In which we discuss Terror On the 40th Floor, The Deadly Tower, Superdome, and A Fire In the Sky, concluding our overview of the disaster telefilms Jerry Jameson directed in the 70s, which began here., where we dealt with Heatwave!, The Elevator, and Hurricane.
When I set myself to the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson, I negligently failed to realize there were this many, so many that even just "the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson of 1974" became a fractal, neverending endeavor, so that I suppose that after doing three previously and only realizing I'd missed a fourth now, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were, somehow, four more still lurking out there to make me look foolish. Fortunately, Terror On the 40th Floor doesn't change anything I said about The Elevator, which is, if anything, even more comfortably Jameson's best movie of an extremely busy 1974. Similar in setting and somewhat in concept to The Elevator, what we've actually got here isn't that at all, and it's pretty shameless and more than a little suspect just from the outset: a skyscraper-on-fire TV disaster movie aired three months before The Towering Inferno came out in theaters in December. If that sounds hackish and mercenary and even gauche to you (yet actually about two months too early to properly parasitize on the marketing and hype for The Towering Inferno, especially when Airport 1975 is presently playing on the big screen), you're pretty much right; this is quite low-effort material. A notable distinction, anyway, is that The Towering Inferno is legitimately "about something"—mostly that fire is hot, sure—but also that skyscrapers and perhaps the system that produces them are an affront to morality, and the disaster there is triggered by greed and hubris and poor regulation; in Terror on the 40th Floor, the disaster is triggered by a drunken blue collar worker spilling fire all over everything.
The victims are... salespeople of some description, taking their office Christmas into the later hours of Christmas Eve (I have come to reevaluate Jameson as someone with a sense of humor: he introduces six of these characters, a trio at a time, as stumbling into the big boss's office unaware that he's still there, and it at least appears that Jameson thought it would be funny if it looked like not one but two nascent MFF threesomes in a row found themselves interrupted). They spend a long time unaware there's a fire, while the emergency services spend an even longer time unaware they're still in the building, yet it's also a long time before any of them begin to resolve, and for going on the first thirty minutes the only one who gets any character whatsoever attached to her is the insecure divorcee who barely figures into anything else in the movie. Eventually, the screenplay just starts throwing flashbacks at us to crudely humanize its figures (albeit only for three out of the, I think, seven), and I'd say two-thirds of these are duds, on top of my general distaste for flashbacks in disaster movies, a strategy that arguably only ever worked for Airplane! (which, honest, is more disciplined about it because it knows who its protagonists are).
It's part and parcel to the expansion of Jameson's canvas: Heatwave!, Hurricane, and The Elevator had been 65-71 minute pictures, but Terror On the 40th Floor is obliged to fill a whole two-hour programming block, and it just can't, not really, and frankly I'm not convinced the screenplay was originally written to do so. There is precious little disaster film incident, and between the presentation I saw it in, and the narrative fact that the firefighters kill the electricity in the building, it's hard to describe it as much more than just seven losers in a dark room waiting to die. There's one freakout-related sequence that at least gets your attention, involving a hysterical young woman smashing through a glass door because nothing cool has happened in a while; there's only ever the one single scene you'd rightly call a "setpiece," and, even so, I would say it's a pretty good setpiece, not least because while so much of the rest of this is playing strictly by (if, arguably, inventing!) small-c conservative TV disaster cinema rules—"get back together with your spouse or God will strike you down, humans!"—the film's one single act of heroism is, in fact, punished brutally. I almost suspected that the entire cast would eat it because in the aftermath they're geographically bound so tightly as a group. It's not that, and instead it turns out the whole last half hour has no means of generating disaster movie adrenaline spikes at all. Even with all that, it's still not actually reaching its 96 minute runtime. To get there, Jameson is deploying a lot of extrinsic stuff (including some wonky-ass interactions between tertiary characters outside of the building, who feel like they ought to be too instrumental to even be weird), and especially a bunch of firefighting B-roll. Now, the treatment of fire is decent for a TV movie—it's very physical, and Jameson gets some good imagery like the Christmas tree bursting into flames like someone doused it with gasoline (as they probably did), or the ghostly appearance of the smoke seeping out of the elevators—and there's a nicely abstract quality to the firefighting, silhouettes milling about amidst all the hellish blobs of orange. But I am receptive to the argument it's too much firefighting, especially in a movie otherwise so in danger of getting dull. Even at barely over an hour and a half, it feels as long as The Towering Inferno, and while, sure, that's hyperbole, it's no greater hyperbole than saying The Towering Inferno only feels as long as this movie objectively is; what I'm saying is, don't bother, be patient, The Towering Inferno will be out before Christmas, everybody.
Score: 4/10
There's a question I have whether mass shootings count as "disasters," at least vis-a-vis disaster cinema; my general rule, which I've publicly stated elsewhere in literally the last six hours, is that conscious malice takes it out of the genre. (It's why Jaws is kind of a gray area.) On the other hand... well, all the obvious reasons that a movie about a mass shooting would be in, or could easily be fitted into, the disaster genre. Indeed, 1976's Two-Minute Warning is generally counted, including by me, amongst its decade's disaster cinema cycle. (But then, in both today's subject and Two--Minute Warning, the mass shooter scarcely is a conscious entity, and more like a force of nature.) Well, it's all theoretical anyhow. That leaves the more specific question of whether The Deadly Tower itself, a TV film concerning the real-life University of Austin tower shooting in 1966, was meant to be part of that aforementioned cycle, using the UofA tower shooting as exploitable disaster fodder; and hence a last, related question, "but isn't that kind of gross? It was only nine years ago." Whatever else, The Deadly Tower is at least unusual, because 70s disaster movies almost never took on real-life events, in no small part because they wanted to keep a free hand to have fun with the destruction. This would also explain why there aren't very many about mass shootings, which, then as now, we don't really have the temperament to have "fun" with. The historical fact of the matter, however, is that "making a disaster movie" was not the exigence for The Deadly Tower's creation: it turns out that the UofA tower shooting was just what rose to the top of the pile when producer Antonino Calderon, seeking Hispanic representation, discovered hero cop and sniper-killer Ramiro Martinez, who later sued him in part because his wife was, uh, not presented as a blonde Nordic woman. But once the ball got rolling, disaster cinema it was: what else do you hire Jerry Jameson for, after he spent the previous year churning out four of 'em? (And halfway through, the screenplay eagerly claims the genre for itself, by way of expositional radio: "It's a disaster here, that's the only term for it.")
I belabor it because, of course, it's a remarkably mordant piece of disaster thrillmaking, by-and-large accurate and even more committed to a sensation of accuracy, with Jameson's usual DP Matthew Leonetti potentially doing his finest work for the director by way of brutely (but deceptively) artless docudrama cinematography, much the same strategy as The Elevator but now applied to daylight exteriors that are blown out to a shocking degree even for 70s television, so the film's world seems both very tactile and real but also to be blinding and unpleasant. He's also getting a huge amount of mileage out of the vertiginous spaces between the sniper's nest and the square, and the location shooting in Baton Rouge with its startlingly vertical Louisiana Capitol. (They did ask UofA. They said no. The big problem, physical production-wise, is an increasingly-noticeable absence of budget for specific Austin livery on the automobiles. There's a lot of "CITY POLICE" in this movie all about cops.) The screenplay itself is, for the most part, a very dry, just-the-facts affair (to the point that "having any musical score" is a slight demerit in its occasional distraction), and Jameson's embracing that, allowing a morbid pallor from the outset and largely disinterested in personality in favor of you-are-here experiential cinema. That obviously poses some challenges for the pre-shooting prelude, which he and editor Tom Stevens meet with some reasonably ambitious cross-cutting, mirroring our Martinez, Richard Yniguez, and our sniper, Kurt Russell (very effortfully shaking off the fairy dust from his Disney years), as they "go about their day." This results in some strong, perverse match-cuts like Yniguez consenting to return to bed with his wife while Russell lays his just-murdered spouse to rest in theirs. It can't do this constantly, but there's thought being put into this that, frankly, Jameson was not putting into most of his previous telefilms.
The bulk of it is just the shooting, including the initial high-casualty phase (it's a tasteless thing to mention, but it doesn't really sound like an optimized plan for a mass shooting), and therefore lots of serpentine running and hiding behind obstacles and Russell blasting away, and "luckily" the UofA shooting has enough convolutions for a narrative treatment, including an attempt at King Konging the sniper from a biplane, as well as the apparently constant battery of attempted suppressing fire from concerned citizens, which I guess I'm enough of a redneck to find "cool" even if they were possibly doing more harm than good and Jameson's look at them is pretty sarcastic. Ultimately, it comes down to Martinez and the killer (and Ned Beatty as fellow hero, university bookstore employee Allen Crum), and while this is by no means an "actor's movie," Jameson is directing Russell well, jointly leaning into a nearly autonomic interepretation of the murderer and the seeming unknowability of his inner life. (That subtle Jameson humor attends him, though: there's a weird but amusingly absurd bit where Russell forgets he's a sniper in a tower, and attempts to throw away a sandwich wrapper in the cupola's trashcan like a human being would, and almost gets his head blown off prematurely; there's an earlier beat that would obviously be funnier—though crasser and more exploitative—if it hadn't actually happened, when one of the initial wave of victims confidently states that he's totally sure he's out of range.) As for Yniguez, he's not winning awards for his performance (the best in show is probably Beatty, albeit with an easier supporting part), and whatever else, I think we can agree with the real-life Martinez that his nagging screen wife (Maria Elena Cordero) does kind of suck. But Yniguez has a great face for what the camera needs him to do, and he and Beatty alike each serve as excellent chassis for the makeup techs who are putting on the real prize performance here, constantly dousing these men in fake sweat that's streaming off their faces like they're actually melting from the stress and the sun and the blown-out highlights of it all, and this is making up a lot of lost ground from the "TV-movieness" of it which, by broadcast standards necessity, is going to be a somewhat sterilized vision of a mass shooting.
By the end, it's just senseless violence that the film more-or-less openly admits it's not equipped to even begin trying to understand, which is, honestly, about as profound a statement as anything deeper could be (though it is rather anti-gun, too), and it feels justified when it goes for pathos (or bathos, I get the two confused often enough) and the death of the sniper arrives under the radio listing the names of his then-confirmed victims. It gives the film an opportunity to handle the weight of that communal tragedy, and it was as hefty as I wanted it to be in that moment, so I have to say that the decision to have Beatty smash the radio—probably after the radio announcer has named all of them (but there'd have been fourteen, and the movie sure as hell can't expect you to be counting them off)—represents some astoundingly bad instincts from Jameson or his writers there. I mean, wow.
Score: 7/10
How about a crisis at the Superbowl? Would that be good advertising for your trademarked intellectual property, the Superbowl? In 1978, the NFL apparently felt that it would be, and acceded to a TV movie all about a whole bunch of Superbowl-related murders (and just casually shrugging at the implications it makes regarding football's connection to organized crime), in the expectation that it wouldn't be anything besides free advertising. Synergy, baby. In fairness, though it's going to remind you of Two-Minute Warning, and Jerry Jameson had just come off a mass shooting movie with The Deadly Tower, it's not fearmongering; it's not really a disaster film at all, and it shouldn't be here, but let's deal with that in a second. Before anything else, the most important thing to know about Superdome is that there's just no overcoming the wretchedness of this screenplay, which is flat busted and not even in just one way.
But it's true: Superdome is, of course, the one that definitely doesn't belong here; nonetheless, it's undeniably patterned on 70s disaster cinema in its collectivist bent, and channeled through Jameson's disaster film-trained sensibilities. This turns out to be one of the film's problems, beacause, generically-speaking, this is a thriller through-and-through, and you can't do this shit in a thriller, where just because a pair of characters are technically "there," it thus makes sense to include their story. I can say without fear of spoiling anything that one of its various threads, the drug-addicted broken-down player and his lovelorn wife (the not-actually-related Ken Howard and Susan Howard), has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else. It's just this entire mini-drama C-plot that happens parallel to the actual story, that is also entirely terrible on its merits. (The lovelorn wife is, in fact, a minor monster—I understand she's all hurting and stuff, but the time to throw an infidelity you appear to have committed solely to cause your partner pain into your partner's face is not 36 hours before the most important day of his life. I might go so far as to say this script involved either teleplay writer Barry Oringer or scenarist Bill Svanoe trying and not entirely succeeding in working out his own problems with women, indeed without even realizing he was doing so, because this is what seems to happening both in this thread of the story and elsewhere.)
But the huge thing is that even the main plot, involving assassinations designed to ruin a team's chances of winning the Superbowl—or at least beating the spread—eventually breaks down on a conceptual level. It's annoying, because probably a majority of the film works, and besides the awful marital drama part, on a scene-by-scene basis it's more-or-less fine: though I kidded, I actually like the premise quite a bit, and the actors are all decent or good, and if it arguably takes too long for the plot to resolve into a clear enough shape for us to follow it, that's not the very worst crime a paranoia-adjacent thriller could commit. But Goddamn it, there's such a profound illogic in the wheel-spinning core of this story, with possibly a full-on plurality of the scenes here involving a character undertaking an action that fits in well enough with that character's motivation and temperament (pretend sports journalist/actual assassin Donna Mills seduces rather older team manager David Janssen), but that action doesn't mechanically interface with that character's actual goals to the very slightest degree. It's like they shifted the story halfway through, forgot about it until the movie was being made, and later hoped you wouldn't notice or chalk it up to daddy issues and go about your day. I might've even been willing to forgive its complete inanity myself, if it didn't culminate in possibly the single lamest villain denouement you've ever seen in your life. But then it does.
Yet I'm loath to condemn it utterly, because Jameson must've been having a grand time with this, and that enthusiasm is absolutely contagious; in another life, Jameson might've better enjoyed being a maker of travelogues or, like, Cinerama movies. And thus in Superdome, like Airport '77 before it and Raise the Titanic after it, and not a few of his disaster telefilms around it (including, not that I necessarily thought of it that way, The Deadly Tower), what he's doing is showing off an abiding fascination with stuff. I don't know exactly what to call the style that Jameson (and Leonetti) are evolving here: infrastructural tactility, maybe. In those theatrically-released films, he showed a love for USN warships (along with supersized modelwork attempting to convince you it was the R.M.S. Titanic), whereas in this he gets to demonstrate what might be an even greater love for just wandering around New Orleans, doing location shooting. So much of the movie is devoted to that: the most interesting spot inside a riverboat's restaurant, for example, where we have a whole dialogue scene play out with the paddlewheel flying behind some anonymous guy talking some boring business-shit with Van Johnson; or consider the awed vistas within and without the Louisiana Superdome, with some beautiful shadows of clouds passing over its impassive white roof, and even a finale that (lame or not) involves some gorgeous uses of the Superdome's enormous interior spaces. If that doesn't do it for you, how about just soaking up the color while tooling around looking at bars, or marching bands playing their instruments, or extraordinarily tacky office waiting areas, or whatever. (Hell, the movie starts with a How It's Made industrial porn montage of the printing equipment for Superbowl tickets. I'm earnestly recalculating how sure I am that it was MCA Universal's idea to advertise their laserdisc player in Airport '77.) And I don't even want to say he's not making a workmanlike made-for-TV thriller here, either, though it certainly doesn't hit Airport '77 or Starflight One levels of intensity or ingenuity. It's simply a pity that the script he's directing sucks so incredibly much, on a structural level.
Score: 5/10
A FIRE IN THE SKY (1978)
I could probably watch Jerry Jameson's 65-71 minute made-for-TV disaster movies indefinitely, regardless of their quality; his 95 minute made-for-TV disaster movies have been a mixed bag, but I'll watch 95 minutes of anything; and I will readily admit to being extremely nervous about his 140 minute one. Happily, my anxiety wasn't vindicated, and A Fire In the Sky does a few neat things: of the numerous made-for-TV disaster films I've seen from the 1970s, it's one of the best of them, maybe the best that is true-blue, pure-bred "disaster cinema"; it's likewise one of the few that just about hits the average for theatrically-released disaster cinema in the 70s (even if I've decided to be conservative with my score for various reasons that'll become clearer); and, above all, it more-or-less even earns its long runtime. The only thing I'd really be eager to cut completely is the dumb redneck comet skeptic grandmother D-plot with her stupidly dutiful grandson Michael Biehn (whom I did not even recognize until he gave a characteristic Biehnian delivery, with only about ten minutes of movie left to go).
In any case, it starts off very well, with about the most "Jerry Jameson loves machines and stuff" gesture it could, starting with a Leonetti-lensed glamor shot of a high-powered observatory telescope slowly being revealed by the rays of a sunset, followed by what that telescope observes, then hard-cutting to credits delivered over top of a bunch of wide-angle lens photography of Phoenix taken from various weird angles meant to say "look at this cool place," interested solely in the material culture of humanity and apparently still having a few people wandering around in the backdrops of its shots solely because Jameson or his second unit failed to shoo them out of there, rather than because he wanted to indicate that human material culture is actually used by humans. It's just a good opening no matter how you slice it: this movie is gonna be about the Earth (specifically Phoenix) getting blasted by a comet, and that's communicated perfectly without a single word before the story has even started. It's let down only a little bit by the rather 50s B-movie bad comet effect, which shall be a constant companion, but I don't mind that too much. Afterwards, it's going to work more often than it doesn't: it's written pretty well on a scene-to-scene basis (especially for a movie that's clearly only a time-filling genre exercise), notably in its loopy introduction of our science hero (Richard Crenna) as a funny lech, but likewise in our increasingly-de-rigeur unhappily married couple (Elizabeth Ashley and David Dukes), which will get worse as it becomes more "TV disaster movie" cliched, but it earns a lot of goodwill early on by taking its unhappy spouses to some weird places. Notably, it has Ashley's newswoman wife (indeed, they're both managers of local Arizona news organs) leverage the woman that her husband's cheating on her with to gather intelligence about the husband's secret meeting with the Arizona elite, and the leverage she's using isn't "you're sleeping with my husband," but "you're a fucking reporter, aren't you?"
And it keeps on keeping on for over two hours, being interesting enough at everything it's trying to do—and, as is worth mentioning, perhaps being the very first motion picture to bring us a "nukes versus the celestial object" sequence, a year before Meteor and many years before Armageddon. Jameson runs it through its paces well, and if there's maybe not a lot of SFX spectacle, nor (that nuclear interlude aside) is there even much of any opportunity for SFX spectacle, prior to our finale, then there is still the spectacle of a AAA-budgeted 70s TV movie going on, with the spectacle of an extras corps running into the thousands, and the spectacle of one shockingly huge amount of cars such as Kurt Russell (in Used Cars, anyway, not The Deadly Tower) would dream about. Not-quite-as-shocking, but still pretty gratifying, is the number of airplanes that Jameson's marshaled for the evacuation of Phoenix. It genuinely feels like a city getting up on its feet to try to escape.
It does not, however, ultimately wind up an unlikely classic of the genre, and that's a pity: when we do get to the finale, that isn't as expensive as you'd have liked it to be and "expensive" is something that the physical production has, to be honest, set you up for. It feels truncated, and its modelwork is a little fakey, and it definitely underestimates (and visually undersells) the devastation caused by the object as it's described, given that just the flash ignitions alone would leave the whole area a sea of fire. Beyond that, it comes horribly close to playing strictly by all the extrinsic "TV disaster movie rules," without any of the arbitrary nihilism that made, e.g., The Poseidon Aventure such a gut-churning masterpiece. This one, of course, veers more towards punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent. (It is at this point that the reuniting spouses plot gets malignantly bad, even though I've enjoyed Ashley's performance throughout, in how she's been making choices, mainly just how she reacts to disappointment, that help define her character as an interesting combo of spoiled grown-up rich daddy's girl used to getting what she wants, and not entirely able to comprehend it when she doesn't, and actual heroine possessed of undeniable integrity.) It doesn't commit, totally, to screenwriter-as-omnibenevolent-God boilerplate, but it's too close for comfort. Plus I'm not even entirely sure these screenwriters' definition of "good" and "bad" is coherent: it clearly thinks the foot-draggers are reprobate dolts, except when it doesn't. I mean, to my mind, Phoenix should be permanently evacuated anyway, whether a comet's about to hit it or not. Well, that's the negative side of A Fire In the Sky; the brighter side is that Jameson's small-screen disaster career got to close out the 1970s on a reasonably high note. But his very best TV disaster movie was yet to come, he just had to wait till the 1980s to get it.
Score: 6/10
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