The Towering Inferno ***** (1974, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Faye Dunaway) – Classic Movie Review 1207

A blaze breaks out in the Glass Tower, a state-of-the-art San Francisco high-rise building during the glitzy opening ceremony attended by a host of city celebrities, in director John Guillermin‘s terrifyingly nail-biting 1974 skyscraper-on-fire movie The Towering Inferno.

It is notable as the first film to be a joint venture by two major Hollywood studios. Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox found they had bought the rights to similarly themed novels, Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower and Thomas N Scortia and Frank M Robinson’s The Glass Inferno, so they combined their resources and shared costs. After good reviews and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture, it became the highest-grossing film released in 1974.

Producer/co-director Irwin Allen was king of the disaster movies and his old-style Hollywood production here is quite the best of all the entire wave of disaster movies in the Seventies. The superlative all-star cast is headed by Paul Newman as the building’s architect Doug Roberts and Steve McQueen as the fire chief, San Francisco Fire Department 5th Battalion Chief Michael O’Halloran.

Roberts has designed the tower for owner James Duncan (William Holden). At 138 storeys (1,800 ft/ 550 meters), it is the world’s tallest building. Shortly after his arrival for the for the dedication of the tower, Roberts accuses the building’s electrical engineer, Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain), of cutting corners but Simmons insists the building is up to current safety standards. Meanwhile an electrical short starts an undetected fire on the 81st floor.

Fred Astaire won a sentimental Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor as con man Harlee Claiborne and Susan Flannery won Most Promising Female Newcomer as Lorrie the secretary/mistress to public relations chief Dan Bigelow (Robert Wagner).

It is propelled by a continuous series of lots of thrilling, knife-edge moments, a brisk pace and a vital sense of the appalling realism of the situation, and it is rarely betrayed by talky set-ups, cardboard characters or sentimentality. However, the creaky romance between Astaire’s con man and one of the guests, Lisolette Mueller (Jennifer Jones in her final film), strains long-standing affection for these two stars.

Stirling Silliphant’s expert screenplay ensures solid, good old-fashioned storytelling, there is first-rate craftsmanship on the Oscar-nominated art direction (William Creber) and set decoration, and there are excellent special effects too (Bill Abbott). John Williams’s score is notable, but of course it is hardly as memorable as his music for Jaws the next year.

The starry cast also includes William Holden (as the building’s owner James Duncan), Faye Dunaway (as Roberts’s girlfriend Susan Franklin), Susan Blakely (as Simmons’s wife Patty), Robert Vaughn (as Senator Gary Parker), Jack Collins (as Mayor Robert Ramsey), O J Simpson (as Jernigan), Gregory Sierra and Dabney Coleman.

The Towering Inferno landed eight Oscar nominations and three wins – for Best Cinematography (Fred J Koenekamp, Joseph F Biroc), Editing (Harold F Kress, Carl Kress) and Song (‘We May Never Love Like This Again’ by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn). The song is performed by Maureen McGovern, who appears in a cameo as a lounge singer.

McQueen and Newman were promised the same pay and number of lines, and given dual top billing, so the credits were arranged diagonally, with McQueen lower left and Newman upper right and thus each appeared to have first billing depending on whether the credit was read left-to-right or top-to-bottom. This set a precedent for billing to be displayed this way. 

Small parts are played by actors in Allen’s 1972 production The Poseidon Adventure, including John Crawford, Erik Nelson, Elizabeth Rogers, Ernie Orsatti, and Sheila Matthews. The acrophobic fireman afraid to rappel down the elevator shaft is played by Newman’s son, Scott.

Holden and Dunaway re-united for Network (1976).

Dwayne Johnson tries to emulate The Towering Inferno in the 2018 Skyscraper.

British film-maker John Guillermin, director of The Towering Inferno, the 1976 King Kong, Death on the Nile, The Blue Max, and The Bridge at Remagen died on 28 September 2015, aged 89. He was best known for big-budget action films, also including El Condor, Shaft in Africa, Sheena and the sequel King Kong Lives.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1207

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