HEAVY WEATHER

Some first-generation disaster films were real-life disasters for their actors. D. W. Griffith's 1920 melodrama "Way Down East," featuring the climactic rescue of a woman being carried off on an ice floe in raging currents, was filmed in a real river after a real blizzard.

- RICHARD BRODY

The movie's star, Lillian Gish, suffered frostbite that afflicted her for the rest of her life, but she did not quit taking physically risky roles. For Victor Sjöström's 1928 drama "The Wind," Gish was placed in the Mojave Desert: "Sand was blown at me by eight airplane propellers," she later wrote in her autobiography, and she was "in danger of having my eyes put out." The Biblical flood in Michael Curtiz's 1928 film "Noah's Ark" was so intense involving at least six hundred thousand gallons of water-that the movie's star Dolores Costello was knocked unconscious and reportedly caught pneumonia; extras in the scene were rumored to have been killed.

The development of special effects and specialized stunt performance, which made swift advances in the nineteenthirties, was a mark of progress. Neither life nor limb should be risked for the making of a movie. But the result is that we no longer experience onscreen disaster as viscerally as we did the freezing waters of "Way Down East." Modern audiences are in the know about the trickery that simulates great dangers. Films must find creative ways to arouse thrills.

"Twisters," like its 1996 predecessor,