Dana Andrews plays Dr. Stephen Sorenson, a terminally ill scientist who decides to follow through on his dream project: using a missile to break through to the planet Earths' magma layer. His associate, Dr. Ted Rampion (Kieron Moore), has been preaching that this will be dangerous, and Ted is naturally proved to be correct. However, he has no time to say "I told you so", because he, Stephen, and others must race to save the world from the resulting title disaster.Copious stock footage mixes with pretty impressive special effects, designed by Eugene Lourie, himself the director of the classic dinosaur flick "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms". Some viewers may be able to poke a lot of holes in the "science fact" aspect to the screenplay, but this shouldn't get in the way of enjoying what is a reasonably entertaining forerunner to the "disaster film cycle" of the 1970s. It's rather slow to get started, and does devote a fair amount of the running time to the love triangle. Ultimately, it delivers the goods if you stick with it. One thing about it that people should appreciate is the fact that it doesn't necessarily guarantee the viewer a happy ending. It keeps you hanging until its final frame. Among its other assets are the art direction (by Lourie), cinematography (by Manuel Berenguer), and music (by Johnny Douglas).Andrews gives a typically solid performance in the lead, but most everybody here is fine. That includes the gorgeous Janette Scott as the female scientist caught between Ted and Stephen. Alexander Knox rounds out the quartet of top billed performers in the role of the pragmatic Sir Charles Eggerston.This does offer a fair amount of fun if you're looking to discover sci-fi and disaster pictures from decades past.Seven out of 10.

There were plenty of alien disaster movies in cinema before this - "War of the Worlds," "Invaders from Mars" and "Day of the Triffids," and there were plenty of monster disaster movies, such "Gozilla" and "the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," but hardly ever any disaster movies without aliens and monsters. The only ones that I can think of are "Things to Come," "Time Machine" and "On the Beach," and "Journey to the Center of the Earth"The movie does add a nice love triangle subplot to the world disaster major plot with top scientists Dana Andrews and Kieron Moore both being in love with Janette Scott.A lot of the special effects are just old documentary footage of lava flowing and atomic bombs, but after a while you become absorbed in the situation and the badly mismatched reaction shots just relieve some tension and make the movie more fun. Scott and Kieron also played in "Day of the Triffids" (1959) together.The message of the movie is that when scientists warn of disaster, we should pay attention. It is still a good message. Although I'm sure that the artificial intelligence machines that will be reading this in 2037, after the human race has been wiped out, will get a big laugh from it.

Very early disaster movie about a crack in the earth.What needs to remembered here is that this came BEFORE the disaster movies of the 1970s (Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, The Swarm, etc) and you have to wonder just how much of this film was copied by Irwin Allen and others. The music of the film has what now seems like rather routine "disaster music", but back then, the opening score would have been like nothing nobody had heard before. Think about it.Crack In The World is a wonderfully scripted, acted, filmed, scored, epic that deserves more attention than it gets. Maybe the average science in the plot is the reason it does not get talked about a lot these days?

While this is not the sort of movie I usually like to watch, I sought it out for one reason--Dana Andrews. While he's not especially famous today, Andrews was a wonderfully realistic and solid actor who never seemed to get his due--even though he made a ton of films--many of which were terrific (such as "Laura", "The Ox-Bow Incident" and "The Best Years of Our Lives"). Part of this might be because of his rather ordinary looks and perhaps part of this might be his own fault, as later in his career he wasn't exactly choosy about the roles he took--with appearances in schlock films like "The Frozen Dead". Whatever the reasons, even his disappointments feature him doing his best and putting in one great acting performance after another. I just marvel at his professionalism and seemingly effortless acting and would watch him in anything.Andrews plays a very flawed scientist. Because he is dying and wants to make a name for himself, he has decided to try a risky experiment--one that his co-worker thinks might cause a chain-reaction that could rip the planet apart. At first, the experiment seems to have worked, but by shooting a nuclear bomb into the Earth and releasing magma, the integrity of the planet has been compromised. Earthquakes and tsunamis begin and it appears as if eventually the Earth will crumble apart. In a last-ditch effort to avert this disaster, a wacky plan involving blowing up a volcano to relieve pressure is planned. Will this work or is mankind royally screwed?! This movie is reasonably well done technically, though a few scenes are a tad clumsy when it came to special effects. As for the plot and acting, they are all fair--worth seeing, perhaps, but it's far from a must-see and really only a pretty good time-passer.