Rent Floods of Fear (1958)

Tides and Affairs - Floods of Fear review by CH

Scarcely has the bare-chested strongman struck the Rank gong than it looks as though he has strayed into a leading part in Floods of Fear (1958) itself.

This much-muscled figure, however, is one which has been worked up by Howard Keel, a decade after he had played another gritty rôle in an English film, The Small Voice. This time, the scene is America, where the levee has broken. Water pours on all sides for much of these eighty minutes and brings with it fellow-convict, a creepy, wire-spectacled, knife-crazy Cyril Cusack, and their guard played by, wait for it, Harry H. Corbett.

Keel has made a bolt from sandbagging work along this ad hoc river which is taking houses and people with it. Along the way, he saves Anne Heywood, and, with the others, fetches up at her smart, rapidly disintegrating home where he commandeers fine doors to create a raft.

This becomes another hostage drama, the twist soon being that Keel has been six years inside instead of the waterside business partner who was in fact the one who murdered his wife after finding that she was having an affair with Keel.

Described in these terms, here is the structure of many a noir drama - including Keel doing the decent thing by saving Anne Heywood from the rapacious Cusack, who has the demeanour of a souped-up Steptoe. Well played as all this is, it owes as much to the direction by a man usually associated with comedy, Charles Crichton. He keeps up a brisk pace and continual use of fresh angles to heighten the ever-surprising events - something which is equalled by cinematographer Christopher Challis, whose task was aided and challenged by having to cope with an extraordinary amount of water, its roar matched by Alan Rawsthorne’s score.

Come the end, and that rare thing, a well-staged fight, it is startling to find that all this was filmed not in the Delta but Pinewood. Challis’s work means that one’s eyes take in stock footage, models and tanks as one.

It is brilliantly done - and one might wonder who decreed that, amidst such a storm, Keel should go bare chested at almost every turn, including his carrying Anne Heywood to safety. Naturally enough, this was an image used on the posters for a film which should now be more widely known.