The Towering Inferno

Saturday is usually "Take Out the Trash Day".  

 

For this particular entry, a "Burn Ban" is strictly enforced.

The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, Irwin Allen, 1974)

"Inferno!
See the flames light up San Fran-cisco
While us lesser-paid stars fry like Crisco
Inferno!
We're trapped in this dreadful In-fer-no!" 

From Mad Magazine #182 (April 1976) "Go to Blazes!" ("New Musicals Based on Big Movies")

(sung to the tune of "Maria" from "West Side Story")

It was one of those situations where two studios were going to be making competing movies on the same subject, in this case, the story of a high-tech skyscraper that experiences a devastating multi-floor fire. 20th Century Fox had the rights to the book "The Glass Inferno" by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. Warner Brothers had the rights to "The Tower" by Richard Martin Stern. Rather than going into competition with each other (and potentially undermining each others' box-office potential), Fox (and "Glass Inferno") producer Irwin Allen convinced the two studios to join forces on one project to be called The Towering Inferno. In this first-of-its-kind arrangement, the two studios would share production costs and split the domestic and international box-office receipts. After Allen had a hit with Fox's The Poseidon Adventure, both studios were amicable to make money on the burgeoning disaster movie wave, with Allen, the self-dubbed "Master of Disaster" leading the project. Screenwriter Stirling Silliphant mixed and matched characters and incidents from both books to create the screenplay. 

Then, the casting began. With the budget afforded by two studios footing the bill, Allen upped his game by top-loading this movie with two of the biggest box-office draws at the time, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen (the two had only worked on one movie—McQueen's film debut—Somebody Up There Likes Me, and had had careers where both eyed each others' movies covetously, narrowly avoiding being paired in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). But, who got top billing is a little controversial. It would take an art director's creativity to come up with the poster—McQueen's name appeared (reading left to right) as first, but Newman's (reading top to bottom) would be slightly over his. Faye Dunaway's career was in resurgence, so she played the love interest, and William Holden, after being rebuffed for top billing, settled for third. Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones both came out of retirement to work, and the rest of the cast was filled out by the journey-men television actors (like Richard Chamberlain, Robert Vaughn, Susan Blakely, and Robert Wagner) who received scripts with prominent coffee-rings staining them.

The plot is as straight-forward as a fuse: a San Francisco multi-use skyscraper catches fire on the night of a big gala celebrating its completion. In attendance at the swank top-floor Promenade Room are developer James Duncan (Holden), architect Doug Roberts (Newman), his fiancee Susan Franklin (Dunaway), as well as local dignitaries including the Mayor, a Senator (Vaughn) and the developer's duplicitous cost-cutting electrical contractor/son-in-law (Chamberlain). During a routine test of the electrical system during the day, a short occurs that starts a fire on the building's 81st floor. Roberts is alerted to this by Security Chief Jernigan (O. J. Simpson), who mans a monitoring system that appears to be ripped out of the submarine "Seaview." (Dammit, those things always sparked!)

This gets compounded when the public relations man for Holden's firm (Wagner), quite understandably, wants to turn on every light in the building once it hits dusk. Roberts objects—turn on all the lights at night? Are you crazy?—but is over-ruled for the photo op. (Oh, you'll get pictures, alright). One wonders how the thing got built with such a light-weight electrical grid, although I'm sure it wasn't done with candle-power as everything in the building seems to be combustible. But, then, we are talking about a company that would consider building the world's tallest glass building on one of the shiftiest fault-lines in the Americas, indicating a lot of unhelpful shaky thinking. Architect Roberts can gripe about people not doing their jobs, but shouldn't architects be thinking "location, location, location?"

The fire, when it starts, begins in a storage room on the 81st floor—high enough to make it nearly impossible to reach with a hook-and-ladder, central enough to do damage to core-stair-wells once it gets going and embedded enough that you can't hose it down from the air. But, smoke is seen from the floor via the closed circuit TV system and the San Francisco Fire Department is called. Investigating the system alert, Roberts head for the floor in question and one of his engineers is roasted trying to save a security guard. 

Roberts calls Duncan to the danger, but the developer has too many politicians upstairs he wants to talk to about zoning for other projects. With the certitude of the beaches being safe, he doesn't order an evacuation. That doesn't occur until the SFFD shows up and a grousing Battalion Chief Mike O'Halloran (McQueen) forces the issue. While the VIP's decide between men, women, children, and well-placed politicians—and stars who have a back-end deal—to leave the top-floor party room, Halloran and Co. decide what will be the best way to get the fire out, and as it's starting to jump up floors, the height of the building becomes the crux of the problem. Exploding gas-lines exploding only amplify the problem.

While Roberts works to evacuate people in the building not in the Promenade Room, O'Halloran works on the fires below the 81st floor, trying to reach the 65th floor where the Duncan Enterprises offices are located, but too late to save Wagner's P.R. man and his mistress from being consumed in the flames. Up at the Promenade Room, those gas explosions stop the express elevator carrying passengers down right into the fully-engulfed 81st floor and stopping the main way to get down the tower.

An attempt is made to land a rescue helicopter on the skyscraper's roof, but high winds destabilize the chopper and send it crashing to the roof, exploding and causing even more fires. Stairways from the top are engulfed by smoke, and those venturing into them soon find that the explosions have smashed floor-lengths of stairs. That leaves only two ways down—the outside scenic elevator and a make-shift way the fire brigade are fighting hard to set up.

That involves setting up a breech's buoy system stretching from the tower's roof to the roof of a neighboring skyscraper across the street, which can hold a limited number of people and is susceptible to those treacherous winds. But, that is looking like the only option as a building-wide power failure has rendered the observation elevator worthless. So, an alternate plan is made to secure a gravity brake to the elevator, snip it away from it's cables, and control the descent using the brake. 

Because everything has worked so well so far. 

It starts to look like The Glass Tower has been designed mostly to sabotage any effort to get around in it...(criminy, at one point, one of the emergency fire-doors is stuck because it's blocked by spilled concrete...who built this thing?) And by this time, there are so many floors and people on them to keep track of that one is ready to just throw up their hands and say "Okay, I'm going to change the batteries on my smoke-alarm!"—if not for the fear that even that might cause a horrendous burst of flames. It's wearying and disheartening and the bodies pile up so that you might become numb to it—like Faye Dunaway in the picture below.

Sure, it's a Disaster Movie—that's very well understood—and one goes into these things expecting a high body count. I mean, the posters used to scream "WHO WILL SURVIVE?" Plus, this thing just bores right into the primal fear centers with fire scenarios and great heights from which to fall. There's a hysterical element to The Towering Inferno that is almost gleeful in its ability to snatch hope from any kind of rescue scenario, leaving it to a revelation that is rather preposterous for a building so high to miraculously solve all of the problems in one swell...flood. But, at that point in the movie, you're willing to just accept it so the damned thing can end.

Frankly, one wonders what the fascination is beyond pyromania. The film was one of the biggest money-makers of its years and is generally sited as the "greatest" (whatever that means) of the "disaster film" cycle. After this torch-song, the cycle ran out of gas...or any other flammable material; Irwin Allen had to resort to killer bees for his next film. Perhaps the appeal is the one I have watching the yearly Academy Awards—hoping against hope that something will go wrong. But, seeing Hollywood Elites get some sort of comeuppance cannot overcome someone's tendency to acrophobia and pyrophobia.* Especially when the characters are such flammable paper tigers.

There's an added element to the dis-taste. Can anyone have any fun watching this movie post-9/11, when the world watched in real time while the Twin Towers were attacked and very real human beings fell from the sky. Accuse me of being a namby-pamby all you want. Anyone who doesn't think of that extended nightmare watching this and feel one's gorge rising a bit, probably hasn't been born yet.   

Jennifer Jones and Fred Astaire contemplating why they came out of retirement for this.

It appeals to all of our worst instincts. That tendency to watch catastrophe and not turn away. Even if that catastrophe is this dumpster-fire of a movie. 

"I got first billing." "I got TOP billing." "I play 'the girlfriend'"

* As far as I know there is no officially-designated, diagnosable fear of bad movies. Will have to consider some names.

 

 

Harper (1966)

Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) The modern private eye, post-Chandler has always been a smart-aleck, but most of them have the charm to at least be surprised by the pecadilloes of their clients.

Not Lew Harper* (Paul Newman).  He's been in Los Angeles so long, he's seen everything and is so jaded, everything rolls off his back like polluted water.  Been there, done that, sneered at it and held his tongue, did his job and took a shower afterwards.  

Most detectives of the ilk don't take their work home with them.  Not Harper.  Now, in the middle of divorce proceedings from his wife (Janet Leigh)—well, not in the middle, he's just not signing the papers, hoping he might be able to charm her back (fat chance)—his work is his home, living in his rat-trap of an office.  When he's not working, he looks like he's a derelict.  But, he's Paul Newman, so he "cleans up" very nice when he's got a job to do, getting his hands dirty..

Harper cleans up real nice

But business has not been good, and he's been depending on the kindness of friends.  His attorney buddy Albert Graves (Arthur Hill), has a very lucrative client—an eccentric oil millionaire, Ralph Sampson—who has gone missing. An interview with his brittle, incapacitated wife (Lauren Bacall) shows a disdain for the man, disinterest in his whereabouts, and only a cunning interest in how it will affect the family dynamic—she despises her step-daughter, the lithe and somewhat vacuous Miranda (Pamela Tiffin)—and the financial situation if Graves should wind up...you know...dead or, worse, out of money. 

The man is eccentric and invisible.  Mrs. Sampson has been through it before—the disappearance for weeks at a time, the affairs, the drunken remorse, then Sampson washes, rinses, then repeats.  She just wants to know where he goes on these benders.  First, stop: round back to the pool, where Sampson's pilot (Robert Wagner) is enjoying not working, with Miranda, Sampson's daughter, who is fulfilling her part in, what can be described in the 60's as "the Raquel Welch role," dancing in a bikini to generic rock n' roll.  Both are curious where Daddy is, but not enough to do anything about it.  And the last time the pilot saw Sampson, he'd just flown him to L.A. from Vegas, and the man had made a phone call to be driven to the bungalow he keeps in Bel-Air. 

Pamela Tiffin, comfortable with boogaloos and bungalows

The trail leads Harper through a series of California cast-off's, a way-past-her-prime actress (Shelley Winters) and her husband-handler (Robert Webber), a junkie lounge-singer (Julie Harris) and the leader of a religious cult (Strother Martin) that's a front for smuggling illegals into the U.S.  They're all semi-competent, deeply flawed to the bone and more than a little desperate.  Just when Harper thinks he might be onto something, there's a call from the Sampson's saying that the old man's been kidnapped and the perpetrators are asking for $500,000.  The money is dropped, then disappears.

Then people start dying.

It's an odd, slightly bungled mystery with not an awful lot of suspense, but more of a jaundiced eye towards the desert wasteland of Los Angeles and the buzzards who circle it.  Harper seems to mark a tipping-point for the detective movie—where the evil that men did was in the past done by a minority of professionals, now it's done by amateurs, and seemingly anybody.

What I think the central interest of Harper is in the subject of loyalty.  It's a stand-by of detective yarns as far back as The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade rambled on about the raison d'être for taking the case.

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's bad business to let the killer get away with it, bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere.

Chandler took that moral quandry to the next level in his novel "The Long Goodbye"**(there are odd echoes of Chandler's books throughout Harper, but none of the moral authority).  There, a friend of detective Philip Marlowe's, Terry Lennox, asks him, no questions asked, to drive him to Mexico.  It is revealed later that Lennox's wife has been murdered, and suspicion immediately falls on Lennox, and, as an accomplice, Marlowe, being in the detective business, doggedly investigates whether his friend's a murderer. When Robert Altman made his 70's version of The Long Goodbye, he took a step far afield of the norm and the book—in the movie, Lennox does kill his wife, and Marlowe's answer to the loyalty question is simple: he shoots Lennox dead.  Loyalty's one thing, but murder's another.

Harper is somewhere in between, where loyalty is tested by actions of friends and the detective has to decide what he's supposed to do about it, whatever he thinks of him.  The ending, where Harper decides to do the right thing, expecting a bullet in his back so he doesn't have to ("Aw, hell!") is an example of not decisive action, but of passive-aggressiveness.  Newman was becoming well-known as an anti-hero actor, and his detective, while not being heroic, is not exactly anti-, either.  That would take a writer the likes of Mickey Spillane, crafting the hero as thug (because, "hey, why waste time, I've got a bottle of scotch getting warm"). William Goldman, after Kenneth Millar, doesn't go that far, and ends it unresolved.  The mystery ends, but justice is never served.  Life goes on, and seems disappointed at the prospect.  Hardly noir.  Hardly much of anything.

* Harper is based on Ross McDonald's Lew Archer character from the novel "The Moving Target," but Newman had enough clout that he could change the name to Harper (because he had a string of box-office hits with titles that began with "H.")

** "The Long Goodbye" was actually published four years after the the book that was the basis of Harper, "The Moving Target."