THE FLOOD

US, 1976, 100 minutes, Colour.
Robert Culp, Martin Milner, Richard Basehart, Barbara Hershey, Carol Lynley, Teresa Wright, Leif Garrett
Directed by Earl Bellamy.

Conventional disaster telemovie produced by Irwin Allen who made such films as The Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno. Director is Earl Bellamy, director of many average telemovies. Allen is successful as a producer but has not been so successful an a director of spectacular disaster material, for example in 1978 'The Swarm'. Average entertainment.

1. The appeal of the disaster trend? The interest in disasters, human reactions, death and destruction?

2. The quality of this film as a disaster film? Average material? For a television audience?

3. How important were the conventions? The people, characters, contrived situations? Response to difficulties?

4. The portrait of an average American town - appearance, streets and houses, countryside, the dam? Cutler and the Council and the nature of decisions taken, lies, the consequences?

5. The focus on the Cutler family - the father and his responsibility, his blame for the disaster and the destruction? The mother and her niceness, concern for the whole family, helping, her looking for her son and her death? Mary as the heroine of the film, her place in the hospital, love for Paul, defending her father? Andy and his place in the melodramatics and the final rescue?

6. Brannigan as the tough hero, cynical, relationship with Daisy, memories of his dead brother, the use of the helicopter, the rescue of Andy, the explosions?

7. Paul as hero? Defying Cutler, his relationship with people in the town, his rescuing people? Mary and the heroics of rescuing Abigail? Of rescuing Andy and the explosion?

8. The sub-plot of Abigail and her pregnancy, Sam and his work at the dam and his death? Audience identification with these minor characters and their situations. tensions, death and the need for rescue? The minor characters in the town - workers, elderly people? Those saved?

9. How well did the film build up its atmosphere of rain, the hunting season and the arrival of the hunter, the dam and the holes in the dam, reconstruction, the floods, the sweep of the water and the burst of the dam?

10. The special effects, audience response to such special effects and disaster? The themes of people rising to situations, help? The overall impact of this kind of popular entertainment - that it could happen and the way human beings react in crisis?