with the film’s success than Deluge itself did, in this case. The cinema in question was the historic 4,000-seat Nippon Gekijo (iconically demolished in the 1954 Gojira), which was still riding a wave of public interest only three months on from its grand December 1933 opening.

² Wade Williams, who produced the first restoration and under whose name the VHS issue was released, continues to assert his control of all rights regarding the film Deluge via his website. To say whether such claims are legitimate or otherwise would go well beyond my realm of expertise, but neither the recent Kino Lorber video editions of the film nor the restoration upon which they are based make any mention of them.

³ Journalist and script doctor Ferdinand Reyher was working on ascreen treatment of M.P. Shiel’s bizarre last-man novel The Purple Cloud under various titles (Purple Cloud, The Last Man, and End of the World) throughout the decade, but no film resulted. His work was eventually credited as the source for writer and director Ranald MacDougall’s The World the Flesh and the Devil, from HarBel and MGM in 1959. Also unmade was Cecil B. DeMille’s production End of the World, which was to be a $400,000 adaptation of Wylie and Balmer’s novel When Worlds Collide. The film was announced in the trades in mid-1933, but just as quickly disappeared – Paramount cancelled the project before it had really begun, reportedly on account Deluge‘s thematic similarities, and DeMille switched focus instead to his historical epic Cleopatra.

A very brief note: I