Starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner.
Directed by Mark Robson.
Rocked by a monster quake, the Sign’s letters topple down Mt. Lee, one by one. The idea was to shock viewers with a realistic image of a familiar monument’s destruction, which, in a sense, was an important validation of the Sign’s pop culture significance. Since then, the Sign’s destruction has been used time and again by filmmakers to bring home the devastation of major natural (and, as we’ll see, supernatural) catastrophes