The Johnstown Flood (1926)

Drama /
6.5/10

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The Johnstown Flood Movie Reviews

Force Majeure Ends All Plots

It’s Johnstown, a lumbering town where the mighty dam holds back the water and makes it available for transporting the felled trees for Paul Nicholson’s mighty enterprise. But engineer George O’Brien warns him that the dam is going to fall with the next heavy rainfall. Nicholson scoffs, so O’Brien quits and with a group of like-minded citizens, takes over the dam.

That might be enough in a B movie, but director Irving Cummings and writers Edfrod Bingham and Robert Lord put a bunch of subplots in. O’Brien is mighty fond of Janet Gaynor — in her first major role — and she is desperately in love with him. Meanwhile, Nicholson’s niece, Florence Gilbert, and O’Brien are falling in love. Add in Paul Panzer as Miss Gaynor’s father, Max Davidson as a shopkeeper, and Gary Cooper, Kay Deslys, Clark Gable, Florence Lawrence, and Carole Lombard as uncredited extras, as well as great set design and an amazingly photographed flood to stop every plotline, and you’ve got among the goldurnestest spectacles of the silent era. Once again, Irving Cummings demonstrates that he can handle any sort of picture with the best of them.

The Real Johnstown Flood Was Far More Impressive!

This remarkable silent film currently exists in a truncated print of poor quality available for download and viewing on YouTube. It is hardly known today, and probably its principal fame rests with the fact that it stars George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor–who went on to considerable movie celebrity from the latter 1920s through the mid-1930s. O’Brien and Gaynor appeared together one more time in the F. W. Murnau classic Sunrise in 1927. The Johnstown Flood movie also contains very brief extra appearances by future stars Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard. Its secondary importance rests on the film’s impressive special effects work–outstanding for the time–in depicting the famous 1889 dam collapse that occurred near Pittsburgh, PA. The flood scenes compare quite favorably with those in the famous early disaster film Deluge (1933)–made some seven years later.

The actual Johnstown Flood was a monumental catastrophe—horribly and unnecessarily killing over 2200 people. The real story of this incident—with all its twists and irony definitely deserves a proper screen treatment today. Many liberties were taken with the pertinent facts in making the 1926 film version. A historically accurate retelling of the actual Johnstown Flood would be far more interesting and compelling to contemporary audiences than the rather dated melodrama that appears here.

Nevertheless, this film is important for what it does show–two (then) young up and coming stars making strong appearances in a significant early Hollywood effort–and exciting special effects that foreshadowed the even greater accomplishments in this area that were soon to amaze us in just a few years.

Wonderful Restoration of a Gripping Film

I saw this film Monday night at New York’s Film Forum in a new restoration by the George Eastman Museum. I won’t try to summarize the plot, which others here have done, but I will say that the new restoration is magnificent. The film looks as though it was made a few weeks ago (with a single scene left unrestored so we can see the horrible nitrate damage it had originally).

The new restoration also completes the last scene which apparently was unavailable before. This is often billed as a film starring George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor, but that’s really not the case. The lovers, happily married by the end of the film, are O’Brien and Florence Gilbert. Gaynor is a teenage girl in Johnstown who’s in love with O’Brien, and works to help him save Johnstown from the dam. He cares about her, but he never loves anyone romantically but Gilbert.

So Janet Gaynor, in her first major role, does NOT get the guy. Also, she dies in the flood, after a heroic Paul-Revere-type ride warning everyone in town when the dam bursts (including the people at O’Brien’s and Gilbert’s wedding). Her career took off from there and she went on to star with O’Brien in Sunrise, but in the Johnstown Flood she was just a supporting actor (though an extraordinary one).

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