Big/small budget spectacles .....

I find the earthquake sequence in 'San Francisco' (1936) pretty spectacular; foreshadows the golden age of the disaster movie, the 1970s. James Cameron took note when making his disaster superbuster 'Titanic' (1997).

This scene has always made by hair rise!

It took many years before I could figure out what movie it was, all I could remember was that a big ship was transported over land with giant rolling logs, (and No it wasn't Fitzcaraldo), it was an MGM movie called Alfred the Great 1969, it did look like a spectacle in just that scene at least that it wanted to be a spectacle. 1969 was the wrong time for those kind of movies.

Intolerance 1916 had huge spectacle moments in the babylonian scens.

...and then there was Samual Bronston, who built a giant studio outside Madrid to make big spectacle movies that could in a cheaper way than Cinecitá in Rome or in Hollywood make big cost looking movies to compete with television. Using big stars in the leads, and famialiar faces in smaller or character roles and well known directors to add some class (maybe, or they were out of work?).
John Paul Jones 1959
King of Kings 1961
El Cid 61
55 Days at Peking 1963
Circus World 1964
The Fall of the Roman Empire 1964 and that was also the fall of Samuel Bronston, though he made an Argentinian Western with Robert Taylor called Savage Pampas 1966
The bankrupt studios outside Madrid though was later made to recreate Moscow in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.

In Old Chicago / Henry King (1937). A colorful (in black and white) and mostly fictional account of the O’Leary family in whose barn, according to a legend made up by a newspaper man, a cow kicked over a lantern, starting the great fire that burned most of Chicago in 1871. Twentieth Century Fox and producer Darryl F. Zanuck poured a lot of dollars into this production and it shows up on the screen. See it as an early exciting disaster movie, not as a history lesson. Alice Brady (as Mrs. O’Leary) won Best Supporting Actress at only the second year that Supporting Oscars had been awarded.

How Green Was My Valley / John Ford (1941). Best Picture Oscar winner. John Ford directs this lengthy epic in a speedy fashion that never lags. It is typical of many BP winners across the decades that were epic, big budget, “prestige” pictures.

The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse / Rex Ingram (1921). After several walk-ons and bit parts in movies, Rudolph Valentino was cast here in his first lead role and immediately found himself an international star. The producers had expanded the role of Julio Desnoyers for him and it paid off. His first appearance in the movie dancing a tango in a seedy Buenos Aires club is still a stunner after going-on 100 years. The movie itself was made while the memory of WWI was still very fresh. There is a huge cast of extras and sweeping and realistic battle scenes. A true epic that still manages to keep its focus on one family group.

Orphans Of The Storm / D.W. Griffith (1921). “Orphans” – a story of the French Revolution starring Dorothy and Lillian Gish - features great spectacle, enormous sets, hundreds of extras in massive battle scenes (not a one of them computer generated), innocent women threatened, and, of course, Griffith’s revolutionary editing style that changed the course of movie history.