For most movie lovers today, the idea of 1970s Hollywood conjures up an image of maverick filmmakers being given the keys to the castle. It was the era memorialized in histories like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, when young turks like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg did some of their greatest and most famous work. But the truth was more complicated than that. Certainly, movies like The Godfather and Jaws were huge hits, but films of that caliber striking gold at the box office were the exception rather than the rule. Then as now, Hollywood has always been first and foremost in the business of churning out big, mindless spectacles, and the blockbuster of choice for many studios in the early 1970s was the disaster film. The biggest of them all was the highest-grossing film of 1974, The Towering Inferno.
What made The Towering Inferno a hit?: In the 1950s, a journalist named Irwin Allen decided to turn his lifelong love for movies into a career. After producing several documentaries and modest features, he turned his attentions to television throughout most of the 1960s, producing hit series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Following the success of 1970’s Airport, Allen jumped on the disaster movie bandwagon by making the 1972 smash The Poseidon Adventure. Poseidon Adventure didn’t invent its genre, but it stood in contrast to other films of its kind by moving its central disaster closer to the beginning of the story and focusing instead on how its characters reacted to the disaster.
Allen rarely directed movies himself- The Towering Inferno was credited to John Guillermin, with Allen credited as the director of action sequences- but there was little doubt who was running the show. With The Towering Inferno, Allen more or less perfected the disaster movie formula- impressive effects, gigantic sets, and a sappy romantic ballad often performed by cheeseball chanteuse Maureen McGovern. Likewise, as with all of the most successful disaster movies, Allen gave The Towering Inferno the most stellar cast he could manage, top-lined by three of the era’s biggest stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Faye Dunaway. In addition, he cast the key older characters in the film with old-guard Hollywood stars like William Holden, Fred Astaire and Jennifer Jones. And what would a big-budget film of the period without such quintessentially seventies names as Richard Chamberlain, Robert Wagner, Susan 
Blakely, and Robert Vaughn? The formula worked- The Towering Inferno was produced for a then-outrageous sum of $14 million dollars, but it ended up grossing more than eight times that amount in America alone, and much more than that overseas.
What happened?: If history teaches us anything about genre moviemaking, it’s that moviegoers are a fickle bunch. The disaster movie was at its peak at the time of The Towering Inferno’s release, but that was about to change. Within the next few years, movies like Jaws and Star Wars gave audiences a new kind of thrill ride at the movies. In light of the lean, efficient nature of these movies, suddenly old-school disaster movies were a thing of the past, and The Towering Inferno, with its galaxy of stars and nearly three-hour run time, seemed stately by comparison. Allen himself couldn’t even resurrect the genre, closing out the decade with three consecutive flops (The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and When Time Ran Out) that pretty much closed the book on disaster movies for years.
Does The Towering Inferno still work?: Not really. If the movie was quaint in comparison to blockbusters made only a few years later, it’s practically a fossil by today’s standards. One of the most distracting elements of the movie is Allen’s tendency to focus on small and fairly cliché bits of character business. At the time, the sight of one or two big-name stars dying onscreen was something of a shock, but from the beginning it’s pretty clear which ones are destined not to survive until the end. Allen pretty clearly divides his principal cast into three groups- the good, the bad, and the doomed. While some people are resourceful enough to survive the tragedy, others clearly exist to be victims or to get their comeuppance in the end. So not only does the story feel safe and comfortable, but it also takes on an element of kitsch as we wait to see how certain characters will meet their ends.
Another problem with the film was its bloated 165-minute running time. You’d think that a movie about people escaping from a fire would be fairly simple narratively-speaking, but there’s so much incident in The Towering Inferno that it overwhelms everything else. The film had its origins in two similar skyscraper-on-fire novels, The Tower and The Glass Inferno, and rather than judiciously cherry-picking elements from both books, Allen had Sterling Silliphant combine the stories of the two books and take the seven principal characters from each. As a result, the movie feels needlessly busy, forever cross-cutting between groups of characters as they attempt to escape the blaze. Some of the actors make an impression- Newman has an effortless authority in his scenes, and Fred Astaire gets a few nice moments- but most of them are lost in the shuffle.
And then there’s Steve McQueen. Arguably the biggest action star of the day, McQueen was cast early in the production and then proceeded to throw his weight around. After being cast as the heroic architect Doug, he decided that he preferred to play fire chief O’Hallorhan. Then, after Newman was cast as Doug, McQueen insisted his role be given equal weight as Newman’s. McQueen was to have exactly the same number of lines as Newman, and their roughly equal star stature necessitated the pioneering use of what was called “diagonal billing.” All of these headaches might have been worth it if McQueen was on top of his game, but he’s mostly on autopilot throughout the film, giving one of his laziest performances. The point of casting a star of McQueen’s caliber is for the audience to care about his character, but whenever he’s onscreen, I was mostly just anxious for Newman and Dunaway (then at the peak of her gorgeousness) to show up again.
Ever since Allen’s reign as the “Master of Disaster”, Hollywood has made several attempts to resurrect the disaster genre. But despite the best efforts of filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, the genre hasn’t caught on. CGI has made effects cheaper and easier to create than ever before, but just as key to The Towering Inferno’s popularity was its all-star cast, and the cost of such a cast today would be astronomical, and a huge gamble at a time when the importance of movie stars seems particularly questionable. The heyday for movies like The Towering Inferno has long since passed, and it looks like audiences will never love a movie like this again.