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.

 

 

Olde Review: Follow the Fleet

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the snarky, clueless kid I was back then a break. 

What was that line from Hondo? "Him very young. Will learn." "If he lives..."

Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936) They begin this way: From the black the upper hemisphere of a globe revolves in a cloud-filled sky. Perched atop the globe at its very hub, is a gigantic radio tower that beeps out the insignia "An RKO Radio Picture." 

That trademark holds something special for me, for it announces that it was made by the RKO Studios--the studios that fostered such film classics as Citizen Kane and the truly original King Kong. RKO made its share of turkeys but even in those, RKO's studios put a certain feel into their films. It comes from their sets. It comes from the equipment. It comes from the team. That's why M-G-M musicals look so glossily over-produced, and current Universal films look so cheesy. 

The two films in 130 Kane Hall this Friday are both RKO films and they are Follow the Fleet and Stage Door.
Follow the Fleet is very generally a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical. And it is a pleasant enough entertainment. Oh, there are some things that will not be tolerated, I'm sure--there are a few lines that a lot of feminists will hiss at, and you can chuckle over some of the clothes,* the dances and the more's displayed in the film. After all, we are so much more advanced and sophisticated nowadays and Saturday's films--The Rocky Horrow Picture Show, and Private Parts shows this to be so.**


But there are some very neat things here, too. Some familiar faces--Fred and Ginger, Randolph Scott, Harriett Hillyard (who would become world-famous as the TV and real-life wife of bandleader Ozzie Nelson), and in lesser roles, Betty Grable and Lucille Ball. There are the songs by Irving Berlin ("Let Yourself Go," "Let's Face the Music and Dance") orchestrated by film music great Max Steiner. 

And then there are the dance numbers--the reason this film was made, its the reason this film is structured the way it was, and it's what made Astaire and Rogers stars, doubly and singly. There is a mutual smash-up-your-partners'-work dance rehearsal about 3/4 through the film that will undoubtedly impress as a great number of stumbles, but is actually as well-choreographed as any of the other dance numbers in the film.*** 

So, gee whiz gosh, folks, why don't you forget your 70's whatever-it-is attitude and enjoy yourself.

There's not much I can add, other than to say that Follow the Fleet introduced the standard "Let's Face the Music and Dance," and that the choreography of Astaire (with Hermes Pan) and the dance performance of Astaire and Rogers (and remember, "she had to do everything he did...only backwards and in high-heels!") are some of the most sublimely beautiful things you will see in movies. In all the years since I've seen this film and the others, I've never seen anything that can compare. Sure, Gene Kelly had that ferocious athletic aggressiveness...but Astaire and Rogers achieved Grace with a capital "G."

2020 Addendum: Oh, there's a LOT I can add: Astaire (originally Frederick Austerlitz—on imdb.com, he is "nm0000001/") had a disastrous screen-test at RKO: "Can't sing. Can't act. Balding. Can dance a little." read the card-synopsis; producer David O. Selznick—who signed Astaire to his RKO contract wrote in one of his famous memo's "I am uncertain about the man, but I feel, in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line, that his charm is so tremendous that it comes through even on this wretched test." Astaire's first film for RKO, Flying Down to Rio, had him fifth-billed—right after Ginger Rogers. He didn't want to be part of another dance duo (he started out on-stage with his sister Adele); he wrote his agent "I don't mind making another picture with her, but as for this 'team' idea, it's 'out!' I've just managed to live down one partnership and I don't want to be bothered with any more." But, they made nine films together in one of the greatest pairings in film.

Katherine Hepburn (who'd worked with Rogers on Stage Door) said of them: "He gives her class and she gives him sex appeal." Astaire said of her: "Ginger had never danced with a partner before Flying Down to Rio. She faked it an awful lot. She couldn't tap and she couldn't do this and that ... but Ginger had style and talent and improved as she went along. She got so that after a while everyone else who danced with me looked wrong." Part of that is Ginger Rogers proved to be a consummate actress. Yes, she could get the routines "down," but most importantly, she could act the dance and its emotional effect—like a good opera singer who can hit all the notes, but also emote beyond them to touch the audience. It's athleticism and skill to hit the marks, but the acting makes it less of a spectator sport and brings the audience in to become part of the experience.  Astaire was likable, but Rogers made him a romantic lead—just by her acting.

One might not like musicals. One might not like dancing in films. But, watching Astaire and Rogers is experiencing artistry...and that is thrilling, whatever one's prejudices.  Excellence always beats them.

* Now, bear in mind, I was writing this during the "disco" 70's! Everybody was wearing platform shoes and bell-bottoms, fergodsake.

** I believe I was being sarcastic here, but I'm not sure. I think I was merely pandering to the audience of a 10 watt rock station on the University campus and this was the first review I'd written (I think).  I was being unsure and general—why else would I start with an explanation of RKO Radio Pictures" (it would be "explained" musically in Rocky Horror on the next night, after all), plus I thought I had to "sell" an Astaire-Rogers musical to the "hipsters" on campus. Balderdash. Anyway, the review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is here and the one for Private Parts is here. 

Stage Door, we will represent next week.

***