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.

 

 

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers

The Three Musketeers: The Queen's Diamonds/
The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (Richard Lester, 1974/1975) These rollicking films were originally planned as a two and a half hour epic (no matter what the Producers now say!) may just be one of the best adventure films (and adaptations of a classic novel) ever adapted, balancing the demands of the story, the tenor of the times in which it was made and the idiosyncrasies of its director.

When approached, Richard Lester (who hadn't made a film since The Bed Sitting Room in 1969) wasn't enthused. Then he read the story, and did some research...and heartily agreed. One can see why. For The Three Musketeers, as Lester and his screen-writer George MacDonald Fraser envisioned it, is a story of intrigue done in high places, but carried out by the lackeys and foot-soldiers who live only to serve. Forget that the palace-dwellers are either snakes or dullards—they provide an opportunity for income and adventure--two qualities lacking amongst the citizens of France and England, who, at the time, are at war. The opportunities for thrills, humor and rapier-pointed satire are rich and mined well by the film-makers.

And Lester's direction is masterful—simple set-ups and multiple cameras are used during the swash-buckling to make sure there's a glimpse of every buckled swash. And those scenes are choreographed as a group participation so that every Musketeer has "business." Lester also worked to make sure that the fights were inelegant affairs--not balletic, as had been the tradition, but more like street-fights, with few rules and the use of landscape and surroundings as equal strategies to the sword technique (and every part of the sword is used, as opponents are sometimes conked with the ornate handles). And, as Lester was renowned as a "one-take" director, opportunities for mis-haps, mess-ups and stumbles only added to the verisimilitude. Sure, the action was rehearsed, but any imperfections made things seem more real.

Reed, Finlay, Chamberlain, York and Kinnear enjoying the fruits of their labors.

Lester surrounds the royalty with games and idle amusements that have a slight tint of mindless cruelty to them, and that extends to the villains, whose elaborate machinations involving the Royals are merely extensions of those same games, with regime-toppling consequences.

A royal chess-game with dogs and capuchins

And the cast! As the musketeers, Oliver Reed as the surly Athos, Richard Chamberlain as the effete Aramis, Frank Finlay as the clownish Porthos, and Michael York as the young and naive D'Artagnan. As the Royals, Jean-Pierre Cassel as the foppish King Louis XIII, Geraldine Chaplin as the frail Queen Anna of Austria, and Simon Ward as the rakish Duke of Buckingham. As the villains, Faye Dunaway as Lady De Winter, Christopher Lee as the villainous Rochefort, and Charlton Heston in one of his best performances as the Machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu. Rounding out the cast are Raquel Welch as the Queen's seamstress, the accident-prone Constance de Bonacieux,* Spike Milligan as her randy husband, and Lester regular, the great Roy Kinnear as D'Artagnan's man-servant, Planchet. A superb cast, rarely equalled.

Welch and Dunaway as good girl/bad girl

It's long been contended that the film was supposed to be one movie, but that the Salkind's split it into two to maximize profits. That's the rumor—there is a natural split of the film at the half-way point that features almost all the actors for a sort-of bow, but it could have easily been used as the starting place for an intermission. It's born out by the fact that there is less movie in The Four Musketeers, it being padded with an "up-to-that-point" narrated prologue.

Charlton Heston in one of his best performances as Cardinal Richelieu

 

The two-film scheme is helped by the fact that there are two very distinct stories of different tones, both of which are resolved, the first being the intrigue-filled, but relatively light-hearted The Queen's Diamonds story (in which Athos, Aramis and Porthos are wounded, but not killed), and the second, Milady's Revenge where the Palace forces seek to disrupt whatever kept them from succeeding in the first one. That story, with its be-headings, extended back-story and several prominent deaths, is less fun (although certainly as clever) and considerably darker. Where Part 1 is rollicking fun with minimal consequences, the stakes in Part 2 are very high, passions flare, and the sword-play becomes deadly and fraught. The humor is darker than the first, too. Despite the same cast and crew,** the two are very different films. The combination of the two of them would have left audiences winded and less ebullient (and more anticipatory of a continuance).

Two other highlights: David Watkins' exquisite cinematography
and the hysterically ornate costumes.

Taken together, they have a moralist's sensibility of the costs of frivolity and duplicity; adventure can be fun, but in a poisonous political atmosphere, one adventures at one's own risk. You can have a good time watching The Three Musketeers, but the story is incomplete without the paid dues in The Four Musketeers. Together, they make one of the finest adaptations of a classic novel ever put to film.

* Welch, not the most versatile of actresses, won the Golden Globe for her hilarious performance in The Three Musketeers and tearfully told the crowd "I've been waiting for this since One Million Years B.C.!"

** ...except for the score composers--Michel Legrand for The Three Musketeers and Lalo Schifrin for The Four Musketeers.