THE TOWERING INFERNO @ 50

 

Theatrically released on December 16th, 1974, The Towering Inferno turns 50 years old today. Representing the "height" of the disaster movie craze of the 1970s, it was both a box-office smash and, mostly praised by critics.

With the advancements in cinema technology in the 1970s, the phenomenon of the "blockbuster" began to drive production of movies that could take advantage of the larger screens and better sound systems. The "disaster" movie became a particularly appealing genre because it could showcase big visual effects and explosive sound, literally shaking the foundations of the theatre with massive bass bins pushing the limit of subsonic immersion. The master of the genre at that time was Irwin Allen, who worked for 20th Century Fox. He'd had a successful career in the 1960s with a string of fantastical science fiction TV series, including Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.

Allen had recently scored big with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), a big-budget, loaded-cast smash that set the stage for so many of the films that would follow. The film's tale of an ill-fated cruise ship, capsized by a tsunami, provided the template for viewers to enjoy the destruction of something massive alongside a cast stacked with some of the biggest stars of the day. It was an expensive proposition, but the box office for a hit could go through the roof, and these were movies that were definitely best seen on a BIG screen!

Securing the rights to make The Towering Inferno instigated something of a bidding war between the studios as they attempted to purchase the rights to the book, The Tower, written by Richard Martin Stern. Warner Bros. initially announced they'd purchased the book for $350,000.00, beating out 20th Century Fox and Columbia Pictures. Columbia bailed on the project at this point, but Fox bought the rights to a similar novel published a year later, The Glass Inferno, by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. It was a very similar story, and they approached Allen to direct, but he had heard about the WB plans for a similar film and warned Fox against producing a second competing movie about a burning skyscraper. This sort of thing had happened numerous times before, where similar movies were released to compete with each other, and both suffered as they cannibalized their audiences. Allen's efforts convinced Fox to negotiate with WB, and the two studios came to an agreement to co-produce a single film, with Allen at the helm, shot at the Fox studios. Fox would distribute the film in Canada and the US, while WB would have worldwide distribution, and a share structure was created for the profits.

With the corporate wrangling out of the way, the film could go into production and deal with casting, landing Steve McQueen and Paul Newman as the principal leads, who shared top billing for the film. William Holden was also in the cast and had lobbied for top billing, but was refused since his long-term standing as a box-office draw had been eclipsed by both McQueen and Newman. To provide dual top billing, the credits were arranged diagonally, with McQueen lower left and Newman upper right. Thus, each appeared to have "first" billing, depending on whether the credit was read left-to-right or top-to-bottom. Other stars included Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Richard Chamberlain, O.J. Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, and Jennifer Jones.

As mentioned, the film was a major box-office blockbuster upon its release. I have distinct memories of going to see it in the theatre and being blown away by the scope and scale of it all. Of course, I was only 11 at the time, so I didn't notice a lot of the clichés that would become common in the disaster genre in its wake. While many critics were impressed with the film, some were less than generous. Pauline Kael, writing for The New Yorker, panned the writing and characters as retreads from The Poseidon Adventure. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a stunt and not a story. It's a technical achievement more concerned with special effects than with people. That's why our attitude toward the film's cardboard characters is: let 'em burn!"

Regardless of the critical response, the film has a kind of iconic status for that generation of moviegoers. SCTV famously parodied the film, dedicating an entire 1982 season episode to their recreation of the film, as the fictional TV station moves into a too-tall and too-thin skyscraper plagued by shoddy workmanship and inferior materials, mocking the genre's overworked clichés.