The most awkward of the stunt casting choices is Steve McQueen as Fire Chief Mike O’Hallorhan. Faye Dunaway has a few thankless scenes as Doug’s girlfriend Susan Franklin. He’s lovable and kind of sad, and comes to the Tower to meet and scam an unsuspecting widow, but finds himself falling in love as the Tower burns below him. There’s also the cowardly cheap skate con man Harlee Claiborn played by Fred Astaire who was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for his supporting role. ![]() These are just two of the many aging stars of the 70s that make up the cast of Inferno. ![]() On the roof, out of the helicopter jumps Doug Roberts (Paul Newman), the architect of the Glass Tower, and soon we meet his boss, Jim Duncan, played yawningly by William Holden ( Sunset Boulevard, 1950). There’s an impressive and heart-in-the-throat inducing scenic elevator that goes up and down the length of the tower from floor one to the Promenade Room at the top. This is “The Glass Tower”, a fictional office/apartment building supposedly set in the heart of downtown San Francisco and made ostensibly entirely out of glass. The helicopter lands atop a freakishly tall Goliath of a building that puts all other real-life San Francisco landmarks to shame. It’s no mystery that from here on out Williams would be the go-to composer for action and adventure films by Steven Spielberg ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977) and George Lucas ( Star Wars, 1977). The music was immediately familiar to me, and at the end of the film I was not at all surprised to see John William’s name appear on the screen. The film opens with a helicopter flying over the skyline of the amazingly picturesque San Francisco, CA while a jazz-pop orchestral score beats away in 5/4. ![]() It may be considered ironic that as a film so critical of greed and men who don’t know when enough is enough, Inferno as a whole seems to be the result of Hollywood budget carte blanche and megalomania in it’s most cinematically pure form. While John Guillermin ( King Kong, 1976) is credited as director, it is widely known that Allen himself directed all of the action scenes, including the climactic grand explosion scene of fire and tons of gallons of water. The disturbingly prescient response to the hubristic building of such a tall skyscraper and the possibility of disaster in the event of a fire was producer Irwin Allen’s (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 1961) 1974 spectacle, The Towering Inferno. In 1970, The Twin Towers were built at the World Trade Center in New York City.
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