Of the many producer and/or director figures in Hollywood, not many are known for being a "master" at something. Indeed, aside from Alfred Hitchcock, the unquestioned Master Of Suspense, Irwin Allen, for better or worse, will always be known as the Master Of Disaster. Although he had begun in the 1950's and continued on into the 1960's with extremely low-budget documentaries and the cult classic TV series "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea", Allen remains known for being the one to put more all-star casts in extremis than maybe anyone else before today's mega-spectacle king Roland Emmerich. His 1972 production THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and the subsequent 1974 opus THE TOWERING INFERNO were the high watermarks of the much-derided disaster film genre of the 1970's, stressing big special effects and well-paid actors and actresses having to survive all manner of catastrophe. During 1976 and 1977, however, Allen went back to his TV roots to do a pair of (relatively) smaller scale disaster films, both of which aired on NBC. FLOOD was the first of these, airing on November 24, 1976.
In this film, the small Oregon mountain town of Brownsville is under imminent threat from its principal income source, a large but aging earthen dam where run-off from mountain rain has been flowing into the man-made lake behind the dam for thirty straight days. The strain on the dam is slowly but surely becoming progressively worse; and two of the townspeople (Martin Milner; Robert Culp) suggest that some of the water behind the dam be released into the emergency spillways to relieve the pressure on the structure. But they are running into stubborn and shady resistance from the mayor (Richard Basehart) who argues that the town's economy, based on the lake providing fishing and recreation, supercedes everything else. Even the dam's caretaker (Cameron Mitchell) is under pressure from Basehart to not open the spillways. Then things really start happening.
Much like Allen's other disaster films, not only does FLOOD involve a lot of stars trapped in a calamity that, in this case, is both a terrible creation of nature and human malfeasance, but it also involves a kind of "Enemy Of The People" situation in which greed and avarice eviscerate public safety. This is also a plot outline that was used by director Steven Spielberg in his 1975 masterpiece JAWS. This is by no means to say that FLOOD is on that level, or with the big-screen predecessors in Allen's portfolio; but even for a made-for-TV movie, the effects are good and the plot is credible, though some of the performances are a bit overripe for the cast that it has, including veterans Whit Bissell, Barbara Hershey, Roddy McDowall, and Carol Lynley, to name a few.
Veteran TV director Earl Bellamy, although basically a hired hand, does a fairly good job of keeping things on an even keel. This is no masterpiece; but for what it is, and especially given how similar situations have played themselves out in reality, notably the Oroville Dam crisis in Northern California in February 2017, it still is good.
In this film, the small Oregon mountain town of Brownsville is under imminent threat from its principal income source, a large but aging earthen dam where run-off from mountain rain has been flowing into the man-made lake behind the dam for thirty straight days. The strain on the dam is slowly but surely becoming progressively worse; and two of the townspeople (Martin Milner; Robert Culp) suggest that some of the water behind the dam be released into the emergency spillways to relieve the pressure on the structure. But they are running into stubborn and shady resistance from the mayor (Richard Basehart) who argues that the town's economy, based on the lake providing fishing and recreation, supercedes everything else. Even the dam's caretaker (Cameron Mitchell) is under pressure from Basehart to not open the spillways. Then things really start happening.
Much like Allen's other disaster films, not only does FLOOD involve a lot of stars trapped in a calamity that, in this case, is both a terrible creation of nature and human malfeasance, but it also involves a kind of "Enemy Of The People" situation in which greed and avarice eviscerate public safety. This is also a plot outline that was used by director Steven Spielberg in his 1975 masterpiece JAWS. This is by no means to say that FLOOD is on that level, or with the big-screen predecessors in Allen's portfolio; but even for a made-for-TV movie, the effects are good and the plot is credible, though some of the performances are a bit overripe for the cast that it has, including veterans Whit Bissell, Barbara Hershey, Roddy McDowall, and Carol Lynley, to name a few.
Veteran TV director Earl Bellamy, although basically a hired hand, does a fairly good job of keeping things on an even keel. This is no masterpiece; but for what it is, and especially given how similar situations have played themselves out in reality, notably the Oroville Dam crisis in Northern California in February 2017, it still is good.