“When there’s a fire, I outrank everybody here. Now, one thing we don’t want is a panic. Now, I could tell them, but you ought to do it. Just make a nice cool announcement to all your guests and tell them the party’s being moved down below the fire floor. Right now.”

‘The Towering Inferno’, directed by John Guillermin in 1974, is an American disaster movie starring Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Newman plays Doug Roberts, an architect who is celebrating the opening of a new skyscraper. Whilst at the party a fire breaks out in a storage room which leads Roberts to question the cost cutting of the building’s owner James Duncan, played by William Holden. As the fire spreads and traps the party-goers on the upper floors, the fire brigade lead by Chief Michael O’Halloran, played by McQueen, comes up with ever riskier operations to get the occupants out, whilst Roberts works his way from the top down. This is a film for which the name of the producer, Irwin Allen, is more recognisable and more closely linked with the movie than the director. The production is all: the script is ponderous and heavy with awkward exposition, the direction outside of the action sequences is perfunctory and unexciting. Where this film wins is with the casting of McQueen and Newman, alongside big names like Richard Chamberlain and (against type) Fred Astaire, and in the spectacular stunts and special effects including a number of full body burns. ‘The Towering Inferno’ was a popular entry in a number of 1970s disaster movies, a genre whose popularity at the time was caused by a natural evolution of the Cold War thrillers of the 1950s and 1960s coupled with advances in special effects that included ‘Airport’, ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, the much maligned ‘The Swarm’ and the parodic ‘Airplane’. Weirdly, what stood out for me, however, was how this movie acts as a template for the 1988 siege movie ‘Die Hard’, the later substituting Alan Rickman in place of fire.

Would I recommend it? It’s long and clunky, the special effects are dated, but McQueen and Newman still have enough charisma and star-power to make it watchable. A double bill with ‘Die Hard’ would be interesting.