public was weary of seeing the same old tropes paraded before their eyes.

1978′s The Swarm would prove Allen’s first epic failure, earning back less than half of its estimated budget of $21 million.  His big comeback feature Beyond the Poseidon Adventure is said to have done worse still, though this reviewer had no luck hunting down its box office returns.  Beyond was universally derided by critics and rejected by audiences, lasting a mere two weeks in general release.  1980′s When Time Ran Out . . . would prove to be Allen’s final chance at luring audiences back to his increasingly outdated brand, his last big swing at melding stars, spectacle, and soap opera dramatics into box office gold.  Even after The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, I doubt anyone could have imagined just how terrible an idea this one was.

Held together by little more than contractual obligations, When Time Ran Out . . . stars The Towering inferno alumni Paul Newman and William Holden (Sabrina) in ostensibly the same roles (inversely, the rich property owner and the doom-sayer), and Jacqueline Bisset (Under the Volcano), who helped usher in the American disaster craze with 1970′s Airport.  The list of unfortunately involved name talent goes on and on, with the likes of Burgess Meredith (Of Mice and Men), Ernest Borgnine (Emperor of the North), Red Buttons (The Poseidon Adventure), James Franciscus, Edward Albert, Pat Morita, and on . . . and on . . . and on . . .  Everyone looks uncomfortable to be in the picture at all, though they trudge on professionally all the same.  Meredith seems particularly perturbed, having been granted a cheap plot contrivance (he’s a high wire artist – that won’t figure into things later . . . ) instead of a role.

Narratively, When Time Ran Out . . . is pretty sorry stuff.  The script, by otherwise exceptional writers Stirling Silliphant (Village of the Damned, In the Heat of the Night) and Carl Foreman (The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon), follows the usual Allen tropes.  A huge cast of everyday people is accumulated in a luxury accommodation, in this case a newly opened resort hotel on an island, threatened with ongoing disaster, in this case a volcanic eruption, and forced on a dangerous trek to safety, in this case the other side of the island.  The disaster builds in the usual way, with the obvious ominous portents of danger being ignored by those in charge.  Par for the course, most of the good guys reach salvation while the baddies (and most of the supporting players) meet their untimely ends.

The traditional Irwin Allen walk of doom, a staple of his brand since 1960′s The Lost World and possibly before, feels particularly tired here, with two unnecessarily lengthy man-on-ledge set pieces tasked with the bulk of the suspense-ratcheting.  The second of these, in which the intrepid survivors contend with a slowly crumbling foot bridge suspended over a river of bubbling lava (cue Meredith and his high-wire act), drags on for the better part of twenty minutes!  Lalo Schifrin (Enter the Dragon, Dirty Harry) is particularly deserving of audience sympathies here, forced to compose some 17 minutes of endless suspense cues to keep the illusion of action going.

Warner, undoubtedly disappointed by then with Allen’s output under their name, seems to have had the decency not to spend more than was absolutely necessary to bring When Time Ran Out . . . to its unfortunate fruition.  It’s clear that after the performers’ salaries and basics of production were covered, the special effects crew was left with peanuts to work with.  The realization of the volcano is, frankly, horrid, amounting to a single matte for daytime shots and uninspired stock footage and process work otherwise.  There is a huge disconnect between the purported threat of the volcano and the reality on screen, the fine Hawaiian locations dispensed with in favor of stuffy and unconvincing studio rigs for the suspense setups.  Poor Newman (“The lava is headed this way . . .”) is gifted the dubious honor of convincing audiences of the danger (“The lava is still headed this way . . .”) as visuals of the slowly approaching molten death fail again and again to materialize.

Then there is the writing for the volcano, which is so pointed in its actions that it should be credited as a character all its own.  Particularly noteworthy are the lava bombs erupting out of it, all of which are aimed (occasionally in multiples of three) squarely at James Franciscus (the requisite baddie, who is greedy and cheats on his girlfriend and, thusly, deserves to die) and the resort hotel under his command.  The lava bombs themselves are pretty inconsistent, causing only minor damage while the heroes are around and sending the hotel up in a massive fireball once they’re safely away.  The realism of things is highly questionable even before the eruption, however.  So-called scientists operate an observatory on the precipitous rim of the volcano their studying, and go so far as to lower a glass-bottomed volcano-vator directly into it just so Paul Newman can get a peak.  Damn the seismographs, it sure looks like it’s acting up . . .

What all of this amounts to is a horrible film that easily ranks as one of the worst of the entire disaster cycle and the biggest box office no-go of Irwin Allen’s career (regaining only $1.7 million of it $20 million budget in general release).  It’s also my favorite of Allen’s films, ludicrous in the extreme and existing at a level of sublime hilarity that Roland Emmerich can only aspire to.  2012 may have whole continents ripping themselves gloriously apart, but where are the men falling sideways into library footage of lava pits just because a plot contrivance necessitates that they stand on the skids of a helicopter while it flies directly over the eruption?  When Time Ran Out . . . is one of the best inadvertent spoofs of its own genre ever devised, a film that would have been brilliant if intentional and is just too fantastically stupid to be ignored.

Warner Brothers was kind enough to keep When Time Ran Out . . . from DVD circulation until after star Paul Newman (who listed it as the only picture he regretted when interviewed by Larry King in 1998) passed late in 2008, but also greedy enough to use his namesake as a means of moving more product.  When Time Ran Out . . . was released as part of the Paul Newman Film Series in February of last year.  The disc is absolutely bare bones, lacking even a chapter selection menu, and features only the shorter theatrical cut (109′) of the film (a 141′ cut was released to VHS previously, for those who want more time to run out of).  Without its big-name star this would probably have ended up a part of Warner’s Archive Collection, alongside Irwin Allen’s made-for-TV. disaster films.  The transfer is a nice progressive job from elements in great condition.  There’s very light damage throughout, more evident in the cheap process shots, but color, detail, and contrast are all quite nice.  Frankly this looks far better than it probably should – the Fred J. Koenekamp (The Amityville Horror, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) cinematography is one of the only genuinely good things about the film.  Audio is a simple and clear monophonic track. Subtitles are available in English SDH or French.

Just one of the many top-notch effects that await you in 'When Time Ran Out . . ."

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