Disaster Day: Short Walk to Daylight (1972)

Disaster movies were very much in vogue during the early 1970s, due in large part to the efforts of producer Irwin Allen, the so-called "Master of Disaster." 

The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974) and Earthquake (1974) all proved early box office hits during the decade, and the appeal of such films -- both then and now --  arises in witnessing the varied and colorful human responses to chaos, mortality, and apocalypse. 

Some characters in these dramas may rise above their petty everyday problems to survive. Others find the weight of their own prejudices, problems and weaknesses too tremendous to overcome, even in moments of high crisis.

The group dynamic is important too. In most good disaster films, power struggles arise, and group loyalty shifts back and forth.  Who knows the "right" path to survival?  The right fork-in-the-road that will save lives? 

One made-for-television movie that exploits this tried-and-true yet still efficacious disaster formula is Barry Shear's impressive Short Walk to Daylight (1972).  The TV movie aired on October 24, 1972 and involves a small handful of subway passengers in Manhattan who, late on a quiet Saturday night, become trapped in a catastrophic earthquake and must escape from the ruined, collapsed tunnels. 

The film stars James Brolin as a white police officer, Tom Phelan, and James McEachin as African-American train driver Ed, two very different prospective "leaders" during this particular crisis. 

Each man sees the survival of the group as his bailiwick and responsibility. And each man wants to call the shots based on his own knowledge and experience.

Meanwhile, the rest of the group consists of two young white women returning home from a night on the town, Joanne (Brooke Bundy) and Sylvia (Suzanne Charny), a sullen, disenfranchised African-American man, Alvin (Don Mitchell), and a hard-working African-American mother ending the night shift, Dorella (Abbey Lincoln).  

Also on the train when the quake hits is a junkie, Jax (Lazaro Perez) and his girlfriend, Sandy (Laurette Spang). We begin the subterranean odyssey with these eight characters, and along the way, their numbers begin to dwindle in crisis after crisis.

The elephant in this subway system, other than the earthquake itself, is clearly racial tension.

As noted above, Tom and Ed butt heads over leadership, and whether to remain in the train, or to seek escape in the tunnel systems.  More plainly, Tom and Alvin also develop an immediate dislike of each other.  Tom takes Alvin for a criminal and thug at first, and Alvin sees only a racist cop who is out to judge him.

As the film progresses, Alvin and Tom confront each other as well as their own prejudices. Although they don't realize it at first, they are each  looking only at a stereotype, rather than the individual.

Desperation grows in the tunnels as several escape routes are blocked, and one tunnel route system under Brooklyn begins to flood.  The group realizes quickly that "no one is digging for" them early on a Sunday morning, under Wall Street, or anywhere else for that matter. If they are going to survive, it's up to them.

A crisp 73 minutes in duration, Short Walk to Daylight makes the most of a small budget by fostering a powerful sense of claustrophobia. After the film's first shot of Manhattan by night, the film cuts to a view of Sylvia and Joanne descending a long flight of stairs.  From that shot on, the film never actually returns to the world of the surface or the world of daylight.

Instead, after the earthquake scuttles the train, the film adopts a shaky cam to present an informal, spontaneous aura to the action. Sometimes, the camera is also positioned behind broken glass, observing characters through a shattered lens, in essence. 

This kind of expressive mise-en-scene, along with the minimal lighting and restrictive set confines, grants Short Walk to Daylight a strong sense of disorder, chaos and urgency.

The small, gritty details are appreciated, and worth noting too.  The Iowa girl, Joanne (Bundy) breaks her nose in the quake, and spends the movie with a bloodied face. And Tom's shirt is covered in sweat for the narrative's duration. The persistent overlapping dialogue also adds to the unnerving vibe of a disaster unfolding "as live," essentially.

Short Walk to Daylight is also bolstered by a few impressive effects sequences, thanks to the hard work of Albert Whitlock.

A good matte painting reveals an overburdened tunnel at one point, and near the film's climax, water bursts into the tunnel and gravely imperils the survivors.  One character is washed out to sea in the rushing waves.  It all looks very convincing, and very deadly.

But in the final analysis, what works best about Short Walk to Daylight is the intense, unswerving focus on the eight diverse dramatis personae.

Tom is a good cop, but one who thinks "you can shake people enough," so they'll do what he wants.

Alvin, by contrast, is a man with an overdeveloped persecution complex, and sees the earthquake as yet another one of the daily hurdles in his life to overcome.  "All my life, this city has been coming down on me," he notes, "and all I have to say is let it crumble on down."

The most sympathetic character in the drama is Abbey Lincoln's character, Dorella, who is slow to trust and like her fellow survivors, and already exhausted from a hard night's work. 

The only thing Dorella desires is to be back at home, on a Sunday morning, with her two little boys.  Every Sunday morning you see, she gets to relax, and her children bring Mom breakfast in bed for a change. 

There's a moment in the film -- traversing a flooded tunnel compartment -- when Dorella's life is unexpectedly imperiled, and this TV-movie gets you exactly where it wants you. After her monologue about Sunday mornings and her two sons, all you can think about are Dorella's children, facing the thought of life without their Mom.

Short Walk to Daylight never wears out its welcome, and never returns to daylight, even in its valedictory moment.  The reason, of course, is that all the drama is right here: these diverse people forced to contend with one another in the dark.

The issues at play, like their locale, are all part of the "underneath" of the American experience.  The battles over the law, jurisdiction and race reveal how different from one another Americans can sometimes seem; in every regard from philosophy to background. But ultimately, the film also reveals how similar we all are aside from such skin-deep differences.

Many disaster movies thrive on epic and expensive imagery: buildings falling down, skyscrapers on fire, the end of the world, even.  Short Walk to Daylight features good but minimal visual effects and saves the real fireworks for the character interaction.  It's a good call, because a Short Walk to Daylight is actually better than a  big-budget 1996 disaster film with roughly the same premise, called Daylight. There, the focus was on impressive stunts and mock heroics, not people...and what people fear losing. 

Yet loss is the real looming threat of any disaster or crisis.

What moves us and motivates us is the terrible fear of losing loved ones, or even our lives. And that's what Short Walk to Daylight never forgets; the human  component of such tragedy.  We all live for those Sunday mornings with our families, but man proposes, and God disposes, right?

Disaster Day: The Wave (2015)

In 2016, I’ve devoted some real estate here on the blog to “Disaster Day,” my reviews of classic disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (192), The Towering Inferno (1974) and even Earthquake (1974).

My obsession with these movies runs deep, but for a good reason, I hope. Specifically, many of these genre films from the seventies seem like more than mere demolition derbies. Instead, they offer unique viewpoints on life, and how to survive in difficult times. I think, for example, of Gene Hackman's reverend in The Poseidon Adventure and his boot-strap brand of  "those who help themselves" Christianity.

By contrast, many modern disaster films, such as San Andreas (2015) feel much more concerned with special effects than with people, let alone philosophical musings.

But 2015’s The Wave -- a Norwegian film from Roar Uthaug -- is a worthy heir to the disaster genre flicks I name-checked above. 

Intriguingly, it’s a highly personal film. Most genre flicks give audiences faded celebrities -- Shelley Winters, Fred Astaire and George Kennedy -- by the (capsized) boatload but The Wave reinvigorates the formula, in part, by cutting out the fat in the cast.  

Our main characters are in one family, for example. 

It's true,  that we meet one or two other victims (a neighbor and a couple visiting a tourist hotel), but the primary focus here is on the family, and how its members relate to one another, and cope with a day nobody believed would ever come. 

The special effects in The Wave go beyond the realm of the impressive to actually stunning, but -- importantly -- aren’t asked to carry the picture. 

The special effects scenes are beautiful and effective, yes, but limited, and that too seems like a re-write of modern genre rules, which seem to demand constant spectacle and constant one-up-man-ship. The tsunami featured in The Wave decimates a seaside town, but doesn’t bring down skyscrapers, planes in flight, or whole continents.  In essence, then, The Wave is rooted in reality, not fantasy.

The Wave is a low-budget film and that’s a contrast to the disaster films made by Hollywood, but its focus on the essential qualities of good drama make for a big impact, and big achievements. With fewer characters for us to keep track of, the film’s danger feels more immediate. And with limited scenes of mayhem and destruction in the mix, the effects transmit as believable, instead of over-the-top. 

Once more, this approach reels in viewers, focusing and refocusing attention not on destruction, but on suspense instead.

Accordingly, The Wave is a thoroughly involving and terrifying film, and a welcome addition to a genre that, since the 1970s, has reveled in trickery and excess instead of good dramatic storytelling.

In beautiful Geiranger -- a tourist village in Western Norway -- a geologist named Kristian (Kristoffer Jonner) has devoted his professional life to monitoring a local mountain range for signs of collapse, or a rock slide. 

Such an event has happened before, decades in the past, and one occurring now would generate a huge tsunami. The town’s unsuspecting denizens and tourists would have only ten minutes to reach high ground (87 feet above sea level…) once a collapse begins.

But now, feeling like a stranger to his family, including his wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp), teenage son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and young daughter, Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande), Kristian has accepted a new job in the city, at a big oil company.

Immediately following his last day on the job in Geiranger, Kristian begins to detect signs that something is wrong inside the mountain. 

His boss, Arvin (Fridtjov Saheim) refuses to sound the alarm and evacuate the village, for fear of destroying, economically, the tourist season in Geiranger. While Kristian makes his case for warning the town, he separates from his family, as Idun goes to her job at the hotel, and Sondre skateboards in the hotel basement.

Before long, Kristian's long-feared disaster strikes.

What do you do when disaster seems impending, and you’re the only person who can, literally, sound the alarm? 

That’s one big question raised in The Wave. Kristian lives in fear and anxiety because he knows that a rock slide is a matter of “when,” not “if.”  

Accordingly, he has become something less-than an ideal father and husband. He is galvanized with fear -- every day -- by the possibility of disaster. Others -- in and out of his family -- view Kristian as “Chicken Little,” one might conclude. 

For him, the sky is always about to fall.

The only problem? It could fall, at any time. With minimal warning.

Arvid, Kristian’s superior, meanwhile, is the polar opposite. He is a man with apparently no imagination, and he denies, even to himself, the signs of the coming apocalypse. Like the town elders in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) who just want to keep the beaches open, Arvid wants to avoid panic, humiliation and false alarms at all costs.  

I suppose if one is willing to consider this conflict or dynamic on a wider scale, there's a real life corollary worth considering. 

Arvid ignores impending disaster -- and the considered evidence of a scientist (Kristian) -- in favor of economic and personal concerns.  

And yes, this exact dynamic is happening right now, and every day, regarding climate change. The Wave, without being preachy in the slightest, makes the case that our failure to responsibly care-take the environment will eventually bite us in the ass. 

It isn’t an “if.”  It’s a “when.”

In The Wave, Arvid pays a price for his failure to heed evidence and facts. While investigating the mountain, he becomes the first to die, thus paying penance for his “keep the beaches open” economy-over-environment viewpoint. Similarly, his failure to act responsibly when it makes a difference, causes many people to die.  

And the tourist season is destroyed anyway.

Meanwhile, Kristian lives through his worst nightmare. In this equation, the scientist plays the role of the mythical Cassandra. He knows what is coming, but is ignored, and ultimately, helpless to stop destiny. 

Still, Kristian’s arc in The Wave is significant and affecting. After he faces the fear of what is happening (not what might happen), he becomes the man his family needs him to be.

The feeling of terror and suspense in The Wave are palpable. Director Uthaug gets much mileage from the classic ticking clock conceit. The mountain collapses into the water near Geiranger, and the ten minute countdown till disaster commences. 

When it starts, Kristian is separated from his wife and son.  He sets his watch for ten minutes, and knows just how long he has to get his daughter to safety, and find Idun and Sondre.

Suddenly as he realizes, there is no time left. A missed call, which goes to voice mail, could be the difference between his family’s survival or destruction. Or a missing hotel resident could delay the departure of the tourist evacuation just long enough to cause total disaster.

The Wave isn’t just about “time,” either. The equation for survival also includes distance and, actually, height. 

One of the film’s most harrowing sequences finds Kristian -- with young Julia in tow -- realizing that he can’t make it to the desired high ground by car in the remaining time left, due to traffic.  

Accordingly, he exits the car with his daughter, picks her up, and starts running.  In the background behind Kristian and Julia, one can see the wave looming, growing ever closer. Then, a neighbor is injured, and Kristian must send Julia ahead so he can take care of the wounded friend, and get her to safety too.

Another powerful technique that The Wave makes use of comes straight from the horror genre. 

Many times, horror movies begin with title cards suggesting that what we are about to see is based on a true story.  

The Wave opens with archival footage of earlier tsunami incidents in Norway. The movie informs us of a disaster in 1905 (with 60 people killed) and again in April, 1934, when a tsunami killed 40.  

The inference is obvious: The Wave is not some far-fetched fantasy. It is not showing audiences just something that could happen.  Rather, it tells a story about history -- predictable history -- repeating itself.  The film’s end card resurrects this call to reality.  We are told the mountain near Geiranger still stands…and scientists aren’t sure when it will collapse.

But they are sure it will collapse.

If that prediction of future terror doesn’t chill the blood, you’re watching the wrong genre, perhaps.

The Wave features many of the tropes one expects of the disaster films. There are panicky survivors who jeopardize everybody’s safety.  There are feats of courage. There are people trapped underwater.  There are families separated and fearing the worst.

But instead of simply repeating such chestnuts in a hackneyed way The Wave floats above the predictable. 

Consider the scene in which Idun, a tourist, and Sondre are trapped in a bunker rapidly filling with water. The tourist panics and begins to mindlessly drown Sondre. How Idun reacts to his behavior is surprising, smart, and brutally efficient. There’s no debate, no second-guessing...she just acts. And I like to think I’d have the presence of mind to react as quickly given the same circumstances.

Suspenseful, emotionally-affecting, and beautifully-rendered, both in terms of cinematography and special effects, The Wave proves that disaster films still have a lot of life left in them when vetted by thoughtful filmmakers. 

More than that, the disaster film looks and sounds great with a Norwegian accent.

The Films of 1974: Earthquake

It’s no secret that, of late, I’ve been experiencing a resurgence of interest -- a love affair of sorts, I guess you could say -- with the disaster films of the 1970s.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) hold up beautifully, for example. Each of those Irwin Allen-produced films concerns more than chaos and wreckage. These are films about the human spirit, and the drive that compels us to keep fighting when all hope seems lost.

My love affair with the genre, however, hits a speed bump with this week’s featured film, 1974’s Earthquake.

film written by George Fox and Mario Puzo and from director Mark Robson simply isn’t in the same league as the efforts I note above.  Instead, Earthquake is a meandering, largely suspense-less effort that suffers from the fact that the action is too spread out, and therefore tension is sacrificed.  A ship at sea and a high-rise on fire are largely inescapable, and concern people with nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  Earthquake’s central disaster -- a quake that registers 7 on the Richter Scale -- doesn’t mine any particular location for suspense, and the result is a film that often feels aimless and directionless.

It doesn’t help, either, that high-point of this film -- the earthquake – occurs after the first hour, and leaves very little of excitement left for the film’s denouement. 

The acting in the film is pretty terrible too (Ava Gardner, I’m looking at you!), and the character relationships are, at times, baffling.

The last straw, perhaps, is the inconsistent special effects. Some moments during the quake are believably rendered, but other moments -- such as the one notorious moment involving blobs of cartoon blood in an elevator -- are downright ludicrous.

Every genre has its highs and lows for certain, and the disaster film format is no exception.  I believe was spoiled by the quality of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, watched back-to-back. Earthquake is thoroughly pedestrian.

But hey, at least Earthquake is better than The Swarm (1978), right?

“The question is: what in God’s name do we do now?”

In Los Angeles, at the Seismological Institute, a young graduate student analyzes data suggesting a tremor, and then a massive earthquake will strike the city in less than 24 hours. His superiors are reluctant to believe his dire warning, and equally reluctant to report his findings to the governor and the mayor.

When the predicted tremor occurs, however, the seismologists leap into action, and the governor mobilizes the National Guard in response.

But no amount of preparation can adequately safe-guard Los Angeles from the earthquake that strikes next. Rating a 7 on the Richter scale, this quake brings skyscrapers to the ground, destroys free-ways, and sends house careening off the Hollywood hills. Worse, the Hollywood Reservoir Dam crumbles, and parts of the city flood.

Through it all, a determined architect, Stewart Graff (Charlton Heston) in a bad marriage with his boss’s daughter (Ava Gardner) shows determination and pluck. 

He rescues a number of people, including his boss (Lorne Greene)m at his high-rise office, and then teams up with a suspended police officer, Lou Slade (George Kennedy) to rescue others in the city, including Stewart’s mistress, Denise (Genevieve Bujold) and her young son, Cory (Tiger Williams).

While Stewart attempts to save the injured and dying, others, including a psychotic National Guardsman (Marjoe Gortner), attempt to take advantage of the disaster for their own twisted agendas.

“This used to be a hell of a town.”

In my reviews of other 1970s disaster films, I’ve concentrated on the notion that films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno thrive on philosophical ideas about their disasters and human nature, not merely the depiction of those disasters. For example, The Poseidon Adventure is about fighting -- to the last breath -- to survive in difficult circumstances; to find the part of God that dwells inside of you, to quote Gene Hackman’s character, Reverend Scott.

And The Towering Inferno assiduously draws a contrast between reckless, money-grubbing Big Business (represented by Richard Chamberlain and William Holden), and the selflessness of San Francisco’s municipal fire fighters, led by O’Halloran (Steve McQueen). One of these forces cares more about profit than people, and it isn’t the firefighters.

Earthquake doesn’t feature a thematic through line or depth that is comparable, alas. Early on, there is much discussion about the responsibility of the seismologists to warn someone in authority about the approaching quake.  Is it right to sound the alarm, knowing that it might start a panic to do so? Is it right to report speculation about a quake, and risk looking like a fool to the media and city politicians if no quake occurs?

These are truly intriguing points, but after they are raised, the movie totally abandons them. 

Without a central location -- or even a galvanizing idea -- to hold the film together, Earthquake quickly proves episodic and underwhelming in terms of its narrative and the hunt for deeper meaning.  

We never find out, for instance, why Stewart and Remy hate each other to such a dramatic degree.  They are an endlessly bicker-some couple, and it’s difficult to have much sympathy for either one of them.  Stewart is having affair, for instance, and Remy fakes suicide attempts on a regular basis.  It’s not a terrible surprise when a Biblical flood washes them away in the film’s final moments, given their “sins.”  But the scene isn’t as powerful as it might be because the audience doesn’t really care for the characters. 

Other moments in Earthquake are downright bad. For instance, Walter Matthau hams it up as a silly barfly wearing a pimp hat in several unnecessary scenes. Why is his character even in the film? He’s a cartoon character who proves agonizingly unfunny, and -- at the same time -- a walking, talking stereotype.

Similarly, what are viewers to make of Marjoe Gortner’s character, a muscle-bound grocery store worker in the National Guard who chooses the event of an earthquake to address his grievances with a group of bullies, and then attempts to rape Victoria Principal’s character, Rosa?

Is he a psychopath? Nuts? A self-hating body-builder?

More than likely, Gortner's character is present to provide some third act tension. The film badly requires that tension because the earthquake has already struck, and the flood is saved for the denouement. Gortner's "Joad" may also represent a Vietnam Age distaste for soldiers, which was seen in a lot of 1970s movies and TV programs, and today transmits as pretty superficial.

The most ridiculous moment in Earthquake, however, arrives when a group of survivors board an elevator during the quake. The car shakes loose of its cable and careens several dozen floors to the ground. There’s a great shot of the screaming people in the compartment, but then several big ,animated bubbles of bright red blood are superimposed over the footage, and launched at the screen.

What the hell?

For a film struggling so mightily to seem believable, and to meaningfully compete with The Towering Inferno, this a reality-shattering moment of the highest order.

Earthquake gets so little right, actually. Ava Gardner is terribly miscast as Lorne Greene’s daughter and Charlton Heston’s wife. I believe she was only three years younger than Greene at this point, and she and Heston share what can only politely be termed “anti-chemistry.”  

Worse, some moments -- like the rescue of Genevieve Bujold’s son from an electrical cable -- make the earthquake seem small and not, literally earth shattering.

But most disappointing of all is the focus on soap opera plotting. Stewart’s promotion, Slade’s disenchantment with the police force, Mile Quade’s motorcycle stunt, Denise’s acting job and other issues are all brought up, but ultimately left unresolved in the face of utter destruction.  

I suppose the film could have considered the way man proposes, and God disposes, but even that idea is not enunciated here.

All that established, I should also write that Earthquake features some beautiful matte-painting of the destroyed Los Angeles landscape.

I think that just about the only way this film could truly be described as gripping is if audiences saw it in theaters in Sensurround. I can see how that rumbling effect would add a whole new dimension to the film’s narrative.

Without the support of this gimmick, Earthquake is rendered, sadly, a completely two-dimensional affair.

Movie Trailer: Earthquake (1974)

The Films of 1974: The Towering Inferno

The Towering Inferno (1974) is the towering accomplishment of the 1970s cinema of disaster. 

This Irwin Allen film was directed by John Guillermin (King Kong [1976]), nominated for eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, and it took home awards for best cinematography, best editing, and even best song . 

As one might expect from a list of kudos like that, The Towering Inferno is dazzling in terms of visual presentation, and more than that, the film is highly suspenseful. Some scenes, especially those involving the fate of Robert Wagner’s character, are also harrowing, and quite frightening. The fire effects are, for the most part, legitimately terrifying too.  

Yet The Towering Inferno holds up best today -- more than forty years later -- due to its carefully constructed social commentary.                                          

I noted in my review of Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972) last week how that disaster film transmitted a specific philosophy: a brand of muscular Christianity that states, essentially, God helps those who help themselves. Gene Hackman’s character, the reverend, was a spiritual leader, rallying the ship’s survivors to survive one crisis after the other.

The Towering Inferno doesn’t present a spiritual story-line to go with its chaotic tale of an out-of-control fire, but instead transmits a strong message about one very real pitfall of unfettered capitalism.  

Essentially, the film suggests that if the contest for a business is between turning a profit, or insuring the safety of its customers….the bottom line is going to win out, and people aren’t.

As we discover early in the film, shortcuts have been taken on the fiery building’s electrical wiring by a morally bankrupt subcontractor, Simmons (Richard Chamberlain). 

Simmons wasn’t exactly acting alone, either. Jim Duncan (William Holden), the head of the construction company, was going perilously over-budget on the project, and needed Simmons to save two-million dollars...somewhere.

Well, Simmons found the place where he could save that money. And in the end, though two million dollars were saved, at least before the disaster, roughly two-hundred people also lost their lives because of his actions.

This idea of a high-rise building being a dangerous fiasco or scam, essentially (especially considering the company’s abundantly ironic motto: “we build for life,”) is dynamically reflected in one of the film’s intimate subplots or "B" stories. 

A con-man named Claiborne (Best Supporting Actor nominee Fred Astaire), attempts to bilk a party-goer, doomed Lisolette (Jennifer Jones) out of her money. He too values money more than he does people.

Even the very structure underlining the film's character conflicts -- with corporate big-wigs like Duncan and Simmons on one side, and heroic, municipal firefighters like O'Halloran on the other -- adds to the leitmotif about the pitfalls of avarice and greed. A businessman is a person out to line his or her pockets. A municipal fire worker, by comparison, is someone who has dedicated his or her life to helping others.

There's clearly a conflict between those goals, and The Towering Inferno diagrams those conflicts beautifully.

Because it includes this social commentary about our society, The Towering Inferno isn’t mere escapism or disaster porn, as it has been accused of being by some critics.

Instead, this film from Irwin Allen proves a riveting and suspenseful experience that warns its audience that in their rush to make money, some people will cut corners…at the expense of the rest of us.

“We have an equipment problem.”

On the day of a gala party celebrating its opening, the architect behind the 138 story (and 135 floor…) Glass Tower, Doug Roberts flies into San Francisco by helicopter.  

He is greeted at the tower by his romantic partner, Susan Franklin (Faye Dunaway), who informs him that she wants to stay in the city and take an important new media job rather than leave the city with Doug.

Following this meeting, Doug is alarmed to  learn that safety-back-ups are not yet installed in the building, and there are indications of a fire somewhere in the skyscraper. He discovers that some wiring is too hot, and realizes that the electrical sub-contractor, Simmons (Chamberlain), did not follow specs. Instead, he used cheap wiring with no conduit covers.

Doug is worried the situation could escalate to a full-fledged disaster, but the construction company’s boss, Jim Duncan (William Holden) refuses to cancel the impending party, in part because a Senator (Robert Vaughn) and the Mayor are slated to attend.

Soon, a fuse box blows out on Floor 81, and starts a raging, ever-growing fire.  This conflagration begins to burn out of control, and Doug calls the S.F. Fire Department after a co-worker, Geddings (Norman Burton) dies from burns. 

Fireman Mike O’Halloran (Steve McQueen) arrives on the scene with a team of dedicated fire-men, but he informs Doug that if the fire is above the seventh floor, there is no good way for his men to combat it.

The fire is on the 81st floor..and moving up.

This situation goes from bad to worse as the fire spreads, killing the passengers on an express elevator, and endangering all the party goers on the top floor, in the Promenade Room.

“I want both, and I can’t have both, can I?”

I noted above that The Towering Inferno -- based on the books The Tower and The Glass Inferno -- is actually a social critique of unregulated capitalism. 

A construction company in bed with political elites (the aforementioned senator and mayor) has cut corners to make its budget and get the construction permits that it needs. 

The budget is ultimately satisfied, but human decency is not.  

This leviathan of a skyscraper may be beautiful to look at, but is demonstrably unsafe. 

“Built for life,” in this case, means built for a day. The building does not survive its inaugural celebration.

Simmons is the obvious bad guy here. He installs wiring without conduit covers, and as a result, the wires get too hot. They overheat. They start a fire.

It’s easy to blame Simmons for the entire crisis since he was the hands-on fellow who changed Doug’s specs. 

But there is plenty of responsibility to go around, as Simmons points out. Duncan, of course, wanted to save money, and that became his most urgent concern.  Even if he didn’t specifically tell Simmons to authorize faulty wiring, he created the environment wherein Simmons felt it was permissible to do so. 

 In The Towering Inferno’s climax, Duncan is contrite because he knows fully the role he played in the deaths of 200 people. “All I can do now is pray to God I can stop this from happening again,” he notes.

For some, that may be too little too late.

Similarly, Doug bears some responsibility too. True, he absolutely designed a building he believed would be safe. But Doug never ran his ideas past by an expert who might know something about skyscrapers, fires, and safety issues; a man like O’Halloran. 

O’Halloran calls him out in the film over this particular oversight, noting that Doug is fully aware that buildings as tall as the Glass Tower can’t be protected from fire, and yet Doug keeps designing such buildings.  

At movie’s end, Doug sees the error of his ways, and says that the ruined building ought to be left standing as a “shrine to all the bullshit in the world.”

This was, actually, a building erected on the shaky foundations of bullshit. It had better marketing --- built for life? -- than it did actual safety precautions. It is a reminder of what happens when greed is made more important than human lives.

Poor old Mr. Claiborne is not a bad person, but he too lives by scamming money from people. He pretends to be rich, but can’t even afford taxi fare, as we see in the film’s first act.  He place a greater value on money than on people, and when he loses poor Lisolette, he sees the error of his ways.  He has lost a person he loves, and nothing can make that loss better for him. It was a person, not a “mark” in a con game that ultimately matters most to him. Claiborne's punishment is that he shall be left alone -- with only Lisolette's cat, Elke -- when he could have had the companionship and love of a dear woman.

The film's leitmotif about runaway capitalism and avarice is even mirrored, to some degree, in Susan’s story.  She’s been waiting for five years to get a promotion to story editor at her job, and now the opportunity lands in her lap. She expresses her desire, openly, to have it all, both her job and the man she loves. “I want both, and I can’t have both,” she complains. We can see here the seeds of conspicuous consumption, and the idea that we can have everything we want, when we want it, all the time.

The party-goers in the Promenade are not exactly sterling characters, either, for the most part. 

They panic, they push, and they sow disorder through their ill-considered actions. We want them to survive, but cannot escape the notion, either, that they are in danger in the first place because of their wealth (their money, again), and their power. 

Again, and again, these rich people put themselves first. Two women run onto the roof, for instance, for a rescue helicopter, even though Doug warns them not to go. These women interfere, and the copter crashes and burns. People die because they didn't obey the rules.  Just as Duncan and Simmons didn't obey the rules.

At another point, the party-goers flood the express elevator, even though they have been told not to do so; that the express elevator is dangerous.  They are killed.

The message here seems to be that these people want everything, right now, and nothing -- not even safety concerns -- is going to stop them from getting what they want.

But just try negotiating with a fire...

And of course, attempting to restore order in this chaotic situation we find heroic O’Halloran. He is not a fire-fighter for the money, the power, or the prestige. He is a municipal worker: a civic worker reporting to a public hierarchy.  

And even though the powerful don’t listen to him, O'Halloran rushes in to rescue them when they are endangered. They could not care less about his life, but he puts his neck on the line again and again for the civilians at risk.  

At the end of the movie, O'Halloran has been through the wringer, and yet one feels he would do it again in a heart-beat.  In one great shot, O'Halloran takes in the scene on the ground floor.  He scans the wreckage. His men are in body bags. Their equipment is strewn across the floor.  

This is the cost of staying on a budget; of making a profit  At least for O'Halloran.

O'Halloran serves as the living, breathing mirror of those he saves. He’s not interested in money or power. He’s interested in putting safety, not profit, first.  

By contrast, Doug is the character in the film who starts on one side (that of the corporate interests), and changes allegiances as the truth about the building is revealed.  In the end, he is left humbled by this experience, and will not make the same mistake again.  The film’s closing lines involve his desire to seek out O’Halloran the next time that he designs a building. 

He knows where to find him. That's where he's been all along.

The Towering Inferno's tragedy of greed is played out against an amazing and spectacular cinematic background.  

One scene that remains awesome and terrifying involves Robert Wagner’s character, Don Bigelow.  He dons a wet towel, and runs out into a room on fire, convinced he can safely reach an exit.  

He is consumed in fire in seconds. It devours him.

It goes without saying that this horrifying moment is not faked with digital special effects. A stunt man accomplished this run, and it was edited for maximum impact in slow-motion photography so the terror is extended. The moment is stunning and horrifying, and impossible to look away from. It captures the beauty and destructive power of fire in visceral terms.

Other scenes will cause your belly to drop, or flop. 

Late in the film, one nail-biting rescue attempt involves sending a lone person in a chair across a dangling line connecting two buildings  Although some of the process work has aged a bit -- the rear projection, specifically -- this moment still looks great in high-definition. A poor soul sits in that chair (belted in), and is moves slowly in mid-air between burning building and distant sanctuary.

I would not want to take that ride.

Before the film is done, we also see water tanks explode and flood the fire -- buffeting the survivors in the Promenade Room -- and a scenic elevator come off its track and dangle dangerously 110 floors from terra firma. 

These moments are executed with an eye towards maximum suspense and realism.

What surprised me, watching the film today, is that every minute seems genuinely suspenseful, rather than histrionic, and I actually cared about what happens to the characters, especially those played by Newman, McQueen, Dunaway, Astaire, and Jones. 

They don’t all make it out alive.

I felt very enthusiastic on my re-watch of The Poseidon Adventure last week, and assumed that The Towering Inferno might not compare favorably. The Poseidon Adventure was short, to the point, and right on target with its commentary about mankind making his own way in the world.

On the contrary, however, The Towering Inferno may just be the zenith of the seventies disaster format.  

The actors are not just good, but fully engaged, the danger is palpable, the threat is not merely pervasive, but in a way, beautiful, and there’s an undercurrent of social critique underlining all the action. The story means something, in the final analysis.

And that’s how you made blockbusters in the mid-1970s.