Burn, Baby, Burn

I can't say I saw The Towering Inferno in a critically impartial state of mind. On the one hand, I was driving back from Danvers with some friends after a lobster dinner and felt like seeing a movie, any movie, when the Liberty Tree Mall loomed up out of the North Shore fog. On the other hand, I was sure The Towering Inferno was going to be a disaster film in more ways than one. After all the genre included such winners as Tora! Tora! Tora! (which destroyed what was, when assembled for the film, the world's 14th largest airforce, and nearly drove its producers, Twentieth Century Fox, into bankruptcy) and the Poseidon Adventure, whose unexpected, (and undeserved) success spawned the current crop of wipe-'em-off-the-ceiling films.

But--what more can I say?--I was a victim of my elitist preconceptions. There I was all winter, reviewing highbrow good-but-not-great movies like Amarcord, Stavisky, Murder on the Orient Express and Godfather II, while all the time a real masterpiece was playing in Danvers. And I would have missed it, too, if it hadn't been for the way the Liberty Tree Mall beckoned out of the mist. As it was, I loved The Towering Inferno and didn't have to dig very deep into my satchel of critical responses to discover why. I was on the edge of my seat, breathless with delight. Yet when I walked out of the theater I was somewhat shamefaced about how unreservedly I'd responded to the film--how easily I'd been manipulated. But, now, a week later, I find myself embarrassed only at being embarrassed in the first place.

The Towering Inferno is, simply, one of the few places where popular art intersects good art. There are lots of examples in other fields. I suppose, like Tchaikovsky and the Mona Lisa and A Christmas Carol, but most of the examples that come to mind are movies. Film is the one art that has stayed resolutely popular, and it has done so only in the United States. When American directors get artsy, like Robert Altman or Francis Ford Coppola, they tend to produce meaty, serious movies that, finally, don't grab hold of your imagination. At least, not the way Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz do.

I don't suppose anyone would dispute the claim that The Towering Inferno is popular art, so I'll defend my assertion that it's good art as well. One red herring--the director. Irwin Allen--needs to be disposed of right away. Auteurist orthodoxy is so much a part of the serious movie-goer's mental baggage that the idea of a good film being produced by an awful director seems a contradiction in terms. And Allen has compounded the problem by acting like some Cahiers du Cinema reader's idea of a Big Bad Hollywood Producer. Allen told the august Arts and Leisure Section of the New York Times that he made The Towering Inferno for the money and nothing else and threatened us with 19 follow-ups, a string of Sons of Towering Inferno's for which he claims he has scripts in the drawer.

But Allen and his mediocrity were necessary for the success of The Towering Inferno. When good directors try to make uncomplicated popular movies, they are incapable of keeping a poker face about it. To paraphrase E.M. Forster, few directors can prostitute all their powers. Even when working on the lowest level, they are always implying they are capable of something higher.

The Towering Inferno is a return to the sources of film's power. Avant garde directors have tried to make movies compete with other art forms and so lost touch with the elemental appeal of film. Cops and robbers and westerns have been transplanted to television.

About the only field left to the movies, in which they could speak in a characteristic voice, is spectacle. The movies that overpower the viewer with effects only possible in film are the purest, most powerful cinematic experiences. Lacombe, Lucien, though it happens to be an excellent movie, could have been a book or a play; 2001 could only have been a movie.

And The Towering Inferno is one hell of a spectacle. The dialogue ranges from the banal to the trite, but only the most primitive phrases are appropriate to the very simple dynamics of the plot. A builder constructs a 135-story office-building-cum-apartment house, but in cutting costs, his son-in-law installs a faulty wiring system that starts a small fire as soon as the first switch is thrown. The fire detection and sprinkler system malfunction, of course, and, as a gala party of 300 bejewelled and tuxedoed guests gathers in the penthouse, the fun is on.

The most primitive joy of the film is its vindictive morality. Rarely has a purer, more rigid and satisfying morality been preached to me since elementary school: If you follow all the directions of the firemen, you will get out alive. Just what I was told in third grade. A few innocent people get killed, for the sake of pathos, but basically, if you obey orders you'll be saved. Unless, of course, you're a Sinner. In this movie sin means, say, staying after work to have sex with your secretary. The connection between adultery and hellfire has never been more firmly drawn in a modern setting. Meanwhile, upstairs in the penthouse, we learn a Conradian lesson--that if men in a dangerous situation act together, under the obvious leadership of men like Steve McQueen, they will be saved; but if they resort to the every-man-for-himself law of the jungle, they will die a horrible death.

The second great pleasure of the film is purely visual. When the ungainly spike of the Tower first appears in the midst of San Francisco's skyline, it is so obviously a cut-and-paste job that you wince. The special effects are on the Star Trek level--somewhat better than Rodan but much, much worse than 2001. But once night falls and the fire begins, and you get used to it, the destruction acquires a weird beauty of its own. The flames lick out from the 81st floor, and punch holes--bam-bam-bam--in the fabric of the building as the pressure breaks open huge wounds in the glass skin of the building and huge windows pop in series. Later, as the fire becomes white hot, the spectral beauty of the scene increases, as down below the whole area becomes an abstract, pulsing mass of red fire lights, blue police lights, and white search beams.

Even human disasters are transfigured into something inhumanly beautiful. The adulterous executive leaves his windowless bedroom to seek aid, and enters his duplex office to find it on fire--huge velveteen curtains, bargello chairs, plush carpeting. His clothing catches fire as well. We lose sight of the human perspective as the director shifts into slow motion and we watch only a vaguely human figure on fire stagger through a room, framed by flames as floor, ceiling and walls burn. (Early in the film there are a couple of graphic shots of charred skin, but--after these few nauseating moments--the death is as distanced as the inaudible thud of a body falling 135 stories.) At the end, gelignite releases a flood of one million gallons of water from the water towers on top of the roof, extinguishing the fire in a tremendous rush of steam as it rushes through the burnt out central core of the building and pours off all four edges of the roof. The Tower becomes a 135-story fiery fountain of cascading water against a perfectly black background. The beauty of scenes like this obviously have nothing to do with the reality of people getting barbecued, but The Towering Inferno is not realistic enough to convince us people are being hurt in the scenes of general destruction. Only when it focuses on scenes of individual danger and heroism does it compel our belief.

These scenes of derring-do are the third great virtue of the film. Part of the credit goes to the scope of the adventure--a harpoon being shot from one skyscraper to another, a million gallons of water drenching the banquet room--but most of it goes to the intensity and novelty.

Paul Newman grabs hold of a young girl just as the stairway she is standing on springs open and collapses away into infinity; a firefighter hangs on to the shell of an elevator as a helicopter lowers it ninety stories. One is perfectly helpless in the grasp of scenes like these.

Unfortunately, The Towering Inferno is not content to think of itself as a combination of simple moralism, abstract beauty and adventure. Instead, it tries to be a public service film, a sort of Unsafe At An, Height. The fire chief leaves us with the impression that any building higher than seven stories is liable to become a towering inferno, without taking into account all the contrary evidence--that none yet has, and that what was wrong with the Tower was its poor construction, not its design. Yet we are asked to see the charred hulk of the Tower as a symbol of something more. "Maybe we should just leave it standing like it is," says a dejected Paul Newman, "as a monument to all the bullshit in the world."

You have to ignore lines like that if you're going to enjoy The Towering Inferno, but the view that the movie itself is a monument to bullshit and concupiscence is unfounded. It's very easy to hype a popular film by calling it a cinematic masterpiece, as Pauline Kael has done so unfortunately with movies like Shampoo and Last Tango in Paris. The disaster film is an urban adventure, like a police or hospital melodrama, but the very magniture of the pseudo-events it chronicles--possible only on screen--give it a dignity beyond its intrinsic merit. When combined with an ingratiating morality, a wealth of invention in the heroism department, and a certain measure of abstract visual beauty, the formula--even if formulae can only take us a small way towards greatness in art--is irresistible, and critical preconceptions are extinguished in a blaze of glory.