The Towering Inferno (1974).....premiered around this time 50 years ago. And served as semi-schlockmeister Irwin Allen's ultimate, quintessential disaster movie. Produced by two major studios and populated with a star-studded line-up of actors. the overlong film delivered everything Allen promised - a catastrophic spectacle of death by fire, water and falling from great heights.
Yet after this film's release to massive box office success, nobody fell from greater heights than Irwin Allen......
Allen, a tireless self-promoter, specialized in borderline cheesy sci-fi TV shows and movies....("Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea", "Lost In Space", "The Lost World") He struck gold with his 1972 upside-down cruise ship disasterpiece "The Poseidon Adventure".
Hollywood execs salivated at the money to be made feeding the public's newly hungry appetite for special effects calamity. Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox bought competing best sellers about fires in gleaming glass high rises. ('The Tower' and 'The Glass Inferno'.
In a rare instance of common business sense, the two studios agreed to blend the two books into one humungous movie they'd produce jointly......and who better to bring this wing-ding to life than Irwin Allen.
(In subsequent years, such economic logic went out the window, with studios releasing separate, competing films about volcanos, meteors hitting the earth and even two James Bond movies......)
Irwin Allen reveled in his role as impresario-ringmaster of a this super-production about a miles-high skyscraper catching fire. Upfront as the leads were the primary superstars of the era, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, along with equally in demand Faye Dunaway. Supporting roles included old Hollywood stalwart William Holden as the big-bucks builder, and Richard Chamberlin as his whining weasel son-in-law, whose cost cutting on the building's faulty wiring touches off the fire.
For Poseidon, Allen was then astute enough to leave directing the actors to smoothly competent Brit Ronald Neame. Fox and WB, knowing Allen was at best a Grade C journeyman director, insisted on the same policy, leaving the actors in the care of John Guillermin while Allen oversaw the blazes and rescues.
The overall result? Like watching any three hour baseball or football game. You thrill to the high points, while there's entire stretches you could nap through without missing a thing.
The superstars played to their strengths - Newman as the thoughtful, caring architect enraged and disgusted as his edifice wrecks due to cheap construction done behind his back.....McQueen as the coolest-of-the-cool fire chief quietly performing feats of heroism everywhere he goes.....(the film provides each star such moments: Newman scrambles up and down a twisted stairway railing to save a woman and two children, McQueen desperately grips a struggling fireman as they both dangle from the roof of an already teetering glass elevator attached to a helicopter cable.
(and yes, that O.J.Simpson as the security guard rescuing a kitty-cat, whom he certainly treats more tenderly than his wife....)
Audiences didn't mind that the film suffered from the same paper thin cornball characterizations and connect-the-dots plotting that afflicted all disaster movies (and what made them so easy to ridicule and lampoon in the 'Airplane!' comedies.).
Nobody cared. Irwin Allen's Bonfire Of The Inanities served up what we craved and expected.....Flaming humans! Big explosions! Crazy stunts! Huge stars all sweaty and smudged! Bodies flying out the windows! (Yes, kiddies, long before 9/11 that was considered popular entertainment......not so entertaining now, is it?)
Returning to the film again, we had to smirk a bit at the astounding finale, which in a way, became a perfect metaphor for the rest of Irwin Allen's filmmaking career......
Allen's gloriously matte-painted skyscraper turns out to hold gigantic water tanks on its roof......why this place needs enough water to turn the Sahara into a lakeside resort is beyond us. But it does come in handy for Newman and McQueen to detonate the tanks and touch off a deluge that sends a few more stuntmen into swan dives off the top floor.
Those final shots of water cascading down the steel Tower and dousing the inferno prophesied the rest of Irwin Allen's sad filmography.......
'The Master Of Disaster' pressed on with the genre mistakenly handing over the direction to a....well, a Grade C journeyman....Allen himself.
The ludicrous 'Beyond The Poseideon Adventure' and the laughable killer bee epic "The Swarm" hammered nails into the coffin of the dead-as-a-doornail disaster film. Warner Brothers would only let Allen produce but not direct the woeful volcano flop, 'When Time Ran Out', his last dire stab at the genre. Even with another director, the film still looked like an Ed Wood Jr. production with a slightly larger budget.
So for one moment in 1974 time, Irwin Allen rode the top of the wave of disaster movies until he himself insured their demise. "The Towering Inferno" still stands as his lasting legacy......silly, outdated, a curio of a long gone era but certainly an overstuffed buffet of all-star, old-fashioned Hollywood cinema.
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2). These days, mainly for fans of the stars and film historians......
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