The Towering Inferno, by the numbers:
• 138 stories, stands San Francisco’s brand-new Glass Tower
• 300 partygoers celebrating this massive erection — the world’s largest
• $2 million saved by going with electric wiring inferior to the architect’s specifications
• one fire caused as a result
• and nearly three hours of star-studded cheese piled eight Oscar nominations high! (Not to mention one crappy tie-in game for the Atari 2600 I nonetheless played endlessly in grade school.)
Directed by John Guillermin (King Kong ’76) and dedicated with a stone face and sans-serif typeface to our nation’s mighty firefighters, Inferno is producer Irwin Allen’s disasterpiece, outdoing his previous smash of The Poseidon Adventure. (As with that 1972 inverted enterprise, Allen entrusted himself to call the shots for Inferno’s “action sequences.”)
Charming as all fk, Paul Newman (The Sting) is the architect who goes above and beyond to save several soap-opera lives; meanwhile, a haircut-cursed Steve McQueen (Bullitt) is the fire chief who doesn’t show up until 45 minutes have passed. Ironically, the film’s first half is the best half, whereas once the blaze has spread to multiple floors and endangers the wealthy people cutting rugs in the penthouse, the rescue efforts play out twice as long as they should. And yet damned if I don’t tense up every time I watch Newman climb up and down an unraveled staircase railing, which hangs perilously over an open chasm.
The supporting cast reads like a Who’s Who of Airport passengers, even if some of them were not: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain and two Roberts, Vaughn and Wagner. Among the various demises, Jennifer Jones (Beat the Devil) definitely gets the most cruel kiss-off, bouncing off a corner of the building on her way down. Her character was on a date with a lonely old man (Fred Astaire, Ghost Story), who at the end, in his charred tuxedo, is clearly disappointed not to find her waiting to continue their courtship. As a consolation, the tower’s head of security (O.J. Simpson, double murderer) hands the man her cat. Symbolism! —Rod Lott