EARTHQUAKE
Filmschau THE AMERICAN DISASTER
THE TOWERING INFERNO
Teil der Special Reihe THE AMERICAN DISASTER
Terror on 138 storeys!
After blasting the box-office with THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, super-producer Irwin Allen sought to outdo himself with his fiery follow-up, in which the world's tallest skyscraper — 515m high and implausibly situated in seismically-dodgy San Francisco — becomes the world's most extravagant death-trap.
Featuring a superlatively stellar cast headed by Steve McQueen and Paul Newman (jointly top-billed), plus Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire and even a pre-infamy O.J.Simpson, it duly exceeded POSEIDON in terms of both takings and awards, landing Oscars for Best Song, Cinematography and Editing.
Produced by not one but two giant studios (20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers) and based on not one but two novels, this 165-minute orgy of lovingly-detailed conflagration now looks like the operatic swansong of the classically extravagant Hollywood system. Lurking on the horizon, shot over the same summer of 1974 on the continent's opposite shore... JAWS.
The realism here is very offensive.
