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Two movies, Earthquake and Dr. Zhivago - the latter made in 1965 and the former in 1974 - don't glamorize extramarital affairs that is such a part of Hollywood these days. In fact, both these movies kill their protagonists at the end. No divorce, no remarriage, no alimony for the wife, no "First Wives' Club". Just death.
Earthquake, despite its action and gore-filled promise, is actually a story of the criss-crossing of people's lives which collide during that fateful day of the earthquake. Charlton Heston plays an executive who cheats on his wife. After the earthquake, he has to make a crucial decision to save her from a rush of water, and descends, along with her, to his fateful demise. All the while, the woman who would be his mistress is watching, hoping, that he abandon the obviously deathly mission. Her expression, at the end, is her realization that she had indeed expected too much.
Dr. Zhivago is about the bliss of a man's double life with a loving wife and another woman he is in love with. There was a telling moment at the very beginning, when Anna is conniving her hardest to get Yuri to marry her daughter Tonya. Anna's husband cautions her saying: "Marriages are made in heaven". Perhaps this was the little warning (or condoning) sign for the full-blown romance that develops between Yuri and Lara later on. Interference often leads to disaster.
After a separation brought about due to Lara's imminent danger from the Bolsheviks, Yuri and Lara never meet again. Except that Yuri sees her from a streetcar in a Moscow street, and rushes out to her. He dies from a heart attack only several feet from her, as she walks away unawares.
Of course everyone focuses on the romance of Dr. Zhivago. But when I first watched it, I was struck by the anti-romance of it all. How can the writer have his protagonist die feets away from his beloved?
The book, by Boris Pasternak, has a different ending. Yuri finds another woman (never marries) has two more children, and eventually dies of ill-health. Lara returns from her exile on the day of Yuri's funeral. Here, I suppose, is Pasternak's final poetic license.
I wonder if it the presence of the straight and solid Charlton Heston (the conservative in Hollywood) that drove that story to its (moral) ending? And if the ominous Russian Orthodox Church had any part in Pasternak's moral tale? Often, movies after the early '60s go out of their way to be permissive and open and to let their characters have all their freedom.
These two put a jolt to that.