Irwin Allen’s skyscraper fire is the best made of the seventies disaster films, and for its first ninety minutes it is properly frightening. It is also 165 minutes long, and the people trapped above the flames are a good deal less interesting than the flames.
Irwin Allen, who sank an ocean liner in The Poseidon Adventure two years earlier, here sets fire to the tallest building in the world on the night of its opening party. The Glass Tower stands in San Francisco, 135 storeys of steel and bronze glass. Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), its architect, comes home to find the wiring is not what he specified; Jim Duncan (William Holden), the builder, does not want to hear about it with a senator on his way up. A storeroom starts to smoke. John Guillermin directs what follows as a procedural: how a fire moves through a building, and how people are got out of one.
The fire itself is superb. Fred Koenekamp shoots it first as orange light behind smoked glass, then up close and filling the frame, and he holds on the flames rather than cutting away. William J. Creber’s tower is a shaft of bronze and mirror with a rooftop restaurant called the Promenade Room and a scenic lift up the outside, and every part of it is later turned against somebody. The helicopter approach over the bay that opens the film shows where the money went.
Steve McQueen plays Chief O’Hallorhan, the fire chief who arrives, looks at the building and says what it will take, with almost no words. Newman’s Roberts is the guilty conscience, an architect who climbs into ducts and down stairwells because he cannot bear what has been done to his building. The two share perhaps a dozen scenes and are better in them than the script deserves. McQueen’s stillness makes Newman look busy, and Newman’s busyness makes McQueen look wise.
The trouble is everyone upstairs. Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay, adapted from novels by Richard Martin Stern, Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, gives the guests in the Promenade Room the lines people say in lifeboats. Faye Dunaway, as Susan, spends the first hour choosing between a job and a man and the rest waiting to be rescued. Richard Chamberlain’s Simmons, the contractor who cheapened the wiring, sweats and sneers like a villain in a school play. Fred Astaire, as an ageing conman called Harlee Claiborne, and Jennifer Jones, as the widow Lisolette he means to swindle, are the only two who make anything human of it, and they do it by playing quietly.
The most frightening minutes are the quietest: a junction box that sparks, a smear of heat behind a door, O. J. Simpson’s security chief Jernigan watching a warning light and deciding it is probably nothing. We sat forward. Then the fire arrives properly and the film starts rescuing people, and it rescues them for nearly two hours, each rescue well staged and each the same shape: a group, a gap, a rope or a lift or a ledge, a countdown. By the third hour we were no longer frightened. We were counting how many people were left upstairs, and at 165 minutes the film is a good half hour longer than the fire needs.
Harold F. Kress and Carl Kress cut between the party and the floors below with a patience that pays off early, while the band plays and the storeroom fills with smoke; later, with several rescue parties on the go, they keep us clear about who is where. John Williams gives the party a lounge tune and the fire brass over low drums, and it works, though he leans on the brass when the pictures had already told us to be afraid. Paul Zastupnevich puts the women in chiffon and the men in black tie, and none of it is made for stairwells.
Against the rest of the seventies disaster cycle it stands up. The Poseidon Adventure was livelier and sillier; this is soberer, better built and more inclined to lecture. It closes with a dedication to firefighters, which is meant kindly and sits oddly on a film that has just spent three hours enjoying a fire.
Watch it for the first ninety minutes, for McQueen, for Astaire and Jones, and for the building. The second half can be something you walk away from and come back to; the fire will still be going. It carries a 15 certificate, and it has earned it.
