Andrew Marton

In Los Angeles, California, Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum) suffers from insomnia. His wife, Ellen (Stacey Pickren), asks if there is anything she can do, but Ed senses her distraction. On the way to work with his friend, Herb (Dan Akyroyd), Ed complains about his dead-end job as an aerospace engineer at Communtronics, and about his complacent wife. Herb suggests he take a midnight flight to Las Vegas, Nevada, and have some fun. Later, Ed dozes off at a meeting, and makes errors upon waking when asked for his input. He leaves work at lunchtime to take a nap, and when he arrives home, he finds Ellen in bed with another man. However, Ed leaves without making his presence known, and returns that evening pretending he does not know of his wife's affair. Later that night, Ed drives to the airport and parks his car. Elsewhere in the parking garage, a man named Hasi is stabbed to death by four men, while his companion, Diana (Michelle Pfeifer) runs away. As the men pursue, Diana asks Ed to drive her to safety. He agrees, and the gun-wielding men give chase. When Ed reports the men to the security guards, Diana changes her story and pretends everything is fine, then persuades Ed to drive her to a marina. Diana seeks shelter on the boat of her former lover, Jack Caper, but finds Jack's friend, Larry (Jack Steinfield), there, and he refuses to help. Ed reluctantly agrees to drive Diana to an address in Hollywood. The four pursuers arrive at the marina and hold Larry at gunpoint while they search the boat. Ed walks Diana into a Hollywood apartment, and is amused to find it decorated in Elvis Presley memorabilia. She explains that it is the home of her brother, Charlie. While Ed waits, Diana telephones her friend, Christie, and asks to stay with her. Charlie returns, dressed as an Elvis impersonator, and argues with Diana about the money she owes him. When she asks him to return the keys to her automobile, Charlie tells her he rented it to a friend. Ed leaves, and discovers his automobile has been towed. Diana begs him to stay and help her, but he refuses. However, when Ed sees her attackers arrive, he and Diana steal her brother's vintage automobile and flee. Ed asks again about the men, and Diana explains that she returned from Europe with an item the men are after. When she refuses to divulge more information, Ed threatens to leave, but is swayed by her pleas. Sometime later Ed and Diana arrive on the set of a television show where Christie, an actress, is filming a scene. Diana bids farewell to Ed, but he waits for her as she speaks to her friend. Christie agrees to hold onto the unnamed item for Diana, and zips it into the hidden pocket of her jacket. Later, Diana telephones her former lover, Jack, to ask for help, but his estranged wife, Joan, hangs up on her. Ed asks Diana to drive him to the impound lot to collect his automobile, but she pleads for his continued help, and reveals that her traveling companion, Hasi, was killed at the airport, and that she smuggled in six valuable emeralds from Europe, that once belonged to an ancient Persian king. Ed wants to go to the police, but Diana fears she will be arrested, as she accepted $25,000 to bring the stones into the country. She asks Ed to contact her friend, Hamid Moratti, on her behalf, while she waits by a telephone for Hamid's call. Ed enters a private casino and asks Hamid's assistant, Mr. Williams, to speak to Hamid. Learning that Diana is in trouble, Hamid agrees to help, and telephones her with instructions to meet him at his hotel. Meanwhile, Ed is spotted by the attackers, but they lose sight of him on the street. However, Ed is confronted by a British man named Colin Morris, who claims to work for a Monsieur Melville. He puts a gun in Ed's mouth, demanding the stones. Ed is saved when police patrolling the area drive past, and Morris leaves. At Hamid's hotel, Diana kisses Ed goodbye. However, after she leaves, Ed fears for her safety, and follows her up to Hamid's suite. Entering the room, Ed sees the stabbed bodies of Hamid, Mr. Williams, and two women, and Colin Morris emerges from the shadows holding a knife to Diana's throat. Mr. Williams rouses and attacks Morris, while Ed and Diana escape down the stairwell. The attackers arrive at the hotel, and chase Ed and Diana, who hail a taxicab. Their driver adeptly outruns the gunmen, before throwing Ed and Diana out of his taxi. Ed and Diana catch their breath at an all-night diner. Ed believes they should go to the police, but Diana insists they visit Jack for help. She tells Ed that she was Jack's lover for five years before he abruptly ended their affair. Ed tells Diana about his insomnia and his unfaithful wife. As daylight arrives, Christie and her director boyfriend, Bud Herman, return to their beach home, and are followed inside by the four gunmen. Elsewhere, Diana and Ed return to Charlie's apartment and find it ransacked. Monsieur Melville emerges from the bedroom and kidnaps them at gunpoint. Meanwhile, the gunmen search Christie's home for the emeralds, and when she escapes to the beach, the attackers pursue and drown her, unbeknownst to Bud. Diana leads Melville to Christie's home to retrieve the stones, but they arrive to find police officers surrounding her home. Diana enters the home alone, so as not to attract attention, and asks Bud for the coat, claiming that Christie borrowed it from her. Police officers question Diana about the break-in and her missing friend, then search the coat before allowing Diana to leave with it. She asks Sheriff Peterson to walk her to the car where Ed and Monsieur Melville await, then tricks Melville into getting out of the vehicle and drives away with Ed. They arrive at Jack's home, but wait until nightfall to sneak into the estate. Once inside, Diana finds her elderly lover lying on a hospital bed. When Jack tells her he is sick and being cared for by his estranged wife, Joan, Diana understands why he never received her messages. Jack assures Diana that he is still fond of her, and dismisses Joan when she enters the room. Diana reveals her plight, and Jack believes that Hasi's aunt, Shaheen Parvizi, is behind the attacks. He suggests they sell the prideful woman the emeralds, and that Diana flee the country. Diana says a tearful goodbye to Jack, then plots an escape with Ed, who agrees to meet with Shaheen and arrange to sell the emeralds. Ed takes three of the six stones to the woman while Diana hides the remaining gems at a flower market. Ed negotiates a deal, and meets Diana at the airport. Before boarding an airplane, Diana telephones Shaheen with the location of the remaining emeralds. After boarding and believing they are safe, they are forced to leave the plane due to mechanical difficulties. Shaheen's men await and take them hostage. As they walk through the airport, Melville arrives and his men attack. However, federal agents step in, and a shoot-out ensues. Diana is held at gunpoint by Shaheen's henchman, and Ed tries to talk the man into releasing her. The exhausted Ed wonders aloud about his unfaithful wife and his inability to sleep, and the gunman unexpectedly shoots himself. Ed and Diana are taken into custody by police and driven to a motel. Elsewhere officers arrest Shaheen at the flower market. Later, a federal agent delivers $750,000 to Diana from an unnamed source she believes to be Jack, and offers Diana and Ed twenty-four hours of protection. In the motel room, Ed finally falls asleep, and Diana kisses him on the forehead. When Ed awakens, he finds Diana gone, and all money in his pocket. Thinking that she ripped him off, Ed searches for Diana, and she returns, smiling at him, and asking for a ride to the airport.

Project Inner Space, alias Project Intraterrestrial Energy, is a bold attempt to drill directly into the earth's outer core and set up, in effect, a controlled volcano. The United Nations Economic, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has agreed to finance the project, the brainchild of Dr. Stephen Sorensen (Dana Andrews), after he has promised unlimited geothermal energy for an energy-hungry world. Dr. Sorensen's wife, Maggie (Janette Scott), guides a convoy of senior UNESCO officials, led by Sir Charles Eggerston (Alexander Knox), to the Project site. Sir Charles orders the convoy to stop as it passes the Project's bore hole complex. He has spotted the real reason for his trip: a ballistic missile, minus its warhead, hanging nozzle-up from a crane, directly over the bore hole. Frostily he demands that Maggie explain the missile; she confidently reminds him that it is not armed, and that he and his fellow Science Councillors are there to decide whether to allow the arming or not. Maggie leads Sir Charles and the others to the main building, built over a two-mile-deep shaft. There they ride an elevator (called a "lift" here) two miles down to the Central Operations complex: essentially a bunker where the real work of Project Inner Space takes place. There, Sorensen waits for the Council--but also is taking an X-ray treatment to a malignant growth (probably malignant melanoma, though this is never made clear) in his hand. His doctor, Bill Evans (Alfred Brown), knows that the treatments will not work, but, out of respect for the doctor-patient confidence that is basic to the Oath of Hippocrates, agrees to keep Sorensen's illness, and its severity, secret from everyone. That includes his wife, who is young enough to have been his daughter. (In fact, Maggie was once a student of his; that's how they met.) Sorensen cordially greets the Council and readily acknowledges a problem that Sir Charles challenged Maggie with on their way down: namely that Sorensen's drilling team has hit a solid wall that is all that separates them from the magma, and that in 17 weeks he hasn't advanced an inch. So now Sorensen wants to blast his way in with a thermonuclear missile (a gift from the United States). Sir Charles asks why the project's chief geologist, Ted Rampian (Kieron Moore), is not present. Rampian is a dissenting voice: he has warned that using a thermonuclear warhead as a demolition charge will deliver such a shock to the earth that the crust will crack. Sorensen gives a dismissive demonstration of Rampian's theory, and then delivers the majority opinion: that the detonation will release great heat and merely melt through to the magma. Sir Charles and the rest of the UNESCO Council are satisfied. But Ted Rampian returns, and is outraged to see the missile not only hanging in place, but now equipped with its warhead! Finding out that the UNESCO Council has already been and gone, without hearing from him, doesn't improve his mood. He angrily resigns from the Project and prepares to take all his notes and charts with him to London to lay his case before Sir Charles directly. Maggie begs him not to go, but she cannot stop him. (As a complication, Ted and Maggie were "an item" before she enrolled in Sorensen's class. Ted is still jealous, and they both know it. Perhaps even Steve knows it.) Rampian does get in to see Sir Charles and set forth his case in detail: years of nuclear testing (before the test ban treaty) have created "fissures" in the crust, several of them leading to a major tectonic fault. A thermonuclear detonation at that depth will crack them open, and if the crack extended along the fault, who knows where it might lead? Sir Charles frantically puts a call through to the Project. But they are too late. Sorensen orders the missile shot to proceed, desperate to achieve success before his funding gets cut and he dies before he can see his work done. The missile takes a dive, the warhead detonates, and magma shoots up to the surface, exactly as Sorensen said it would. Sorensen, generous in victory, asks Sir Charles to tell Rampian to get himself back to the Project and get back to work! Rampian returns to a Project in a triumphant mood. But then the earthquake reports start to trickle in. Rampian realizes that they are right along the fault, as he feared. Hastily he organizes a dive in the Indian Ocean, and there photographs what he was afraid to find: a chasm with magma boiling out of it, extending at three knots along the floor of the Indian Ocean. He brings his photographs back to Sorensen, who acknowledges the horrible truth: he has cracked the earth's crust, and might have started something that could destroy the world. The UNESCO Councillors are outraged, of course, but Sir Charles tells his colleagues, quite reasonably, to let Drs. Sorensen and Rampian work out a way to solve the problem. Rampian returns to the Project and assumes command. He and Sorensen then pore over spectrographic data and films of old nuclear detonations, and finally realize what has happened: the missile touched off a fusion explosion in a layer of hydrogen in a pocket beneath the magma, so that the force of the explosion was greater than Sorensen expected. But this finding also suggests a solution: another detonation in the path of the crack could break a gaping hole in the crust; the crack would run into it and stop. Rampian sets out with a heat-shielded fission bomb and asks a fellow scientist, Steele (Mike Steen), to descend into a dormant volcano crater with him to drop the bomb into the lava. Steele dies when the bomb, catching Steele's line between itself and the surrounding rock, parts the cable and sends Steele falling into the lava pit. Rampian, nearly overcome with grief, barely manages to release the bomb into the lava before he collapses at his line, overcome by the heat. The crew hastily haul him up and take him off the island, to a nearby island where they give the signal to set the bomb off. The bomb blows the volcano cone away, and at the Project site, the seismologists confidently believe that the crack has in fact stopped. Then Dr. Evans sends a message to Maggie informing her of the truth about her husband: that his disease is malignant, terminal, and will kill him within a week. She takes a tearful leave of Ted and prepares to rush back to Sorensen's side. But then another earthquake in the Indian Ocean signals that the crack has not stopped, but has changed direction. Rampian asks Sorensen to be more specific, and when he hears where the new quake's epicenter was, he realizes that the crack has doubled back toward the Project's original bore hole--a course that might not have the dire consequences of cleaving the crust into two equal hemispheres. But the crack is now moving at twice its original speed. Rampian rushes back to South Africa to observe the crack's progress personally. He and Maggie soon realize that two cracks have opened in the crust, both converging on the bore hole. Rampian orders an evacuation of a nearby village--but can then only watch helplessly as an evacuation train heads directly for the crack, and is wrecked when the crack knocks over a trestle while the train is trying to cross it. Frustrated, Rampian orders another evacuation, and then he and Maggie return to the Project. There they find that Sorensen has ordered a full evacuation--but Sorensen has stayed below in the bunker and won't come up! Maggie and Rampian take the elevator down, to find Sorensen sitting alone at the consoles. He says that he will personally record what he believes will be the birth of a new moon. Of course, he really is suicidal, a fact he makes clear when he sends Rampian and Maggie out of the control room on separate errands--and then abruptly shuts the heavy door, locking himself in, and then shorts out the motors that move the door. Heartsick, Rampian and Maggie race for the elevator to take it topside--but then a boulder smashes into the elevator cab, stopping it about halfway up. Desperately the two climb through the trap door and up the elevator shaft, and then climb uphill away from the bore hole as fast as they can. Finally the two cracks meet at the bore hole, and a gigantic disk of crust lifts up into space, to join the Moon in orbit. After which the earthquake activity stops, and small animals come out of hiding as Rampian and Maggie comfort one another, happy to be alive in a world that can still sustain them.

The film opens with adventurer Rian Mitchell (Stewart Granger) inside a dark mine shaft, deep in the side of a Colombian mountain. He chips away at a vein of greenish ore, pockets a sparkling specimen, and starts back toward the entrance. On his way out, he stumbles upon a bronze conquistador's helmet. Chiseled above the mine entrance is the inscription "1687." Once outside, Mitchell carefully conceals the entrance with brush and starts down the mountainside. He suddenly notices a group of birds taking flight and warily pulls out his gun. He gets the drop on a lurking Colombian bandit, but the bandit's two companions fire on Mitchell and wound him. Knocked unconscious, Mitchell is stripped of his personal belongings and rolled down the mountainside to die. Once he comes to, a bleeding Mitchell stumbles through the dense jungle, only to be trailed by a hungry jaguar. He stops at a river to quench his burning thirst, and just then the jaguar pounces down on him from a huge boulder. A gunshot suddenly rings out, killing the beast. Mitchell looks up to discover a robed priest, rifle in hand. The priest helps Mitchell onto a horse and takes him to the sprawling coffee plantation of beautiful Catherine Knowland (Grace Kelly). The unconscious Mitchell is patched up by Catherine, awakening a full day later to discover his good fortune. He is nonetheless in a hurry to leave, insisting that she take him to board a river boat so that he can resume his journey. Catherine warns him that he needs to recuperate more fully, but she reluctantly agrees to drive him to the boat in her Jeep. A subsequent conversation between Catherine and her brother, Donald, reveals that the coffee plantation is struggling to survive and produce a successful harvest. As Mitchell dresses to leave, the priest confides that he came across the valuable ore sample in Mitchell's trousers. Mitchell tries to pass the specimen off as a worthless rock, but the priest knows better. He explains that he too once discovered the fabled emerald mine of the conquistadores, but he kept the location a secret, fearing the greed and violence that its discovery would produce. Mitchell frankly assures him that he is coming back for the emeralds. At the river landing, Mitchell bids a fond farewell to Catherine and says he will be back to "return her brother's borrowed clothes." She has to loan him the money for the boat fare. Back in the city, Mitchell returns to his mining consulting office and the waiting arms of his pretty Colombian secretary. She explains that his partner Vic Leonard (Paul Douglas) has given up and is catching a boat back to Canada. Mitchell catches up with him at the waterfront and tells him he has discovered the emerald mine. Leonard is undeterred, completely disgusted after twelve years of futility. When the boat is delayed, Leonard hunts down Mitchell at a cantina and joins him for drinks. Mitchell later helps his drunken partner to a hotel, relieves him of his boat ticket, and uses the refunded money to gamble. He wins big and talks an angry Vic Leonard into staying. They are soon headed upstream on the tiny riverboat. After an adventurous river trip, they arrive at the landing near Catherine's plantation. Mitchell tries to hire a large crew of laborers for the mining expedition, but when the local foreman discovers where Mitchell is headed he refuses to help recruit anyone. Catherine eventually shows up at the dock and coyly spars with the cocky, self-assured Mitchell. Mitchell soon recruits a group of men on his own and they journey to the mine. The mining crew is soon under threat from the local bandit chief, El Moro. Mitchell and Leonard are invited to dinner at Catherine's hacienda. As the romance between Mitchell and Catherine gradually blossoms, success at the mine remains elusive. Mitchell divulges to Catherine that his father was an impoverished coal miner, dying a broken man. Mitchell had vowed to become a miner himself, but a rich one. As work inside the mine progresses, a fight between two laborers loosens some support timbers and causes a cave-in. Mitchell is injured and pinned under falling rocks, but Vic charges in to save him. Nevertheless, the mine shaft is choked with debris. Mitchell and Leonard concede that they would need a great deal of money to resume their excavations, and no mining syndicate would touch the risky venture. Out of desperation, Mitchell slyly cons Catherine's restless brother into providing an infusion of cash and plenty of laborers from the coffee plantation. The plantation is left without workers or money. Catherine is furious with her brother and with Mitchell. To make matters worse, Vic is also disgusted with him. Vic angrily splits with Mitchell and returns to the plantation, where he offers to help Catherine for free. He also awkwardly admits that he is in love with her. She takes him on as an unpaid partner. Just as a hopeful new spirit is born on the coffee plantation, a tragedy occurs at the mine. A falling boulder crushes Donald Knowland just after he uncovers a brilliant emerald outcropping. His funeral is held at the Knowland plantation, where Rian Mitchell is treated like an outcast. More emeralds are soon unearthed, and activity at the mine turns feverish. A new sluice box funnels the mine tailings directly into the river, altering its course and sending torrents of water downstream toward the Knowland plantation, threatening to flood it. Worse, the rainy season is fast approaching. Vic Leonard angrily tells Catherine that her plantation can only be saved by blowing up the mine, choking the current river channel and re-directing the water flow. She reluctantly agrees. Leonard plants dynamite above the sluice channel, then awakens a groggy Mitchell and advises him to get off the mountain before it blows up. Mitchell's workers flee the impending explosion as Mitchell and Leonard furiously duke it out. Catherine breaks up the fight and calls off the detonation. A dejected Leonard prepares to leave with her, but Mitchell stops him. He concedes that the mine must be destroyed. Just as they are preparing to blow the mine, El Moro and his men attack. The bandits are after the emeralds. A heated gun battle ensues, and Mitchell realizes that his small band is hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. His only option is to reach the dynamite charges and blow the face (and the bandits) off of the mountain. Catherine and Vic provide covering fire as Mitchell works his way up the steep slope to the dynamite charges. He sets the timer and starts his escape, but he is cut off by El Moro. His fight with the bandit dangerously delays him as the timer counts down. Catherine and Vic begin their descent without Mitchell. Suddenly, a massive explosion erupts and the mountain cascades down around Mitchell. Catherine and Vic exchange a sorrowful gaze and continue down the trail. From a clifftop, they can see that the avalanche has accomplished its purpose. The river has been diverted. Suddenly, Mitchell appears behind them, beaming. Catherine rushes to embrace him as Vic good-naturedly cheers their reunion. Reaching into his pocket, Mitchell happily presents Catherine with a beautiful emerald cluster. "My dowry," he exclaims as he kisses the radiant Catherine.