The mighty Leonard Cohen sung: "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in". But his beautiful anthem was one of hope, whereas the titular crack of this film represents the greatest disaster imaginable, and possible the end of the world as we know it! "A Crack in the World" is a disaster movie that predates the Irwin Allen era. In other words, it's not a massively budgeted epos that features a long list of Hollywood stars and thrives on special effects and set-pieces, but more of an intelligently scripted and rather talky drama with genuine suspense and plausible plot twists. Brilliant scientist Stephen Sorenson (Dana Andrews) suffers from a terminal illness, but refuses to tell anyone in order to complete his prestigious and ambitious life's work, namely providing the world with never-ending energy sources that are coming directly from magma of the earth's core. To bring the magma to the surface, his team launches a missile straight to the center of the earth, but like his much younger and more handsome colleague Ted predicted, the missile causes a crack in the world, and consequently earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, tsunamis and approximately 38.000 human casualties in one day! "Crack in the World" surely isn't the most exhilarating Sci-Fi/Action movie of the sixties, but the story is hugely absorbing and the scientist roles are very well-acted. After a very theoretical first hour, there's quite a lot of action. They even drop nuclear bombs into active volcanos and hundreds of poor souls fall to their deaths when a ramshackle train bridge collapses.
Review of Crack in the World
