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Noah's Ark

A troop train wreck on the eve of the Great War becomes the Flood; lovers in 1914 become Japheth and Miriam; and Warner Bros. spends a million dollars to say that mankind is drowning itself again. Michael Curtiz’s 1928 part-talkie epic — story by Darryl F. Zanuck — yokes Genesis to the Western Front just as the Jazz Age was ending and the memory of 1914–18 was still raw: peace leagues and prosperity on the surface, another war already imaginable. Dolores Costello and George O’Brien play both eras. The deluge itself was shot with extras standing under real collapsing temples and dumped water. Cinematographer Hal Mohr, who had lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, walked off rather than photograph what he thought would kill people; Barney McGill took over. Contemporary reports say three extras drowned and others were maimed. The footage is still staggering. A Vitaphone spectacle with a sermon, and a production that proved the sermon on set.

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