The war jitters triggered by the Munich Agreement in September 1938 that gave the Sudetenland to Germany were fanned into hysteria by the mass media following Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds Halloween radio hoax. Seizing an opportunity, Universal recalled their current Flash Gordon feature Rocket Ship and slapped a martial moniker on it, and within the week Mars Attacks the World was playing theaters in Boston, New York and Sioux City. That same week the November midterm elections put the brakes on Roosevelt's progressivism as Democrats lost 76 congressional seats. With Hitler's April renunciation of Germany's non-aggression pact with Poland, anxiety reigned into the spring of 1939 when Republic Pictures direly trumpeted S.O.S. Tidal Wave, seemingly torn from the headlines and rushed through production to meet early June bookings, a scant month after FDR opened the New York World's Fair via a live NBC telecast.
So what if there were only several hundred receivers in Manhattan? In S.O.S. Tidal Wave television is everywhere, as ubiquitous as the ever-gullible public. Stealing the mayoral election in a city along the Eastern seaboard is easy peasy for a corrupt political machine as voters stampede following a faked Election Day telecast of a biblical flood inundating New York City. Ralph Byrd's investigative TV reporter uncovers the fact that it's just an old movie the miscreants have rented from “Horror Films Incorporated.” New Deal politics frame the spectacle of Manhattan as a New Atlantis, a dazzling finish that welds the narrative to the Welles panic broadcast with found footage from the 1933 disaster movie Deluge. Even in 1939, the recycled devastation still looked clean and crisp as Republic had purchased the original negative and cut it up like a paper doll, consigning Deluge to the legion of lost films (for a half-century at least, until copies turned up in Europe).
In a post-9/11 world the quaint, pre-CGI tableaux of S.O.S. Tidal Wave remain alarming and prescient, the First Amendment correlative still a potent caution in the age of alternative facts. —Scott MacQueen
35mm, b/w, 62 min. Director: John H. Auer. Production: Republic Pictures. Distribution: Republic Pictures. Screenwriters: Maxwell Shane, Gordon Kahn. Cinematographer: Jack Marta. Art Direction: John Victor Mackay. Editor: Ernest J. Nims. Cast: Ralph Byrd, George Barbier, Kay Sutton, Frank Jenks, Marc Lawrence.
Restored from the 35mm nitrate original picture and track negatives and the 35mm 1952 acetate fine grain master. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Inc. Special thanks to Paramount Pictures.
