Terror on the 40th Floor

The Disaster Movies of the late 1960s and 1970s seem to owe their success to the spectacle involved. If you have a really big building on fire or a gigantic ship sinking at sea or an earthquake ripping down a city, it's very impressive. But once you get past the big set piece, you still have to photograph people and stories in interesting ways or you don't really have anything.

John Ford was once asked why he took his film crews out to Monument Valley for westerns. Instead of speaking of the beauty of the location, the fact that other other sites for westerns were too familiar, he replied "To photograph the most interesting thing in the world: a human face."

Unfortunately, while there are a lot of human faces in this movie, they don't seem to be doing anything we haven't seen a hundred times and more. The lines are well read, John Forsythe speaks his lines meaningfully, Joseph Campanella plays a jerk as well as he ever did, but nothing is ever meaningfully solved. Oh, under the stress of Imminent Death and 1970s pre-disco music, people Figure Out What Is Really Important. But six months afterwards, they probably change their minds.

So all you're left with of potential interest is the fire. And you've seen a fire, haven't you?

This is basically a TV movie version of the 70's theatrical disaster classic "The Towering Inferno". Naturally, it's much lower budgeted than its inspiration, so the high-rise fire in this building is much less towering and not so much of an inferno. (Of course, people that grew up after the advent of CGI probably wouldn't find even the big-budget spectacle of the original film that impressive today, and even many of us who were born before CGI ironically find ALL special effects pretty unimpressive now since any doofus with a good computer program can create just about anything these days).

The plot involves a group of characters who are having a smaller, private party in the boss's high-rise suite after the official office Christmas party breaks up. They become trapped by a fire started by a dimwitted janitor. The fire department comes to the rescue, but they are unaware of the trapped people. The characters consist of the boss (John Forsythe) who is being tempted towards infidelity by a luscious, predatory secretary (Anjanette Comer). There is a lower level executive (Joseph Campanella)who convinces another secretary to break into his personnel file, and then spends the rest of the movie pouting that he is not getting a promotion. There is another executive hitting on a yet another naive secretary. Finally, there is another older secretary (Lynn Carlin) who is struggling with guilt over a recent abortion.

Of course, this movie doesn't have nearly the star power of "The Towering Inferno". Forsythe, Campanella, and Comer are not Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. But the bigger problem is the characters they play. I didn't really care whether any of these corporate cretins or office drones lived or died--well,except perhaps Anjanette Comer whose gold-digging character is totally unsympathetic, but she is wearing this slinky red dress that clings to every mouth-watering curve. . .But with all due respect to Ms. Comer, when you're drooling over a fully-clothed actress in 70's made-for-TV movie, it's probably a good indication you're NOT being too entertained otherwise. Besides, while I'm not so sure about Forsythe and Campanella, if you've seen Comer in the cult film "The Baby" or Lynn Carlin in the horror classic "Deathdream", you know that even some members of this relatively low-watt cast are capable of much more when they're given good material to work with. It is really the material and the thinly-drawn characters--not the special effects or the star power--that let's this movie down.

If anything else, this film and other disaster pictures shall serve as a tribute to the local Fire Departments putting their lives on the line to rescue people in such awful circumstances. This picture shall serve as such a tribute.

It's basically the story of several guys and gals who stay behind after the Christmas Office Party has broken up. Unfortunately, it is not realized that several people are trapped on the top floor until the fire has really spread.

Naturally, those who stayed behind are unhappy during this season of love for a variety of reasons and effective flashbacks show us what brought these people to their current dangerous situation.

Yes, this is the typical disaster film of the 1970s but it is done well and is nicely paced. John Forsyth, as the company's vice president, along with employee Joseph Campanella, who is annoyed that he will be passed up for a promotion, deliver fine performances.

The 1970s produced some fine made-for-television movies like "Brian's Song" and "Dr. Cook's Garden". However, it seems that for every good made- for-television movie like those, there was a stinker like "Terror On The 40th Floor". My guess is that this movie was rushed into production to take advantage of the publicity building for the theatrical movie "The Towering Inferno". I guess that, because the story and characters in this imitator are sorely lacking. The characters in this movie are a boring lot. I didn't care about them, and they seem pretty dim-witted. Why don't they use the fire escape stairs? Why don't they break a window and send "Help!" messages to the streets below? Those and other questions are never answered. And no doubt because of the low budget, the fire footage is infrequent and lacking in power during the few times it's displayed. The end result is a very tedious and boring effort, so it's no wonder why there was apparently no one keeping track of it to prevent it from being in its now public domain status.

Seven stragglers at a Christmas Eve office party are trapped when fire breaks out in their Art Deco high-rise, and no one knows they are up there.

This darkly lit, small scale TV version of The Towering Inferno also throws in moments from Earthquake (attempts to scale the elevator shaft), and The Poseidon Adventure (lots of Christmas tree imagery - I thought at one point they were even going to use the tree itself to climb down the elevator shaft).

A news reporter on the scene helpfully explains that despite little external evidence of a fire, it is raging over several floors inside. The TV budget clearly didn't extend to burning skyscraper model shots. We do get several blazing office interiors.

It is not terrible, though the final segment drags. The actors play their parts well and I did care about the characters. There are some ridiculous bits of padding around commercial break cliffhangers and interoffice tensions resurface as colleagues argue about what they should do. The soap opera-style flashbacks are mercifully brief.

Pippa Scott's short scenes are the funniest.