The first time New York City was ever destroyed in its entirety on screen was in a pre-code B-picture from 1933. Deluge, for a time, was considered a lost film, until an Italian-dubbed print was discovered in the 1980s, and a dupe negative with the original English-language audio was rediscovered in 2016 and subsequently restored. The sequence of destruction is legendary, with miniature figurines of the famous skyline succumbing to a tidal wave, crumbling onto thousands of innocent fleeing civilians superimposed onto the carnage with stunning optical printer effects. It’s a knowingly Biblical flood, with the film opening with a quote from Genesis: “And I shall establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of the flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.” The flood effects, as much an excuse as any for making the picture, only gets us through the first 20 minutes of the short film. The rest of its runtime is concerned with the new world the flood creates, the disparate islands that now make up the world, the people that inhabit them, and the kind of lives they carve out for themselves.
The water-covered world is initially strange. The continental U.S. has been turned into a vast chain of islands, and the first people we meet don’t know if they’re the only survivors. There’s a dog-eat-dog world first presented by Jepson (Fred Kohler) and Norwood (Ralf Harolde), a pair of brutes who find a woman washed along the shore, and in their jealousy to possess her, Jepson kills Norwood. The woman, Claire (played vigorously by the tragic starlet Peggy Shannon) escapes in the melee, and starts to swim. She eventually finds herself on the shores of another island, in the arms of another man—Martin (Sidney Blackmer), whom we first met pre-disaster as he tried to bring his wife and two children to safety. They’ve apparently disappeared, and Martin is alone, stockpiling supplies in an old mine. That is until Claire shows up, and the two begin a friendship of sorts, first of camaraderie for the independent Claire, but Martin’s attraction to her (he says) transcends just his loneliness, and she eventually builds real affection for him as well. Unbeknownst to them, there’s a frontier town of sorts being built not too far away, one that Martin’s wife and kids have taken shelter in. When Jepson eventually shows up to take Claire back, and he and the gang he starts to lead are defeated by Martin and Claire, the villagers take them in in triumph, and Martin’s returned to his family. Martin has to explain to Claire that while he loves her, he has to consider his wife and kids. Claire realizes there’ no place for her, and returns to the sea.
The novel of the same name that Deluge is based on was written by the conservative author S. Fowler Wright, who wrote it with the intention of rebuking the optimistic futurism of writers like H.G. Welles, instead postulating that returns to simpler forms of society is where human beings work together best. The novel concludes not with Claire leaving, but her new union to Martin affirmed above Helen’s old one. The adaptation, written by Warren B. Duff and John F. Goodrich, does something much more interesting. Instead of having the flood as a sort of cleansing leading to rejuvenation, the flood offers an opportunity to reinvent society, and yet it falls back on its old constructions and hierarchies. Instead of a primordial utopia, the new frontier society is an attempt at rebuilding the exact world which was destroyed. Like a town on the edge of the West, it may not be the East Coast civilization that it aspires to be yet, but it is planting all the same seeds and aspiring to the same world.
What makes the ending of the film version of Deluge so interesting is Martin’s own reversion, his total rejection of his new post-apocalyptic identity, one that could strive to be even more than what he was before the disaster, and instead reach for the comfort of the old world. In rejecting Claire it affirms an old patriarchy, one which was subverted by the dynamic of Martin’s relationship with her. Even at the end of the world, people lack not just the imagination to make a better society for each other, but the drive to do so. Claire alone aspire for more.
