Film Review
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...
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.