The Towering Inferno (1974, John Guillermin)

Hot takes.

The Disaster Blaster series concludes! If you missed them, you can read the other entries, The Poseidon Adventure, The Horror at 37,000 Feet and Earthquake. Stay tuned for our next four-film series, American Dystopias, starting in two weeks.

Inevitably, there are spoilers in this post. Read with care. Thanks!

What is it? The Towering Inferno, directed by John Guillermin, written by Stirling Silliphant, based on the novels The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia & Frank M. Robinson, and starring Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Roberts Vaughn and Wagner, Dabney motherfuckin’ Coleman and introducing Gregory Sierra as Carlos the bartender.

First viewing? No, my first viewing was in the pre-Letterboxd era, I believe in 2008 or so. In the Letterboxd era, I watched it 4 February 2025, and then again in two parts a few days later, but I forgot to log it.

What’s it about? When a fire breaks out in San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, architect Doug Roberts (Newman) and fire chief Michael O’Hallorhan (McQueen) must race against time to save as many people as they can.

What are your thoughts about it? When The Poseidon Adventure became the biggest movie of 1973, it was inevitable that other studios and production companies would chase that disaster dollar. It was also inevitable that someone would try to make a big budget, prestige, Oscar-bait disaster movie. What wasn’t inevitable was that it would happen through the partnership of two rival studios, Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox. Each had the rights to a (extremely Kings of Leon voice) skyscraper on fire. Warner had optioned Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower while Fox got the rights to the similarly-premised The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. Rather than bring two different movies about burning buildings to the theaters, the studios pooled their resources, combined elements of each book, and created The Towering Inferno.

I’d buy that office for a dollar.

Presumably, this team-up is what allowed the film to have a $14 million budget, a not-unheard of amount for a star-studded event film (both The Exorcist and Papillon had equivalent budgets) but a very large amount for a disaster film (that year’s Airport 1975 had a $3 million budget). The movie announces itself as epic and flush with money with its opening sequence. While rival film Earthquake (budget: $7 million) opens with a single helicopter shot of downtown Los Angeles and Mulholland Dam, The Towering Inferno opens by following a helicopter (a helicopter shot of a helicopter) over the course of a five-minute long sequence, over a forest, over an ocean, across the bay to San Francisco, before alighting at the top of the Glass Tower itself. There’s no real reason to open the film this way, other than to throw its monied weight around.

So what, exactly, did that $14 million buy?

Some really cool sets, for one. A lot of the spaces inside the Glass Tower, by production designer William J. Creber, are huge and deep, inviting comparison to James Bond production designer Ken Adam. At one point, the camera follows Doug as he goes four rooms deep, from the main architectural office to his secretary’s office to his personal office to the secret bedroom within. These last three are never seen again, and it can seem like, again, a monied flex. And it is that, but not just that. The filmmakers understood that if this was going to take place inside a skyscraper, it damn well better be more than just a series of non-descript corridors. (It does have those as well, unfortunately.) The Glass Tower needs to look like Doug’s crowning achievement, but it also needs to look like an extravagant, even decadent, thing. The Tower is situated as a hubristic momument to Man himself, one that is inherently corrupt (as it took corruption to build it), and as such, will take fire and flood to purge it of sin. Point being, if you’re gonna have a golden calf, that shit better look twenty-four karat, and Creber delivers.

Here’s the best character in the whole movie, the late great Gregory Sierra as Carlos the bartender, here offering two survivors of the conflagration several stories below some frosty milkshakes. Throughout the whole thing, Carlos is always there to help, and the movie does him dirty.

That godawful amount of money ($90 million in 2025 dollars) also bought a terrific cast, one that’s easy on th eyes but also brings the skills to sell the pulpy, airport-novel scenario. Everyone does good work, even if they’re not always given a lot to do. Astaire is charming, Dunaway is glamorous, Chamberlain’s a delightful weasel, Newman leaves no emotion behind on his face (complementary) while McQueen does the opposite, reining it all in until it hurts. The folllowing goes for most movies, but it’s doubly important for disaster ones: is the audience being offered good company to spend time with? The Towering Inferno has the best company.

R.I.P. Richard Chamberlain, who passed during the writing of this piece. Chamberlain understood the assignment here: be a sociopathic creep. He’s great. We’ll likely see Mr. Chamberlain again in at least two future AT70s posts.

The screenplay was written by Stirling Siliphant, one of the two writers credited with The Poseidon Adventure. This should set off smoke alarms, but somehow, everything that movie did wrong in its thirty minutes, this one gets right. No “critical renegade” bulllshit here; there’s actual subtext for the actors to play. Sometimes there’s not even any dialogue, but the script (and direction) trust the audience to follow along — the sequence where Doug discovers the substandard wiring and goes to big boss Duncan (Holden) to register his disgust is a delightful bit of sustained tension and, by disaster movie standards, subtle. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but upon rewatch, there were two bits of subtext that passed me by the first time.¹. I blame the relative lunkheadedness of TPA², Horror at 37,000 Feet³ and Earthquake⁴ for dulling my senses.

Future U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission meme.

John Guillermin is kind of a surprising choice for director; while a journeyman of twenty-five years at that point, none of his previous work was particularly famous, and his previous film (Shaft in Africa!) tanked.⁵ Guillermin’s work is a pleasure here. I’ve called the “getting to know the characters” portion of a disaster movie “The Boring First Act”; the first act here is so smooth, it makes me long for a non-disaster prime-time soap opera version.⁶ (This is where I need to note that this film, in the famously-grubby disaster genre, is nearly 3 hours long. That’s part of the money attack to proclaim its “importance,” but I suspect it also allows these early “boring” scenes some room to breathe.) Notably, the “action scenes” (as indicated in the opening credits) were directed by producer Irwin Allen, of TPA fame. If they aren’t as smooth as Guillermin’s dramatic scenes, if they’re a bit more pedestrian in conception and execution, I’m willing to acknowledge that Allen had more technical obstacles to overcome than Guillermin. At the end of the day, I want to believe some screaming lady is actually suspended 1,500 feet in a half-assed-looking ski lift, and Allen gets it done.

It’s got great actors on amazing sets, guided by the sure hands of two veteran directors through impressive setpieces.

It’s also got Dabney Coleman, listed in the opening credits and appearing for one scene and one scene only. That’s okay, it’s Dabney goddamn Coleman.

So why doesn’t it work?

This will sound ridiculous, but I believe it: fire doesn’t work as a cinematic threat. I don’t mean explosions. I don’t mean hot lava. I don’t mean flamethrowers. I mean (and don’t have a stroke, man) rooms on fire. That’s what the majority of The Towering Inferno is, a series of rooms on fire. Yes, the fire represents danger and the possibility of death, but it never really gets past the representation part. It stays in the realm of the abstract. It’s difficult to feel in the body. Seeing a guy get a knife in the gut, or somebody bit by a snake, even watching someone fall from a great height⁷ — these can be felt. But fire just sits there and burns. I imagine most of our experiences with fire are touching it for a brief second and recoiling from the pain, which just isn’t enough to translate the sensation cinematically. It’s also difficult to give fire a kind of antagonistic desire.⁸ Contrast that with water, which can chase people, fill up a room to drown them, or sweep them away (all of which happen in Earthquake). Weirdly, the closest comparison I can think of is when movies use disgusting but mostly harmless creatures like tarantulas or cockroaches as monstrous threats. The fiction tells us they’re dangerous predators; the reality is that they just scurry about randomly. Fire, in its own way, does the same.

This part makes me laugh every time: some construction guys left a wheelbarrrow full of quick-drying cement behind the door to the top level, which is now blocking the way out for everyone. It’s funny because it feels exactly like the kind of dumb puzzle/obstacle you’d find in some cheapie first-person video game.

I suspect the filmmakers understood this problem. It can’t be coincidence that the two best suspense scenes — climbing down the destroyed staircase and the helicopter-elevator rescue — have nothing to do with fire directly. There’s only so much you can do with rooms on fire; after you’ve witnessed Robert Wagner’s stunt double intentionally light himself on fire via flaming chair, there’s really nowhere else to go. Nor is it exciting to watch undifferentiated firefighters crouch and hold a hose to a fire, especially when it’s not even clear the water is doing anything. Maybe that’s realistic, but it’s also uninteresting and narratively murky.

That narrative murkiness extends throughout the film. The spread of the fire isn’t visualized in a coherent way, so it gets difficult to keep track of it. Which floor is it on? What floor are the characters on? (They often have to go down to go up, which is confusing.) This unrecognizable room that’s engulfed in flames, is that one of the places we saw earlier? (A final question: who was supposed to be responsible for coherency, Guillermin or Allen?) At the climax, O’Hallorhan tells the remaining survivors on the top floor they have fifteen minutes before the fire gets to them. This should provide a significant amount of tension, but there’s no cut to the fire creeping towards them like The Blob, because fire doesn’t work like that. There’s no cut to anything, actually, defanging the threat, again rendering it abstract. When the room is flooded, and torrents of water are knocking people around like dolls, there’s a synaesthetic kick that’s missing elsewhere.

Every time I watch this movie, for a brief moment I think this is a giant severed finger.

But if fire is a problem, it’s just burning the kindling of the real issue: the undercurrent of cruelty that runs through the film. The only characters that have agency are Doug and O’Hallorhan, and to a lesser extent, Dunaway’s Susan and Chamberlain’s Simmons. The rest exist to be ordered around or escorted or otherwise saved by those with agency. (If you’ve ever played a board game where you have to use your pawn to guide non-player pawns to a destination, like “Horrified” or “Final Girl” or uhhh “Flash Point: Fire Rescue”, it’s like watching an IRL version of that.) That’s fine; not every character will have agency, and not all are meant to. The problem is that there are a slew of characters that fall between the two stools of “character with agency” and “extra.” They have a face and bits of backstory, but they have the dramatic weight of an extra. It’s strangely counterintuitive — when the undifferentiated extras in TPA or Earthquake are killed, the horror registers. This scenario, however, gives these in-betweener characters no agency to save themselves, then sets them up so all they can do is wait for the fire to come. They’re not characters, they’re simply victims. So when they’re killed, it feels manipulative and exploitative, and instead of pathos I’m emotionally kicked out of the movie.

DARK STAR (1974, John Carpenter)

I’d say there’s no rhyme or reason to who lives and who falls to their death from an elevator, but I suspect the randomness is the rhyme and reason. As I intimated earlier, there’s a Biblical undercurrent here. These people are sinners, having built and celebrated this monument to man (and not God), so they have to be punished, firsrt by fire, then by water. This also explains why O’Hallorhan is given these nonsensical speeches that treat skyscrapers as a scourge on the level of polio, and not a simple fact of cities that have been around for almost a hundred years by that point. He’s the One Good Man, unlike Doug, who must repent.

It’s an inferno, it’s a tower, it’s a towering inferno.

The Towering Inferno’s $14 million budget bought a lot, but did it buy the Oscar prestige it was clearly angling for? It was nominated for eight Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Song, Best Sound, and Best Supporting Actor for… Fred Astaire?) and won three (Cinematography, Film Editing, and Song, “We May Never Love Like This Again” by Joel Hirschhorn & Al Kasha, the team that gave us TPA’s “The Morning After.”)⁹ So, not bad! Pretty good even. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel this strategem helped lodge it into the public consciousness as “the good disaster movie,” a designation it does not deserve. How it should be remembered is as an expensive, failed monument to itself about an expensive, failed monument to itself.

I may be wrong, for all you know, but I may be right.

How many stars out of five? Two breeches buoys out of five.

Where can I stream it? As of this writing (4/2/25), The Towering Inferno can only be purchased digitally from Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Fandango at Home.

What can we take from it? Back in my post on The Poseidon Adventure, I spewed some words on the problems with adapting the disaster movie genre to ttrpgs, and some potential solutions, culminating in some thoughts on a disaster movie micro-ttrpg — what it might look like, how it might play. To continue those thoughts, I have taken the four major scenes from The Poseidon Adventure and used them to extrapolate what a disaster micro-ttrpg might play like. What follows is an example of play, using what look like actual written rules. Let me be clear: there are no written rules here, just the illusion of written rules. Now that I’ve written this all out, if I were to do it all over again, I’d change almost all of this. Furthermore, if you’re a game designer (or want to be one) and find any of this interesting, consider it all to have a Creative Commons Zero license. Take it and do what you like with it! (Except for the stuff that’s directly from The Poseidon Adventure, you should probably avoid using that.) Anyway, this is pretty indulgent even by my lax standards, so if you give it a read, I thank you and I hope you enjoy it.

THE BORING FIRST ACT

Five players sit down at the table to play the disaster game. First, they need to decide the nature of the disaster. One player suggests a cruise ship that has capsized, requiring the characters to travel up through the bottom of the ship. The players agree to this, then collaborate to make characters. Each player is responisble for making a primary character and a secondary one, with an optional relationship between the two. Player #1 creates a police detective on vacation, along with his wife — Mike Rogo and Linda. He gives Rogo the descriptor “pig headed” and Linda “beliigerent,” and gives them the relationship “married.” Player #2 makes a little kid named Robin, and his older sister Susan as the secondary, making the relationship “sibilings.” Robin has the descriptor “inquisitive” while Susan has “starstruck,” an open-ended descriptor that could get defined more through play. Player #3 also creates a married couple, Belle and Manny, who are described as “diffident” and “deferential.” Player #4 makes a solo bachelor character named James Martin, and for his secondary, thinks it would be interesting to have a low-level crew member in the group. He decides to add Nonnie, the ship’s singer. He sees Martin as “clear-eyed” and Nonnie as “fragile.” He doesn’t give them a relationship, but thinks about how one might come about during play. Finally, Player #5 makes Rev. Scott, a “demanding” religious figure. Player #5 really likes this Rev. Scott guy, can sense he’s going to center all his play towards him, so he makes a “servile” crew member, a waiter named Acres, to fill out the requirements for a secondary. He does not give them a relationship.

The group decides the story will take place over four scenes.

SCENE 1: ROCKIN’ UP THE CHRISTMAS TREE

The first situation card is drawn, and right away it’s a doozy. It says that before the main conflict can be resolved to move to the next scene, a secondary conflict must be resolved first. Two of the group are separated, and must make a check to survive to the main conflict of the scene. After some discussion, the players decide that the two characters are Acres and Susan. Susan managed to hold onto a table, but is now dangling from it. (No one asks why the tables were bolted to the floor to allow this, because people want to have fun.) Player #5 immediately decides to have Acres soak the danger with his “servile” descriptor, meaning Acres automatically survives this secondary test. The table decides this means he’s already on the kitchen deck, which was below but now is above.

The group needs to decide on a Leader for the conflict. Because both the main conflict and secondary conflict are on the same card, that character will be the Leader for both. Players take turns narrating and/or role-playing their characters saying why they should be the Leader and what their plan is, or passing. After this, the players take the trust tokens from the characters and assign them to other characters. Rogo gets 4 (Rogo’s, Linda’s, Belle’s, and Manny’s) and Rev. Scott gets 6 (everyone else’s). Rev. Scott is the Leader. He is responsible for passing the check, and takes the ramifications if it fails. He makes the check, and succeeds. Following each check, the table must describe in narrative terms what happened. It’s decided that the group made a big net out of tablecloth to catch Susan.

Now the main conflict can be addressed. According to the card, the group must now overcome a physical obstacle and a social obstacle. The players discuss it, and the physical obstacle seems clear: they need to find a way to go up and out to avoid the soon-encroaching water. The social obstacle takes a bit more discussion, but they finally hit upon what it is: one of the crew is trying to take control of the situation. Social obstacles can’t kill characters like physical obstacles, but instead, if failed, remove the Leader character from that position and bans them from assuming that role for the rest of the game.

Normally, Rev. Scott gets all 9 trust tokens to use for both conflicts. However, Rogo’s player, who has 3 trust tokens, undermines Rev. Scott’s player by flipping his tokens to automatically have Rogo, Linda, Belle and Manny succeed the physical obstacle, leaving Rev. Scott only 5 tokens towards both conflicts. He makes the check for the physical obstacle and succeeds — Martin, Nonnie, Robin, Susan and Rev. Scott are safe. But then he makes the check for the social obstacle and fails. Player #5 marks off Rev. Scott’s “demanding” descriptor to automatically succeed, saving him but he won’t be able to use that descriptor for the rest of the game. A narrative description is needed to tie this off. Player #5 describes how Rev. Scott pleads with the Purser and the rest of the survivors to join them, but is rebuffed.

SCENE 2: SOMEONE GETS THE SHAFT

The situation card is drawn, and again, there is a physical obstacle and a social obstacle for the group to overcome. On the card, there is a bold line between the physical obstacle and the social obstacle, indicating that the first must be overcome before tackling the second. The players decide this physical obstacle is an extremely tall shaft that needs to be climbed via a rickety ladder, while the water bubbles up towards them from below. It’s a new scene, so the Leader must be determined again. Rogo gets 2 trust tokens (his and Acres’)¹⁰, Martin gets 2 (his and Nonnie’s) and Rev. Scott gets the rest, for 6. Rev. Scott is again the Leader. He makes the check and succeeds, but there’s a twist: only those who put their trust in the Leader are safe. Everyone else will have to make their own check. The table explains this by saying that Rev. Scott leads the other five to a small side shaft that leads to a corridor in the ship. There’s an explosion, which causes the other four to stumble and possibly fall.

Player #1 makes the check to see if Rogo and Acres are safe. He fails. Rogo can’t use his relationship with Linda to soak the danger, so Player #1 marks off Rogo’s “pig headed” descriptor. Acres has already used his descriptor, and has no options left, so Acres dies. Player #1 describes how Acres falls into the water, and how Rogo dives in after him, but can’t find him.

Player #4 flips both his trust tokens to create a new relationship between Martin and Nonnie, which he defines as “romance under pressure.” This was what he had planned to do originally, but also thought he was going to be able to ride on Rev. Scott’s coattails. He can’t do that now, and he can’t use the relationship to soak a failure in the same scene he created it. So he makes a check and fails. In order to save both, he must mark off both Martin’s “clear-eyed” descriptor and Nonnie’s “fragile” one. They are now safe. Player #4 narrates how Nonnie freezes up, and seems to want to join her brother in death, but Martin manages to talk her out of it and get her up the ladder.

SCENE 3: THE DROWNERS

Scene 3 begins with another situation card draw, and this one is much simpler. It says that the Leader must risk their life; regardless of the result, the rest of the group will make it through safely. The group collectively paints this as a flooded corridor that has to be swum through. The Leader can only be helped by any other character who made a bid for Leader. The trust tokens are distributed, and the final result is Belle gets 1 (hers) and Rev. Scott gets 8 (everyone else’s). Rev. Scott is the Leader again.

Shockingly, Rev. Scott fails the check. He can’t use a descriptor, a relationship or a secondary character to soak the danger, because he has none. His only hope is that someone who made a bid for Leader will step in. Player #3, the only other player to put in for Leader, considers it. If he sacrifices Belle, he will be able to move her trust token to Manny (because of their relationship, which hasn’t been marked off yet), giving him two tokens. Player #3 narrates that Belle jumps in to the water to find Rev. Scott stuck under a piece of debris. She frees him, but when they surface, she has a heart attack and dies, but not before passing off a personal memento to give to Manny. The rest of the group swims through, and is safe.

SCENE 4: UP ON THE CATWALK, A BIG WHEEL IS SPINNING

Because the players agreed to only four scenes, everyone knows this is the last scene, and whoever makes it through survives the disaster. Because it is the last scene, one of the Final Scene cards is drawn instead of a situation card. The Final Scene card reveals that the group must survive three separate physical obstacles, one after the other, and the Leader is the same for each one. For the first obstacle, the players agree that the group can see the exit several stories above them, and they have to navigate a treacherous catwalk to get there.

The trust tokens are distributed, and Rev. Scott gets all 8. Player #5 makes the first check for Rev. Scott, and succeeds. The card says that, on a success, the only reward is to go to the next challenge. Since two more challenges need to be overcome, Player #5 describes leading the group across the catwalk to where they can possibly get to the exit door, only to find that it is blocked by fires, and needs to be approached from further above.

Player #5 makes the second check for Rev. Scott, but this time fails. The card says that, for failing the second challenge, the Leader must select one of the other characters to perish. That character’s player does not get to use any resources to soak the danger. Player #5 selects Player #1’s character, Linda to die. Player #1 draws a line through her character sheet. As it was Player #1’s character that died, they get to narrate how it happens. There was another explosion, and Linda lost her balance, and fell to her death.

Player #5 is about to make the third and final check for Rev. Scott, but before he can do so, Player #1 flips Rogo’s token, reducing Rev. Scott’s tokens to 7. The check is made, and it fails, but was close enough that if Rev. Scott had had 8 tokens, it would’ve been a success. The failure states that either the Leader dies, or the entire group fails and dies. The card allows the Leader to soak the danger, but Rev. Scott doesn’t have any way of doing that, having lost Acres already and scratched out Rev. Scott’s “demanding” descriptor. Player #5 could be a pill and say that everyone dies, especially since Rogo/Player #1 backstabbed him, but he’s a swell chap and is willing to take one for the team. Player #5 describes how there’s another explosion, causing steam to blow in front of the door. The only way to stop it is to turn a wheel hanging above the burning water. There’s no way to do that and get back to the catwalk — it’s a one-way trip. Rev. Scott jumps over to the wheel, and superhumanly turns it, turning off the steam and allowing the others to escape. He then tells Rogo to take over leading the group, now that all they have to do is walk five feet to escape, and then drops into the water.

NEXT TIME, ON AGAINST THE ’70S: Rollerball (1975, Norman Jewison)