The Towering Inferno (1974) - film review

The Glass Tower, San Francisco, is the crowning achievement in the career of architect Doug Roberts.  At 138 storeys, it is the tallest building in the world, and to celebrate this fact an inaugural party is to be held at the top of the titanic superstructure.  But when Roberts returns to the tower on the day of its opening, he is advised of a failure in the electrical systems.  It soon becomes apparent that many of the safety features that Roberts had specified in his design have been bypassed, for cost reasons, by the man who built the building, Roger Simmons, the son-in-law of Jim Duncan, the tower’s owner.  Roberts’ fears are borne out when a circuit breaker blows on the 81st floor and causes a fire in a storage room.   As the inaugural party gets underway, Roberts detects the fire but fails to persuade Duncan to cancel the party.   As the fire slowly spreads, the happy partygoers on the top floor are totally oblivious to the danger they are in.  Until it is too late.  Fire Chief Michael O’Hallorhan has the next to impossible job of trying to save them, at the risk of the lives of himself and the fire fighters under his command...

The Towering Inferno was the last of the great Hollywood disaster movies, a genre that enjoyed immense success in the early to mid-seventies but which rapidly became passé and prone to pitiful self-parody in the later years of the decade.  It was also the last great flourish from producer Irwin Allen, the creative genius who brought us a string of memorable sci-fi fantasy television series in the sixties (including Lost in Space and Land of the Giants), in addition to several blockbuster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), arguably the greatest of the big budget disaster films.  Allen was pretty well burnt out after The Towering Inferno (which he co-directed with British director John Guillermin).  Despite working on another twenty or so productions for film and TV, he would never again live up to his past achievements.  

The Towering Inferno is an epic of its kind, 165 minutes of high tension thriller-drama featuring some of cinema’s most stunning visual effects and set-piece action sequences.  Made on a budget of 14 million dollars, which was impressive even by the standards of Hollywood, it employed four camera crews working on 57 sets.  Indeed so ambitious was the film that it exceeded the resources of one major Hollywood studio.  Whilst the film was shot at Twentieth Century Fox, half of the budget was provided by Warner Brothers.  As was common in films of this genre and grandeur, the principal cast was comprised almost entirely of big name actors, something that now undermines the film’s artistic credibility but which added to its popular appeal at the time.  The leads Steve McQueen and Paul Newman insisted on have an exactly equal number of lines and equal top billing in all the merchandising (which explains the innovative diagonal placing of their names in the credits, with the former’s name occurring to the left but below the latter’s).

The 1970s disaster movies were very much a product of their era.  Audiences were both thrilled and fascinated by the harrowing spectacle of mayhem and destruction.  This was in the days before Star Wars, when cinema offered few event spectacles of the kind that are now so tediously commonplace.  Perhaps part of the appeal for these films was that they tapped into prevailing fears of the limits of man’s technical achievements in an inherently violent and unpredictable natural world.  Today, these films have acquired a new resonance, as extreme natural disasters have become a recurring phenomenon and terrorist action (notably the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001) have exposed the fragility of our modern way of life.  The Towering Inferno may be a shamelessly bloated, self-indulgent behemoth of a film, marred by corny dialogue and wafer-thin characterisation, but it still manages to grip an audience in a way that few of today’s epic Hollywood productions do.  With the image of the collapse of the New York Twin Towers firmly embedded in our collective consciousness, the film has perhaps acquired a greater significance.  When man attempts to defy Nature, he is taking a tremendous gamble.  Sometimes, the gamble will not pay off...

© Chris Alderton 2010

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