Welcome back, reader! Last week I suggested that we would be looking at a summer blockbuster genre that was a tentpole for quite some time. I promise that we’re getting there, but all great journeys do take time and most are filled with minor detours that take us places that we never imagined that we’d get to see. This journey promises to be as meandering and sometimes convoluted as the genre it represents. I refer to the disaster genre, as the title may suggest. The disaster movie genre has been around for a very long time. The genre’s genesis is typically credited to Zero Hour! as that film served as the primary fodder for the much more popular Airplane! which gained a surprising amount of popularity due to its tongue in cheek spoofing. However, the genre does technically go back further than Zero Hour! which came out in 1957, in case you were curious. The genre really was alive and well in some form all through the 50s with a slew of alien invasion films and the early 60s. Then by the late 60s the genre had started to putter out somewhat. However, like Mick Jagger, the disaster genre wasn’t quite ready to call it quits. In 1973, The Poseidon Adventure was released to relatively good reviews from both critics and audiences. This resurgence would last another decade and span countless films before the disaster genre would finally go back to sleep.
Where am I going with this? Well, to be honest, I wasn’t really sure of the answer to that question myself until I got to the end of the last paragraph,but the fact that disaster films are still being made says a lot about our culture and it’s entertainment preferences. Now in order to understand what I mean by disaster film, let me lay down some cornerstones of criteria that constitute your average disaster film formula. First, there’s got to be a reasonably large ensemble case of actors and actresses who are either currently, or recently big names. Second, there’s got to be a lot of plodding through several unnecessary romantic subplots. Third, one of the ‘main characters’ has to make a sacrifice of self in order to save the party. Four, there has to be at least one old person and one young person for some reason. Five, the disaster at hand needs to be pretty implausible and over-the-top. And finally, there’s usually a really cheesy pop song written specifically for the movie, again for some reason. That last one is the most negotiable of the criteria, but as a music guy, I took notice.
Now that we have all the pleasantries out of the way, let’s get this disaster off the ground! The Towering Inferno came out about two years after Poseidon Adventure. The latter had been a surprise success and as happens with Hollywood, whenever something is successful, they try to duplicate that success as many times as possible. What sets Inferno apart from other productions of the time is the fact that the movie represented the first time in film history that two major studios cooperated on one project. 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. had each optioned novels about skyscraper fires at around the same time and in order to better capitalize on the concept, they agreed to co-produce one film instead of releasing two competing films at around the same time. I’ll just let that sink in, and for the slower folks out there, here’s the clincher one more time: Fox cooperated with someone that wasn’t Fox. If only that trend had lasted. From a social context, the World Trade Center Complex had opened only about one year previous to the release of this movie. That’s going to be important a little later.
Looking at the movie itself, it’s pretty unremarkable. It’s got a huge spread of reasonably big names that I expect most of my readers won’t really know, but some of the highlights include Steve, McQueen, Paul Newman, Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, and *ahem* OJ Simpson. Oh, Mike Lookinland of Brady Bunch fame was in this movie as well. That about covers the huge ensemble cast requirement. As I said, the movie is pretty unremarkable. The main plot, as far as I could ascertain, involves a high rise skyscraper that’s been recently completed. This tower has been built using substandard electrical wiring and that wiring sparks a fire on the 81st floor of the building. Now that may not seem like an over-the-top disaster premise, and indeed it really isn’t. It’s the way that the disaster in question gets handled later on that’s over-the-top so bear with me.
To complicate matters, there’s a grand opening party being held in the top floor banquet hall the evening that the building decides to catch fire. All of the who’s who of the city are in attendance including the building owner, the contractor that oversaw construction and the architect that designed the building, although he’s busy trying to figure out exactly how many corners were cut in construction most of the time so we’ll get back to all that. In order to cover the romantic subplot criteria, there are several. Robert Wagner’s character, who I only recognize from his work on NCIS, has a thing going on with his assistant. For some reason, he has a bedroom suite right off of his office, which is situated right off of a central operations office, I think. There’s a bed! I swear I can’t make this up. To make things worse, I really don’t know exactly what it is that his character even does, or why he’s in the building in the first place. He says a line towards the beginning of the film, then he and his assistant abscond themselves to the office/sex room thing, and then he dies burning up in a blaze. Even his mistress catches fire and falls to her death. Yeah, this movie is potentially not for children.
*Whew!* Still with me, because we have more. The architect, played by Paul Newman, has a relationship with the Faye Dunaway character. I’m pretty sure she’s just there to be arm candy for Paul Newman, but who knows? They spend very little time on developing that relationship beyond simply telling us that it does, in fact, exist, mostly due to Paul Newman galavanting around the building trying to do stuff. Then there’s Fred Astaire. He plays a down-on-his-luck conman who’s working a gig on a character played by Jennifer Jones. The movie doesn’t actually explain how the two of them came into contact with one another, but by the time the party starts, they’re already an item. That relationship goes through the cliche ‘I don’t care that you’re a liar’ arc as Jennifer Jones explains to Fred Astaire that she already knew he was a conman and that she loves him anyway and that she never wants to be without him again. After all that, she falls over 120 stories out of an elevator and dies. They even show her body ricocheting off the building. It would be tragic if it weren’t so fake in every sense of the word, both the development of the relationship and the ensuing plummet. Finally, there’s the mayor and his wife. They don’t really get much screen time, but for some reason, they have a moment where the wife is worried about their daughter and the husband has to console her. I’m not really sure why I should care, but whatever.
The third bit of criteria is a little harder to nail down in this movie. There end up being several ‘main characters’ that make sacrifices in order to save others. The Jennifer Jones character in particular, beyond being exceptionally clumsy, falls to her death as a result of saving a young girl from doing the same. Several of the larger male characters get swept away by a torrent of water at the end of the film. However, our two top billed actors, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, both survive the film so here’s to being slightly different I suppose. Even OJ Simpson survives, and he was in a supporting role!
There is definitely a cheesy pop song that was written for the film. It’s called “We May Never Love Like This Again”. It’s performed by Maureen McGovern, who also did the pop song for Poseidon Adventure, oddly enough. It’s a mediocre bundle of 70s pop cheesiness. The lyrics are awkward, the melody is mundane, and McGovern’s voice is kind of weird. Since we’re on the music, the score for this film was done by none other than John Williams, a wasted opportunity to be sure as I noticed that there wasn’t really extensive use of music in this movie to begin with..It’s as if the director thought that letting the ambient noises permeate each scene would draw the viewer more into the film. He was partially right and that’s one thing that I can say that’s positive about this film. That aspect, oddly enough, actually helps to suspend one’s disbelief more than if it were overflowing with musical scoring.
Now the over-the-top disaster is about as convoluted as the rest of the film. Could a skyscraper catch fire? Sure, of course it could. However, I have to believe that a lot of what is portrayed in this movie is just total fiction. First, the fire starts on the 81st floor as a result of bad wiring. Okay, I’m on board so far. Next, the fire starts to spread across that floor and a little bit into the floor above it. Still okay right now. Then things get super weird. The gas lines start randomly exploding. Sometimes it’s as a result of direct contact with heat, and other times, it just happens for no reason. Someone with some architectural and engineering experience correct me if I’m wrong here, but wouldn’t shutting down the gas mains be priority number one in a situation like this? I know that won’t solve everything, but surely that would quell things a little bit. They do a pretty good job emphasizing that elevator shafts and stairwells can act like wind tunnels to feed fires and that’s how quite a bit of the fire gets spread. It’s the ending that I have a hard time with. Steve McQueen goes up to the tippy top of the building where there are several water containers, the purpose of which I do not know. He uses C4 to blow these containers open, which in turn floods the building floor by floor until the fires are all miraculously doused. This all happens after the idea is floated and other less effective ideas fail. I get upping the ante, but it needs to be done in a rational manner, which this film does poorly.
From a more technical standpoint, parts of the film do things well. For example, the miniature work and the matte work are all well done. However, it’s the script that really kills this movie. The main plot drags on forever! The film has a total running time of nearly three hours! It doesn’t really feel like much gets accomplished beyond putting out the fire because so many potential subplots are introduced and then dropped that nothing ever evolves within the story. Characters are haphazardly flung at the audience like wet spaghetti noodles in order to see which might actually resonate with audience members. There’s no meaningful character development, which makes it basically impossible as a viewer to connect with the characters. Situations are so out-of-this-world that what could have been an exciting and tense film is reduced to a plodding farce. Unless you’ve got a profound fear of heights, there’s nothing to latch onto to make this movie engaging for most people. Despite all of these issues, the film still managed to make back ten times what it cost to produce. But why? It all goes back to the human fear of the unknown. Our fears keep us all alive and if those fears are tapped into in a way that resonates in just the right way, we can have a pretty exciting experience. Sure the film was a technical disaster, but what it was showing were elements of a world that not a lot of people actually understood and so they were afraid of it. That;s why we still give enough money to disaster films to keep getting more because we’re all afraid of things.
Now,it begs mentioning that Steve McQueen had a self-imposed, one sided rivalry with Paul Newman. Newman and McQueen both started out racing, both of them migrated over to acting,and in most cases, Newman just did it better and that really pissed McQueen off. He insisted that he and Newman get the same number of lines, the same amount of pay, and equal billing on all of the promotional material. An entirely new billing method called diagonal billing was created specifically to assuage McQueen’s ego.Faye Dunaway was chronically late, or absent for her scenes throughout filming, which led to the filming schedule falling behind. The entire project was as much a disaster behind the scenes as it was in every other way. It still deserves a place in history as the first jointly produced major motion picture and I’d still recommend giving it a watch if you find yourself with three hours to spare.
I am going to ask the question in writing that i asked myself as I was starting this project. Why am I even doing this? The short answer is that despite all of its flaws, I still enjoy this movie. It has a special place in my heart for some reason, but the other answer to that question is that we’re getting a sequel to a certain mid-90s mega blockbuster hit this month and I didn’t want to do anything that seemed out of left field. We’re going to take advantage of the lead up to this potential turd and look at a few moments in cinematic history that defined the genre so grab your popcorn and snacks because we’re in for some stinkers! Next week, we’ll look at a full length film produced by multiple countries and made for television. Don’t miss it!
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