‘The Towering Inferno’ at 50 – Review
The Towering Inferno (1974)
Director: John Guillermin
Screenwriters: Stirling Silliphant
Starring: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, O. J. Simpson, Jack Collins, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner
In 1975, Steven Spielberg released what many consider to be the first true blockbuster: Jaws. If one takes into account the marketing, the action figure tie-ins, the posters, the t-shirts, and the general fever surrounding the film, perhaps this is true. If you’re talking box office takings and silver screen spectacle however, The Towering Inferno predates Spielberg’s film. It’s big, it’s overblown, and it was made for $14million (around $90million adjusted for inflation), but made $116m at the box office (around $742million when adjusted for inflation). By the modern interpretation of the word, it was every bit the blockbuster Jaws was.
The plot seems trivial and boring now, purely because so many films have taken this and spun it in a slightly different direction to make their own boatload of cash. Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) has designed the world’s tallest building, The Glass Tower, a massive skyscraper over 135 floors tall. Lots of it is for business, and lots for pleasure. Everyone’s there for the grand opening, including the Senator (Robert Vaughn). Roberts’ plans and safety precautions have been skimped on by Richard Chamberlain’s Roger Simmons, son of The Glass Tower’s builder James Duncan (William Holden), and there’s an electrical fire. The whole building is about to go up in flames, leaving hundreds of party guests stranded high in the sky.
The Towering Inferno is what every big disaster movie should be: it doesn’t skimp out on spectacle, blending every conceivable use of matte-painting trickery and miniature magic to give us what we really came to see: destruction. Corridors get swallowed up, explosions rock the tower, people cling on to scrap pieces of metal for dear life (thanks to some great effects that would no doubt have been nominated for the Oscar if they were a competitive category that year).
The crowning achievement of the film, despite the gripping chaos on screen, is its very human side. Yes, Holden’s big boss tries to downplay the warnings to keep his money in his pocket. Yes, down with capitalism at the expense of safety and people’s lives. Yet, when the authorities arrive, Duncan gives in and actively helps to save his guests. There are true villains in the midst for sure, but the big capitalist does change his mind and realise the error of his ways. When a cage is roped up to a neighbouring skyscraper to take one person at a time across the gulf (itself a great scene of suspense and tension), he refuses to go on board, and proudly proclaims that he will be the last one across. He admits that he needs to make sure it never happens again. It is human to have multiple sides to oneself, and making him a character with both flaws and bravery is a welcome change.
Steve McQueen’s Michael O’Halloran, chief fireman, takes a moment two thirds of the way through the film to sit baffled and exhausted as people pile more bad news on him. He doesn’t instantly swing around and charge on with authority, nor does he melodramatically shout back. He simply sits down, breathes for a few seconds, takes stock, and then wearily gets back up to deal with things. Small moments like these make the film so much more than fire and smoke. When they are about to enact the final, desperate attempt to save both the building and the lives of the people, everyone still trapped on floor 135 ties themselves to whatever they can find. Director John Guillermin moves to closeups on numerous faces, and their expressions are ones of weary resignation. This is a story about people, good or bad, poor or rich and snobbish, being trapped in a nightmare from which they probably won’t escape, and it shows.
These little beats of downtime – other examples being: holding to show a character gearing up in real time, clipping a piece of equipment onto a rope, considering what to do, often carefully and deliberately dropping out Williams’ wonderful score to give the moments extra gravitas – are both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it is good to see everything play out in as close to real time as the filmmakers can get away with without ruining the flow (and, to their credit, Harold F. Kress and Carl Kress won the Oscar for Best Film Editing, so they definitely pulled their weight), yet there are still times when everything feels slightly sedate, moments when a little dramatic editing, a shave of a shot here or a few seconds there, could gift the film a little more speed. Perhaps this is the retrospective perspective, coming from a world of rapid-fire editing and montages that seem to move at one thousand frames per second.
For all the grim moments of gut-wrenching screams as fireballs blast into elevators and roast people alive, for all the people crashing through windows to their deaths, for all those who perish in the events of the film, it is still a Hollywood movie; it still needs to give everyone hope and catharsis come the end. This is mostly achieved by having some of its heroes survive, and composer John Williams gives a triumphant brass-led sweep into the ending credits theme as the fire is brought under control and our hero’s car begins to clear away from the scene. A glance at several rows of black body bags on the ground, and the morbid comment of “We were lucky tonight; body count’s under 200,” is the true grim reality, but the machines that are 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros could never let a massive investment like this end on such a sour note. Nobody would come back for repeat viewings if they did. You understand why they’ve done it from a business perspective, but that doesn’t make it right.
Small moments aside, The Towering Inferno is still a towering success. There’s a reason it was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for Cinematography, Editing, and Song. The structure is perfect. It is an incredibly human film; one that gave inspiration to Die Hard, Skyscraper, and perhaps even the finale to Linwood Barclay’s novel “Elevator Pitch”. It’s one of the all-time great disaster movies – popcorn and actual emotion. What’s not to enjoy?
Score: 18/24
