For anyone convinced post-apocalyptic movies are a recent phenomenon, here’s Deluge, a remarkable film from 1933. It’s got all the stuff you might expect from a big disaster movie and some thoughtful stuff you might not. Some of it you might even recognise – the makers of The Day After Tomorrow paid direct homage to this movie when they destroyed New York with a massive tsunami.
Like The Day After Tomorrow we’re dropped down right in the middle of things. The film opens with a breakneck montage. The barometer is dropping and scientists are expressing concern. Ships are being called back to port, planes and airships (gratifyingly 1930s) are being grounded. As the ocean gets choppier, an attempt on an endurance record by a famous swimmer (Peggy Shannon) is cancelled.
Conditions worsen and director Felix E Feist ups the pace – tickertape machines chatter, radio broadcasts deliver reports of destruction, preachers predict both the end of the world and god’s protection from harm. Then news of devastation starts coming in – the entire western seaboard of the United State has gone. Louisiana is sinking. The Great Lakes are overflowing. As hurricanes lash the country, the wave arrives that will destroy New York…
And then, also like The Day After Tomorrow, the aftermath, a survivor story. Of a nice apple-pie family, the Websters, and that famous swimmer, Claire Arlington, who, tossed onto the shore, finds herself thrown together with two men. They, it will soon turn out, both have sexual designs on her. Afraid she will be raped, Claire flees into the sea again and, thanks to her swimming abilities, escapes, only to wash up with Martin Webster, who believes his family has perished. Soon – far too soon really – Martin setting his cap at Claire, albeit in a less obvious way than the two men she has just escaped.
Meanwhile, the clean-up is going on in the remaining refuges of civilisation. What sort of world should they rebuild – might is right or the rule of law? It’s the same choice Claire is being offered – rape or sexual favours freely given? – but on a macro scale.
To modern eyes it’s the relentless threat of sexual violation that really stands out in Deluge. But the special effects are also worth a look. They can’t match up to modern CGI but are effective in conjuring the apocalyptic mood. The team that worked on them would later provide the know-how that powered another 1930s landmark, sci-fi blockbuster Things to Come. There is a touching stiff-lipped formality to both.
Feist isn’t remembered for much these days beyond a few noirs in the 1940s. This is his monument, a remarkable piece of work that’s at its best in the chaotic opening act, when Feist shows himself to be a dynamic magician of mood and expert choreographer of pace. Later, as the dynamic shifts from the apocalyptic towards the personal, he’s less assured. A touch old-fashioned, even, with shadows from the silent movies of yore beginning to gather.
Sidney Blackmer plays compromised good guy Martin. He is hardly a hero when he’s forgotten about his wife and kids so quickly, but he is undeniably a hero to the desperate Claire. But try what Blackmer might it’s Peggy Shannon’s movie. She’s warm and sexy as Claire, resourceful and optimistic, a go-getter. But then in general the women fare best in this movie. As for the men, the goodies are a touch stiff and the baddies – would-be rapists to a degree that is shocking to puritanical moderns – all look like they are on the run from a sheriff’s posse. Bad hats one and all.
Ultimately, Deluge is a political film. If it all ended tomorrow, it asks, what sort of world would we reconstruct? It’s not a question on anybody’s lips in The Day After Tomorrow, or not that I remember. And if, in the end, Deluge cops out a bit by shifting the question from political to personal, it does at least ask the question.
A fascinating film that still works on its own terms. We’re lucky to have it. At one point it was thought to be entirely lost. Then a very poor quality Italian print was found, before a a decent print in the French National Archive turned up. Restored by Kino Lorber in 2016, it looks great – a little artefact-y here and there and a little bit of digital snow in the darker scenes but on the whole it is readable enough for an immersive movie experience.
Deluge – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
