I’m finding all kinds of old and forgotten films on YouTube, including some science fiction films I didn’t know existed. I’ve read about the 1928 English novel Deluge by S. Fowler Wright, but never knew it was made into an American film in 1933. According to Wikipedia it was lost for many years, then Forrest J. Ackerman discovered an Italian language copy in 1981. Then in 2016 an English language copy was found. It’s now available on DVD/Blu-ray made from a 2K scan. However, it can also be seen on YouTube. I don’t know if it’s a legal copy or not, but this print is pretty good. There are other prints there that aren’t.

Deluge is a Pre-Code Hollywood film which means it’s grittier and sexier than most old films from the 1930s and 1940s, and that gives it a kind of brutal honesty. However, it’s still an early sound picture, and probably most modern viewers will think the cinematography, acting, and special effects primitive and clunky. It was made by the same studio and in the same year as King Kong. I thought the special effects in Deluge were damn impressive for that era.

Deluge is post-apocalyptic flick where we get to see New York City destroyed by earthquakes and a tsunamis. Martin (Sidney Blackmer) is a married man with two small children who tries to save his family but is washed away. He believes his wife Helen (Lois Wilson) and kids are dead and starts a new solitary life by scavenging supplies he stores in a cave and living in a small cabin.

Concurrent with Martin’s story, Claire, a competitive long distance swimmer, has washed up on shore and is discovered a brutish man named Jepson (Fred Kohler) who claims her as his possession. But Claire escapes by swimming back out to sea and washing up on another shore where Martin finds her. They begin a new life together and eventually consider themselves married.

However, Jepson hasn’t given up looking for Claire, and has joined a band of ruthless men who rove the countryside looking for women to rape and kill. Along with all of this, a group of survivors are rebuilding a small town, and Martin’s wife and kids find their way to it.

The big conflict of the story comes when the town decides it must hunt down and kill all the roving males who are capturing their women. It’s not Mad Max, but the story is quite honest about the brutality of living in a post-apocalyptic aftermath. The story even gets nicely complicated when Martin rediscovers that his wife is alive and doesn’t want to give up either woman.

Deluge is only 77 minutes long, but it is a science fiction film from a time when science fiction films were so rare that people didn’t know they belonged to a genre category. Here is Wikipedia’s list of science fiction films of the 1930s. I don’t consider them all science fiction, some are fantasy, and several are the classic horror films from Universal Studios. Plus, many are crude multi-episode serials about Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and similar adventure heros. Science fiction was known as that crazy Buck Rogers stuff back then. The most impressive science fiction film of the 1930s was Things to Come from 1936, and if you haven’t seen it you should. Quite a few films on this list are from Europe.

Ranker has a rather nice list of these old films worth watching, The Best ’30s Sci-Fi Movies. It’s just 34 titles, and Deluge comes in at #27. I plan to watch The Invisible Ray (1936) next with a story about seeing the past by viewing light from the Andromeda galaxy.

I enjoy watching these old films because I like to imagine how people from the 1930s explored science fictional concepts. Some ideas are old, like in Deluge with civilization being destroyed. That’s as old as Noah’s Ark, which predates The Bible. Knowing that light from other stars and galaxies comes from the past is a relatively new concept, and only significant since we learned of the speed of light in the late 19th century. Space travel by rockets is also recent, since the first chemical rockets were built in the 1920s. The word robot was coined in the early 1920s. Many of the science fiction films listed for the 1930s in Wikipedia are based on 19th century novels.

Even thinking about the future in the way we think about the future isn’t all that old. One of the earliest science fiction sound films was Just Imagine (1930). It was considered a musical-comedy about the future.

It’s fun to see how the past saw the future. I always thought it would be a gas if I could travel back in the past and show them films from the future, from our times. Would they marvel or be horrified?

JWH