I first saw this movie at the cinema when I was a kid, and it blew me away, if you'll excuse the expression. Probably also started my lifelong interest in Tidal Waves, as I think it was the first time I'd ever heard of them. Watching it 35 years later was not, unfortunately, a particularly rewarding experience.
For a start, purely by coincidence, a couple of days before my online rental copy arrived in the mail, a local station played a documentary about the disaster, which despite being a slapped together TV production, made the documentary aspect of the film look outright pathetic. 'Krakatoa' won the special effects Oscar for 1969, and it's quite amazing how old and limited those effects actually seem, compared even with movies of a few years later, like 'The Poseidon Adventure'.
Probably what disappointed me most about 'East of Java' is that I had remembered it as focusing much more on the volcanic eruption than it actually does. The film is far more concerned with the adventure yarn about diving for pearls, and the romance between the two main characters. Krakatoa almost seems like just a backdrop sometimes. People rarely even refer to the fact that there's a mountain in the process of blowing itself into the stratosphere, a few hundred yards away. Maximilian Schell as the unflappable captain is particularly infuriating in this regard, as nothing the volcano throws up seems to phase him in the slightest. He barely seems interested in it, as if mountains explode during diving expeditions on a fairly regular basis.
The rest of the cast are all adequate, but nobody excels. There is a rather distasteful sequence where an admittedly laudanum-sozzled Brian Keith assaults a Japanese diving girl, and after he dries out by being suspended in a crate for a few hours, nobody seems to think it was a particularly noteworthy incident.
It's a decent adventure yarn, but there is little effort made to summon the sense of foreboding and dread which would have been appropriate given what was about to happen. I suppose the art of building tension in disaster movies wasn't really honed until the early to mid 70's.
For a start, purely by coincidence, a couple of days before my online rental copy arrived in the mail, a local station played a documentary about the disaster, which despite being a slapped together TV production, made the documentary aspect of the film look outright pathetic. 'Krakatoa' won the special effects Oscar for 1969, and it's quite amazing how old and limited those effects actually seem, compared even with movies of a few years later, like 'The Poseidon Adventure'.
Probably what disappointed me most about 'East of Java' is that I had remembered it as focusing much more on the volcanic eruption than it actually does. The film is far more concerned with the adventure yarn about diving for pearls, and the romance between the two main characters. Krakatoa almost seems like just a backdrop sometimes. People rarely even refer to the fact that there's a mountain in the process of blowing itself into the stratosphere, a few hundred yards away. Maximilian Schell as the unflappable captain is particularly infuriating in this regard, as nothing the volcano throws up seems to phase him in the slightest. He barely seems interested in it, as if mountains explode during diving expeditions on a fairly regular basis.
The rest of the cast are all adequate, but nobody excels. There is a rather distasteful sequence where an admittedly laudanum-sozzled Brian Keith assaults a Japanese diving girl, and after he dries out by being suspended in a crate for a few hours, nobody seems to think it was a particularly noteworthy incident.
It's a decent adventure yarn, but there is little effort made to summon the sense of foreboding and dread which would have been appropriate given what was about to happen. I suppose the art of building tension in disaster movies wasn't really honed until the early to mid 70's.