The Towering Inferno: 40 years after the fire.
In 1970, The Twin Towers were built at the World Trade Center in New York City. The disturbingly prescient response to the hubristic building of such a tall skyscraper and the possibility of disaster in the event of a fire was producer Irwin Allen’s (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 1961) 1974 spectacle, The Towering Inferno. While John Guillermin (King Kong, 1976) is credited as director, it is widely known that Allen himself directed all of the action scenes, including the climactic grand explosion scene of fire and tons of gallons of water. It may be considered ironic that as a film so critical of greed and men who don’t know when enough is enough, Inferno as a whole seems to be the result of Hollywood budget carte blanche and megalomania in it’s most cinematically pure form.
The film opens with a helicopter flying over the skyline of the amazingly picturesque San Francisco, CA while a jazz-pop orchestral score beats away in 5/4. The music was immediately familiar to me, and at the end of the film I was not at all surprised to see John William’s name appear on the screen. It’s no mystery that from here on out Williams would be the go-to composer for action and adventure films by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) and George Lucas (Star Wars, 1977). The helicopter lands atop a freakishly tall Goliath of a building that puts all other real-life San Francisco landmarks to shame. This is “The Glass Tower”, a fictional office/apartment building supposedly set in the heart of downtown San Francisco and made ostensibly entirely out of glass. There’s an impressive and heart-in-the-throat inducing scenic elevator that goes up and down the length of the tower from floor one to the Promenade Room at the top. On the roof, out of the helicopter jumps Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), the architect of the Glass Tower, and soon we meet his boss, Jim Duncan, played yawningly by WIlliam Holden (Sunset Boulevard, 1950). These are just two of the many aging stars of the 70s that make up the cast of Inferno. There’s also the cowardly cheap skate con man Harlee Claiborn played by Fred Astaire who was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for his supporting role. He’s lovable and kind of sad, and comes to the Tower to meet and scam an unsuspecting widow, but finds himself falling in love as the Tower burns below him. Faye Dunaway has a few thankless scenes as Doug’s girlfriend Susan Franklin. The most awkward of the stunt casting choices is Steve McQueen as Fire Chief Mike O’Hallorhan. The thing that struck me about Towering Inferno is that not only could a movie about a downtown
skyscraper burning down be made today in 2014 with such restraint and focus on stunts over special effects, but I feel like such action-heavy roles would be more likely given to younger up-and-comers, not Hollywood royalty.
The royalty factor made this an extremely troubled shoot and the tension comes through in the performances, to the film’s benefit. McQueen doesn’t appear until 43 minutes into the action and at that point Newman has already said half of his dialogue. Apparently the role of Architect was originally offered to McQueen, but he turned it down for the part of Fire Chief, a much more heroic but much smaller turn, under the stipulation that he and his rival co-star would have the exact same amount of lines and screen time and be paid the exact same whopping one million dollars. Newman did not enjoy his time on set and said he’d never take a role for a million again after completing this film. However, the on-screen tension works! McQueen pulls up to the building already in flames because of faulty wiring (intentionally over-looked by the building’s owner’s drunken and arrogant son-in-law, played by none other than Richard Chamberlain, The Last Wave, 1977) as Newman is inside frantically trying to put out a fire in a control room along side a befuddled O.J. Simpson. As the two leads finally meet, McQueen admonishes Newman saying that someday people will start asking firemen how tall they should build their structures, and jumps into action.
There are some truly great stunt scenes and practical special effects that made The Towering Inferno as spectacular as Irwin intended. Paul Newman performs his own stunts, including one in a stairwell after an explosion knocks out the stairs and he has to get himself, an elderly woman, and two children down to the next level. There’s also a scene where he climbs straight up through a pipe chamber John McClane style, that looks like something out of a sci-fi flick like THX 1138 (Lucas, 1971). McQueen’s action scenes are less impressive and his performance is so much less convincing and interesting than Newman’s, it’s hard to believe that it was his behavior on the set that could be considered downright diva-esque. He reportedly refused on-set visitors and interviews (so did Dunaway, who was late most days and sometimes didn’t even show up for
her shoots, a habit that enraged Bill Holden), and I suspect it was because he knew that on a pure talent basis he was out-matched by Saint Paul Newman, and behaved like a brat because of it. I haven’t seen many
McQueen films, but I truly think this film would have benefitted from having a more comic actor like Ernest Borgnine (the original consideration) in the role of Fire Chief and the heroics left completely up to the infallible Paul Newman. But, then we wouldn’t get the battle of the blue eyes, a stunning feature of both actors that the director and cinematographers Fred J. Koenekamp (Patton, 1970) and Joseph F. Biroc (It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946) highlight.
The Oscar-winning cinematography is the most impressive part of the film for me. Even with such star power, the acting is somewhat bland. Except for Newman, Chamberlain, and Astaire, the rest of the cast is phoning this one in. This seems to be the early stages if not birth of intense and impressive action scenes given precedent over story and acting in blockbusters. There are some familiar tropes of the action/adventure genre here, as well. The camera zooms and holds on the faces of the people in the Tower, building suspense and anxiety before booms happen - a technique now known as “The Spielberg Face” (See: every Spielberg movie). Also, firefighters are heroes (deservedly so) and slimy businessmen are villains, taking engineering shortcuts for corporate kickbacks.
Tension never lets up once the initial blaze begins, and despite a flimsy plot and some cheesy scenes of fatherly love from McQueen to his underling firefighters, I was riveted throughout. Given it’s almost 3-hour run time, I was prepared to be bored by cheesy effects and 70s-style shtick, but as much of a hack as Guillermin may have been, Irwin Allen really was a talented filmmaker, and I’m finally motivated to check out more of his infamous disaster pictures.
by Kenny Meier
