The 1970s may have been the era of the disaster film with such box office hits as Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974) but the genre has been popular since the silent era when Noah’s Ark (1928) first awed moviegoers with its spectacular flood sequence. Certainly the most famous disaster film of the early sound era is San Francisco (1936) with its spectacular earthquake scenes but even more ambitious and almost overlooked today is The Hurricane (1937), directed by John Ford. While not on a level with the director’s later masterworks such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941) or They Were Expendable (1945), this tale of colonial repression and injustice is set against the exotic background of the South Seas.