Day 107 - The Towering Inferno



Day 107          The Towering Inferno [1974]
                          
Screenplay                    Stirling Silliphant
Based on                       ‘The Tower’ by Richard Martin Stern and ‘The Glass Inferno’ by Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson
Director                         John Guillermin
Cinematography            Fred J. Koenekamp & Joseph Biroc
Music                            John Williams
Leads                            Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, O. J. Simpson, Susan Flannery, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, Susan Blakely
Production                      Irwin Allen Productions, United Films

IMDb                                  6.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes                  71%

‘The Towering Inferno is a clusterfuck of hammy dialogue, overly ambitious cinematography, and explosions aplenty’… reads my favourite user review on Rotten Tomatoes of this movie. I would agree with the hammy dialogue, but I thought it was a masterclass in set-building and stunt coordination. This is your classic big budget disaster movie, where they have spent a whole lot of money on the cast and on gunpowder, but they forgot that the story is the most important part. The title is a spoiler in itself. From the very beginning we know that this glass tower will become a pillar of fire, and I actually think Guillermin did well to manage this impending doom. He lays out a few storylines, which are either based on love or escape or both, and then the action begins and doesn’t stop until they roll the credits. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman are the two calmest, strongest, most collected men throughout the entire film, fighting for liens and screen time. I did a fair amount of research on McQueen for a documentary once and I remember reading that Newman and McQueen did some serious battle over who was the star of the movie. In the end everything was shared – they have the same number of lines, diagonal billing (one stars name is bottom left, so it appears first, and the other stars name is top right, so it appears higher, therefore both names are ‘equal’ in a sense depending on which way you read them) and were most likely paid the same amount. McQueen was clever though in choosing the role of the fire chief as he doesn’t appear until 45 minutes in, by which time Newman has used most of his lines. The trivia from this film is brilliant and I encourage you to read into it. In the end though, all the movie amounts to is a bunch of high-paid actors running around while everything explodes around them. I would have liked to see the storyline focusing on why the fire started and whose fault it was that such a disaster could happen. This would have added some much-needed depth to the script. The Towering Inferno gets an ‘A’ for effort but is a ‘C+’ in reality.

Acting                             3 / 4
Writing                            2 / 4
Cinematography           3.5 / 4
Music                              2 / 4
HWF rating                 2 / 4

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