To ring in the new year, here is the late great Bruce Kogan with a review of this disaster epic...Although some like to compare The Towering Inferno to The Poseidon Adventure because Irwin Allen that master of disaster brought us both, in point of fact The Towering Inferno is more like a landlocked Titanic than anything else.
It has to be remembered that the Titanic was on its maiden voyage and was ballyhooed as an unsinkable ship when the tragedy occurred. The building that William Holden built, that Paul Newman designed was also on its maiden voyage so to speak. The 135 story building in San Francisco was being dedicated and there was going to be a big blowout on the top floor with all kinds of VIPS in attendance. Little does Holden suspect that his son-in-law Richard Chamberlain cut quite a few safety corners in the electrical wiring. When the whole tower gets lighted up, a fire breaks out in one of the circuit junction boxes and the party gets cut short.
Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as the fire battalion chief head an impressive cast list of name players put in harm's way by Chamberlain's avarice. Fred Astaire got an Academy Award nomination for playing an elderly conman who tricks his way into the VIP gathering to fleece wealthy widow Jennifer Jones. This was Jones's farewell performance on screen, she retired right after that to become just the kind of wealthy society matron she plays here.
The film got an award for Best Cinematography deservedly so, the shots are quite vivid and also the best song of 1974. During the party scene, Maureen McGovern who had introduced the popular There's Got To Be A Morning After in Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure sings We May Never Get To Love Like This Again. It won for best song, but certainly didn't have the lasting popularity of the other.
The most vivid moment of the film for me besides the climax is the illfated rendezvous of Robert Wagner and Susan Flannery. They agree for a boss secretary rendezvous in his apartment there and Wagner turns off the phone so word cannot reach them of the fire. The death scenes of both will tear you up.
According to the Films of Steve McQueen the reason for the joint production by Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox is that when two studios put out two Harlow films, both cut each other up at the box office and no one made out. Warner Brothers purchased The Tower and Fox bought the Glass Inferno screen rights. Rather than have competing disaster films, they made an historic interstudio agreement to have a joint production.
Sometimes these pictures are hard to look at, but we think Hollywood stars are different than us. They really are not. They have issues just like we do, and despit the plastic surgry industry, they for the most part age like us too. Here are some more last pictures of our favorite stars...
Betty Grable - April of 1972. She died in July of 1973
Myrna Loy (with Lauren Bacall) - June of 1993. She died in December of 1993
Racquel Welch - July of 2022. She died in February of 2023
Terry Thomas - April of 1989. He died in January of 1990.
Marlon Brando - March of 2004. He died in July of 2004.
Steve McQueen - April of 1980. He died in November of 1980.
In 2012 I broke down my favorite movies from each decade. To start off the new year I thought it would be interesting to gather my 100 favorite movies for a list. I was going to make the list according to preference, but that just was too difficult. So here are my 100 all-time favorite movies in chronological order...
Al Jolson and May McAvoy in The Jazz Singer
1. The Jazz Singer (1927) 2. City Lights (1931) 3. The Public Enemy (1931) 4. Frankenstein (1931) 5. Dracula (1931) 6. Freaks (1932) 7. King Kong (1933) 8. 42nd Street (1933) 9. Show Boat (1936) 10. Follow The Fleet (1936) 11. Bringing Up Baby (1938) 12. Of Mice And Men (1939) 13. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939) 14. The Wizard Of Oz (1939) 15. The Great Dictator (1940) 16. Citizen Kane (1941) 17. The Face Behind The Mask (1941) 18. Ziegfeld Girl (1941) 19. Holiday Inn (1942) 20. Pride Of The Yankees (1942) 21. To Be Or Not To Be (1942) 22. Shadow Of A Doubt (1943) 23. Arsenic And Old Lace (1944) 24. Going My Way (1944)
Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend
25. The Lost Weekend (1945) 26. Blue Skies (1946) 27. The Boy With The Green Hair (1948) 28. White Heat (1949) 29. Harvey (1950) 30. Limelight (1952) 31. The Country Girl (1954) 32. Rear Window (1954) 33. Love Me Or Leave Me (1955) 34. Marty (1955) 35. High Society (1956) 36. Twelve Angry Men (1957) 37. Paths Of Glory (1957) 38. Silk Stockings (1957) 39. A Face In The Crowd (1957) 40. Vertigo (1958) 41. North By Northwest (1959) 42. Some Like It Hot (1959) 43. The Music Man (1961) 44. The Hustler (1961) 45. To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) 46. Gigot (1962) 47. Whatever Happened To Baby Jane (1962) 48. The Great Escape (1963) 49. It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Steve McQueen and Jackie Gleason in Soldier In The Rain
50. Soldier In The Rain (1964) 51. In Cold Blood (1967) 52. Planet Of The Apes (1968) 53. The Odd Couple (1968) 54. Midnight Cowboy (1969) 55. Cool Hand Luke (1969) 56. The Godfather (1972) 57. Blazing Saddles (1974) 58. The Towering Inferno (1974) 59. The Godfather II (1974) 60. Young Frankenstein (1974) 61. Jaws (1975) 62. One Who Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 63. Network (1976) 64. Taxi Driver (1976) 65. The Omen (1976) 66. Star Wars (1977) 67. National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) 68. The Jerk (1979) 69. Kramer VS Kramer (1979) 70. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 71. Caddyshack (1980) 72. The Shining (1980) 73. Raging Bull (1980)
Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack in Airplane!
74. Airplane! (1980) 75. The Elephant Man (1980) 76. Scarface (1983) 77. Return Of The Jedi (1983) 78. The King Of Comedy (1983) 79. A Christmas Story (1983) 80. Back To The Future (1985) 81. The Breakfast Club (1985) 82. Stand By Me (1986) 83. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) 84. Goodfellas (1990) 85. Silence Of The Lambs (1991) 86. JFK (1991) 87. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) 88. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) 89. Forrest Gump (1994) 90. Casino (1995) 91. Donnie Brasco (1997) 92. Being John Malkovich (1999) 93. The Green Mile (1999) 94. Any Given Sunday (1999)
Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago
95. Chicago (2002) 96. Big Fish (2003) 97. Beyond The Sea (2004) 98. Crash (2005) 99. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) 100. Sweeney Todd (2007)
Again, these are my favorite movies and not what critics or the public are saying are the best films. Some of these 100 films might be horrible bombs, but they are ones that I like personally. What films did I leave off? Comments are greatly appreciated...
The decade of the 1960s was a decade of change for America. It also was a decade of change for the movies. The movies finally were allowed to show more sex and violence that they had been able to show since the official Hays code was enacted in 1934. The popular movies at the time was a reflection of those changes. It was really hard to do this top five favorite movies, because there was so many quality films in the 1960s. Here are my five favorites though:
5. COOL HAND LUKE (1967)
Paul Newman became a star in the 1950s, but his super stardom was cemented by the 1960s, and great movies like Cool Hand Luke definitely helped. Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Florida prison camp[ who refuses to submit to the system. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress deemed Cool Hand Luke to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Upon its initial release, Bosley Crowther wrote an NYT Critic's Pick review, saying "what elevates this brutal picture above the ruck of prison films and into the range of intelligent contemplation of the ironies of life is a sharp script by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson, and splendid acting by Paul Newman and George Kennedy. I would agree.
4. IN COLD BLOOD (1967)
The true crime novel In Cold Blood written by Truman Capote is one of my favorite novels of all time, and this 1967 adaption is true to the novel and in ways is superior to the book. It stars Robert Blake as Perry Smith, Scott Wilson as Richard "Dick" Hickock and John Forsythe as Alvin Dewey. The film follows the trail of Smith and Hickock: they break into the home of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, kill all four members of the family, go on the run, are found and caught by the police, tried for the murders and eventually executed. Although the film is in parts faithful to the book, Brooks created a fictional character, "The Reporter" (played by Paul Stewart). This was also the first commercially released film in the US to use the word 'bullshit'. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, but no acting awards. I personally do not like Robert Blake, but he deserved at least a nomination for his gritty role.
3. THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963)
Another prison drama, this movie takes place during World War II. The Great Escape is a 1963 American film about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a German POW camp during World War II, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Richard Attenborough. The film is based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, a non-fiction account of the mass escape from Stalag Luft III in Sagan (now Żagań, Poland), in the province of Lower Silesia, Nazi Germany. The characters are composites of real men. The film was made by the Mirisch Company, released by United Artists, and produced and directed by John Sturges. The story was adapted by James Clavell, W. R. Burnett, and Walter Newman from Paul Brickhill's book The Great Escape. Brickhill had been a prisoner at Stalag Luft III during World War II. The film was to some extent a work of fiction, based on the real events but with compromises made for purposes of commercial appeal, serving as a vehicle for its box-office stars. While many of its characters were fictitious, most were amalgams of several real characters and many were based on real people Hilts' dash for the border by motorcycle was added by request of McQueen, who did the stunt riding himself except for the final jump (done by Bud Ekins). If you want to find a movie to have a guy’s movie night with, you can not go wrong with this film.
2. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE (1962)
Is this movie a horror movie or just a campy film that spotlights two aging stars. I can never tell, but I love to watch this movie at Halloween. It is not real scary other than the part with the dead rat (I have a phobia of rodents), but the movie is fun to watch. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a 1962 American psychological thriller (not really a horror film) produced and directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The screenplay by Lukas Heller is based on the novel of the same name by Henry Farrell. In 2003, the character of Baby Jane Hudson was ranked #44 on the American Film Institute's list of the 50 Best Villains of American Cinema. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one for Best Costume Design, Black and White. Before, during and after the film's production and release, there was heavy fighting between Davis and Crawford, which included Davis actually kicking Crawford in the head (she went for small stitches) and Crawford putting weights in her clothes for the scene of Jane's dragging Blanche (Davis got muscular backache as a result). Not even director Aldrich could stop the fighting, which escalated in the coming months. I think that real life drama makes the movie fun to watch.
1. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) One of my favorite television shows was The Twilight Zone, which was created by Rod Serling. He also was the brainchild behind this original Planet Of The Apes in 1968, and he was responsible for the terrific ending which has become one of the greatest movie endings in all of cinema history. The film tells the story of an astronaut crew who crash-land on a strange planet in the distant future. Although the planet appears desolate at first, the surviving crew members stumble upon a society in which apes have evolved into creatures with human-like intelligence and speech. The apes have assumed the role of the dominant species and humans are mute creatures wearing animal skins.The script was originally written by Rod Serling but had many rewrites before eventually being made. Directors J. Lee Thompson and Blake Edwards were approached, but the film's producer Arthur P. Jacobs, upon the advice of Charlton Heston, chose Franklin J. Schaffner to direct the film. Schaffner's changes included creating a more primitive ape society, instead of the more expensive idea of having futuristic buildings and advanced technology. The film was groundbreaking for its prosthetic makeup techniques by artist John Chambers, and was well received by critics and audiences, launching a film franchise, including four sequels, as well as a short-lived television show, animated series, comic books, various merchandising, and eventually a remake in 2001 and a reboot in 2011. I enjoyed both of the remakes, but nothing can compare to the original film. The movie was much more deeper than anyone realized in 1968, and almost 45 years later, the film is my favorite of the decade…
Of course there are movies I left out but I wish I didn't have to. Honorable mention goes to: The Music Man (1961), The Hustler (1961), To Kill A Mockinbird (1962), The Odd Couple (1968), and Midnight Cowboy (1969).
The film Soldier In The Rain is now available on Warner Brothers Vault series, but for many years the movie collected dust and was never seen. Many people who have seen the movie says it is corny, and fans of Steve McQueen do not like him playing a Gomer Pyle like character, but I think Soldier In The Rain is a charming movie, that I have always enjoyed. I got my DVD copy from a Steve McQueen fan, and it is one of my most cherished movie possessions.
Soldier in the Rain (1963), starring Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen, is a comedy-drama film about the friendship between an aging Army Master Sergeant (Gleason) and a young country bumpkin buck sergeant (McQueen). Tuesday Weld also stars.
Produced and co-written by Blake Edwards, the screenplay is based on a 1960 novel by William Goldman, who was in the US Army from 1952-1954. The film was directed by Ralph Nelson, who had directed Gleason in Requiem for a Heavyweight the previous year and had a major success with his Lilies of the Field. The film was released five days after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, which didn't help its box office take.
Sergeant Eustis Clay (McQueen) is a peacetime soldier can't wait to finish his service and move on to bigger, better things. He is a personal favorite of Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter (Gleason), a military lifer who is considerably brighter than Eustis but enjoys his company and loyalty.
Eustis is involved in a number of schemes and scams, including one in which he will sell tickets to see an equally dim private named Meltzer run a three-minute mile. He inconveniences Slaughter more than once, including a traffic mishap that requires him being bailed out of jail.
Determined to tempt Slaughter with the joys of civilian life before his hitch is up, Eustis fixes him up on a date with the much-younger, not too bright Bobbi Jo Pepperdine. At first Slaughter is offended but gradually he sees another side of Bobbi Jo, including a mutual fondness for crossword puzzles. Eustis and Slaughter golf together and begin to enjoy the good life.
One night, Eustis is devastated to learn of the death of Donald, his dog. A pair of hated rivals wh use their status as Military Policemen to lure Eustis into a barroom brawl. He is beaten two-against-one and is nearly defeated when Slaughter angrily comes to his rescue. Together they win the fight, but the middle-aged, overweight Slaughter collapses from the effort.
Hospitalized, he delights Eustis by suggesting that they leave the Army together and go live on a tropical isle, surrounded by blue seas and beautiful girls. Slaughter dies, however, and Eustis, a changed man, re-enlists in the Army for another hitch.
Film critic Craig Butler wrote about the film's theme, "An absorbing film that deserves to be much better known, Soldier in the Rain is a sometimes uneasy blend of comedy and drama that doesn't always quite come off, but has so much going for it that one is glad to overlook its flaws. A buddy picture set in the peacetime Army, Soldier is concerned with how a strong friendship can develop between two people of differing personalities and aims. Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen are different types, and the fact that they have such a strong bond may at first seem unlikely, but as the film progresses it somehow seems natural and inevitable. Blake Edwards and Martin Richlin have done an excellent job of adapting William Goldman's novel, and together with director Ralph Nelson have opted to emphasize the character aspects of the material over the plot."
Steven McQueen was one of the great icons of the movie industry in the 1960s and 1970s. While the generation before McQueen had more polished actors like Cary Grant and James Stewart, Steve McQueen's roughness made him a superstar with the younger audience. Not only was he captivating on the screen, but through these pictures you can tell the camera loved him...
One of my happiest younger memories was on a lazy Sunday I would put in a long movie and just lay and get so sucked into a movie. One such movie that I remember watching is THE TOWERING INFERNO. THE TOWERING INFERNO was a 1974 American action disaster film produced by Irwin Allen featuring an all-star cast led by Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.
A co-production between Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. (this was the first film to be a joint venture from two major Hollywood studios), it was adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a pair of novels, The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, and was directed by John Guillermin, with Allen himself directing the action sequences.
After the success of The Poseidon Adventure, Warner Bros. bought the rights to The Tower for $390,000. Eight weeks later, Irwin Allen discovered another novel, The Glass Inferno, and bought the rights for $400,000 for 20th Century Fox. The productions were combined, with a budget of $14 million ($58 million adjusted for inflation 1974-2005). Each studio paid half the production costs. 20th Century Fox had the United States domestic box office receipts while Warner Bros. would distribute the film in all foreign territories around the world.
Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of In the Heat of the Night, combined the novels into a single screenplay. Silliphant took seven characters from each and combined the plots. In The Tower, a bomb in the utility room of a 150-floor tower (the world's tallest) causes a power surge which sets a janitor's closet on fire; the escape from the top floor is by breeches buoy to the adjacent 110-story North Tower of the World Trade Center, and is only partially successful. More than a hundred partygoers die in the restaurant on the top floor. In The Glass Inferno, an electrical spark sets the janitor's closet in a 60-story tower on fire; the escape from the top floor is by helicopter, and everyone left in the restaurant escapes.
The 57 sets and four camera crews were records for a single film on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. At the end of filming of principal photography on September 11, 1974 only eight of those 57 sets were left standing. William Creber is credited as Production Designer of the film and under his direction, Dan Goozee from the Fox art department designed the final look of the Glass Tower itself.
Small parts played by actors who appeared in The Poseidon Adventure, which Irwin Allen also produced, include John Crawford, Erik Nelson, Elizabeth Rogers, Ernie Orsatti, and Sheila Matthews, who played the mayor's wife 'Paula Ramsay'. She would later become Irwin Allen's wife and remained so until his death in 1991. Jennifer Jones' role of 'Lisolette Mueller', her last before retiring from acting, was originally offered to Olivia de Havilland. The fireman in the scenic elevator was played by Paul Newman's son, Scott.
In the initial stages of the film's development, the fire chief's role was relatively minor – the architect was the hero. Fire Chief Mario Infantino was to be played by Ernest Borgnine, and Steve McQueen was to play the leading role of architect Doug Roberts. However McQueen requested the fire chief's role, so it was suitably revised and augmented. Paul Newman was cast as the architect.
McQueen, Newman, and William Holden all wanted top billing. Holden was refused, no longer in the league of McQueen and Newman. To provide dual top billing, the credits were arranged diagonally, with McQueen lower left and Newman upper right. Thus, each appeared to have "first" billing. McQueen is mentioned first in the film's trailers. In the cast list rolling from top to bottom at the end of the film, McQueen and Newman's names were arranged diagonally as at the beginning. As a consequence Newman's name is fully visible first here. This was the first time "staggered but equal" billing was used. It had been discussed for the same actors when McQueen was to play the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. McQueen was eventually replaced by Robert Redford, who took second billing.
In the 2010 biography by AE Hotchner titled Paul and Me, reference is made to the commotion caused by Steve McQueen due to his apparent displeasure at having a lesser part. McQueen discovered that Paul Newman had twelve more lines than he did, something that was soon changed. According to the book, Newman's salary from the movie totalled $12 million.
The movie also marked the last acting role for the great Jennifer Jones. She is wooed in the film by the legendary Fred Astaire, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role. The film was nominated for a total of eight Oscars and it went on to win three. More importantly, THE TOWERING INFERNO would become the father of all future disaster movies, and as a young teenager I became engrossed with the actors in this all-star movie from Steve McQueen and Paul Newman to William Holden and Robert Wagner. Even though it is a tragic movie, as most disaster movies are, the film is good clean fun to watch on a lazy Sunday...
Steve McQueen has been dead now for thirty years, but he has left behind many memorable movie roles. He was one of the best actors of his generation, and his movies are still loved today.
Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen was born on March 24, 1930. He was nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination for his role in The Sand Pebbles. His other popular films include The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, The Getaway, Papillon, and The Towering Inferno. In 1974, he became the highest-paid movie star in the world. Although McQueen was combative with directors and producers, his popularity put him in high demand and enabled him to command large salaries.
He was an avid racer of both motorcycles and cars. While he studied acting, he supported himself partly by competing in weekend motorcycle races and bought his first motorcycle with his winnings. He is recognized for performing many of his own stunts, especially the majority of the stunt driving during the high-speed chase scene in Bullitt. McQueen also designed and patented a bucket seat and transbrake for race cars.
By the time of The Getaway, McQueen had become the world's highest paid actor. But after 1974's The Towering Inferno, co-starring with his long-time personal friend Paul Newman and reuniting him with Dunaway, became a tremendous box-office success, McQueen all but disappeared from Hollywood and the public eye, preferring to focus on motorcycle racing and traveling around the country in a motorhome and on one of his vintage Indian motorcycles. He did not return to acting until 1978 with An Enemy of the People playing against type as a heavily bearded, bespectacled 19th Century doctor, in this adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play. The film was shown briefly in theaters and has never been released on home video.
His last films were both loosely based on true stories: Tom Horn, a Western adventure about a former Army scout turned professional gunman who worked for the big cattle ranchers, hunting down rustlers, and who was later hanged for murder in the shooting death of a sheepherder, and then The Hunter, an urban action movie about a modern-day bounty hunter, both released in 1980.
McQueen died on November 7, 1980 at the age of 50 in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, following an operation to remove or reduce several metastatic tumors in his neck and abdomen.
Shortly before his death, McQueen had given a medical interview in which he blamed his condition on asbestos exposure. While McQueen felt that asbestos used in movie soundstage insulation and race-drivers' protective suits and helmets could have been involved, he believed his illness was a direct result of massive exposure while removing asbestos lagging from pipes aboard a troop ship during his time in the Marines.
A memorial service was presided over by Leonard DeWitt of the Ventura Missionary Church. McQueen was cremated, and his ashes spread in the Pacific Ocean...
