Clyde’s Movie Palace: The Towering Inferno (1974)

 

Directed
by
John Guillerman
(Action Sequences by Irwin Allen)
Written
by
Sterling Siliphant
Based on the novels
The Tower
by
Richard Martin Stern
and
The Glass Inferno
by
Thomas N. Scortia
Frank M. Robinson
Original Music
by
John Williams
Cinematography
by
Fred J. Koenekamp

I have pretty much decided that  any review I would post next, as health permitted, would be of a film romantic in nature.  Nobody on the planet is as much a promoter of that crazy little thing called love as I am.  Look at the evidence:  I’ve been married three times and have been in numerous other permanent relationships ranging from six months to ten years.  What better credentials are there than experience?

I’m sure that there are already a few of you out there scratching your head trying to figure out what is so romantic about The Towering Inferno. The answer is: practically everything.  Think of it as The Love Boat, Love American Style, or even the movie Valentine’s Day which was released just two years ago.  The  only difference is that all of  the heartache and heart throbbing takes place in and around an imaginary 138 story high rise in San Francisco on the very same date that Producer/Director Irwin Allen decided to torch the building.

For starters, we have architect Doug Roberts (Paul Newman) who designed The Glass Tower and is having an affair with Susan Franklin (Faye Dunaway).  The first thing Doug and Susan do upon his return from Bumfuck-wherever-he-was for two years is to ignite their own campfire by frictioning two bodies together. 

Doug would like for Susan to come to the wilderness jungle and “do good things” with him which means getting married and raising a passel full of mealy mouthed little brats.   That might be why he packed  “$140 worth of vulgar underwear” in his suitcase. Unfortunately for Doug, Susan has been offered the position of Managing Editor of the magazine for which she works.  This is what Doug refers to as the two of them “having a situation.”  I would have thought the fact that he went missing for two years would have been a situation as well, but who am I to comment on fictional agreements between two fictional adults in a fictional romantic disaster film.

Susan:  See Doug, I want the kind of life you’re talking about, I want that.  And I want a place where our kids can run around, grow, and be free.
Doug:  But?
Susan:  I want this job, I’ve wanted it for five years.  I’ve worked for it for five years.  Now suddenly it’s there.  You see, I have ideas, Doug. I can do something with it, something that hasn’t been done before.  I guess I want both and I can’t have both, can I?
Doug:   I don’t know.

Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the snappy dialog rather quickly.

Con artist Harlee Claiborne (Fred Astaire) is getting ready to con rich old widow Lisolette (Jennifer Jones) by selling her some phony stock.  He has a date with her in the party in the penthouse that evening celebrating the opening of The Glass Tower, which is where he intends to woo her and then screw her over.  What Harlee doesn’t know but what we find out  later is that Lisolette is already on to his scheme.  But she doesn’t care, which means despite her wealth, she’s probably hit a pretty long dry spell.  We know that love will burn brightly between these two canaries eventually.  Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Roger Simmons (Richard Chamberlain) works for Jim Duncan (William Holden) and is married to Duncan’s daughter Patty (Susan Blakely).  The romantic fires between these two may have burned hot  and intense at one time, but their passion has fizzled out  like a wasted sparkler on July 5th and the chances of them ever rekindling that flaming spark are now non existent.  But since Roger only married Patty to further his own career by using his father-in-law’s money and influence, she’ll probably end up being better off. 

Patty:  Roger,  if you’ve done anything to Daddy’s building, God help you.
Roger:  Maybe I don’t need God’s help anymore, or your old man’s.  Not anymore.   So don’t expect me to shake every time Daddy barks, even if that’s what you want me to do.  
Patty: All I want is the man I thought I married.  But I guess we’re running out of reasons to stay married, aren’t we?
Roger:  It’s getting late, we mustn’t miss the party.

We certainly know what Roger’s priorities are and that makes wife Patty pretty much expendable.  It’s a damn good thing Irwin Allen didn’t pair her up with O.J. Simpson for this movie or Patty may never had made it to the credits with her head attached.  He has his own way of dispensing with his betrothed that is pretty nasty. 

Dan Bigelow (Robert Wagner) works for Jim Duncan as well.  I’m not sure what his job is but I suspect it involves a lot of ass kissing.  At one point he shows up with the biggest pair of scissors I’ve ever seen for a ribbon cutting ceremony.  I don’t know what happened to those scissor when the film was over, but Marcia Clark and Chris Darden never did come up with O.J.’s murder weapon. Hmmm…… 

Dan also is hot to trot for his secretary Lorrie (Susan Flannery).  They are having a very illicit affair.  I know this to be true because the screenwriter Sterling Silliphant makes it perfectly clear that Dan has to keep Lorrie’s flagpole riding top secret, although it is never explained why.  So after a long hard day’s work Dan shuts the phones off and they retire to the back of his office for some well earned boinking right about the time that one tiny spark ignites a night of blazing suspense.  What could possibly go wrong for this loving couple?

 

Mayor Ramsay (Jack Collins) shows up with his gorgeous wife Paula (Sheila Allen).  Although they are a couple of long married old farts, we know they are still deeply in love  because they tell us  just before the wife takes a fun filled ride in the scenic elevator.   She has hair to kill for.

The deaf widow, Mrs. Albright  lives on the 87th Floor with her two brats Angela (Carlena Gower) and Bobby Brady Phillip (Mike Lookinland).  Philip loves music and wears his headphones practically all the time.  His love of melodies is really just one of those annoying things that enables  him and sis Angela to figure heavily into the plot further down the road. 

  

Bartender Carlos (Gregory Sierra) loves his cases of 1929 Chianti.   And Senator Parker (Robert Vaughn) loves the Chianti as well, and may love somebody else but whoever it is, they weren’t invited to the party.  But by now, you get the idea.

Then there’s the aforementioned Jim Duncan.  He too has a lot of love. Not necessarily for his daughter, Patty, but for his pride and joy, The Glass Tower, the tallest building in the world and part of what Doug Roberts refers to as Duncan’s Edifice Complex.  The Glass Tower is an urban renewal project and is a government subsidized building where rich people can enjoy the finer things in life that the rest of us slobs could never afford but always seem to be footing the bill for.  You know, Republican Corporate Welfare.  I guess even back in the 70’s it was the American way:  Feed the wealthy, cut the feet out from under the middle class and the poor.

Jim loves his 130 story billion dollar building so much, he wants to build more of them all over the country.  But to obtain that goal, he needs the Senator to help him latch on to some more Government handouts.  He doesn’t give the Senator a case of ‘29 Chianti out of the goodness of his heart, you know.

While head architect Doug Roberts was running around in some jungle pretending to be Tarzan, Jim’s Tower began to experience costs over runs.  So when his favorite son-in-law, Roger, tells him that he can shave a few million off the budget, he doesn’t really question why or how.   So when the whole thing decides to go up like a Roman Candle  on the 4th of July because of faulty shoddy wiring below the specs Doug had insisted on, Jim can also plead ignorance while kicking Roger in the ass.  Besides, Roger is pretty much a shitty son-in-law anyway.

And up in smoke it goes.  We’re not talking about an old Cheech and Chong movie here.  When that one not so tiny sparks ignites a pile of  rags in a store room on the 81st floor, and when some dip shit comes along and opens the door to see if perhaps it is Cheech and Chong lighting one up, all hell breaks lose.  It’s time to call the fire department and fire fighter in chief Chief Mike O'Hallorhan (Steve McQueen), who was probably pretty damn glad he was able to avoid all the banal dialogue and silly plot manipulations which occupy the first thirty seven minutes.  All O’Hallorhan has to do is show up, fight the fire, and rescue people. But by the time the movie is over and he has practically gone through hell in a gasoline rain coat, he’ll undoubtedly be wishing he had been a bit player reciting some of the more dreary lines in the script, just as long as he wasn’t playing Dan Bigelow or Will Giddings (Norman Burton.)

Having struck box office gold two years earlier with The Poseidon Adventure, Irwin Allen,  aided by the combined financing of Fox and Warner Bros., decided to do himself one better with The Towering Inferno. No expense was spared, as evidenced by Allen securing the services of two of the top box office draws available in Paul Newman and Steve McQueen.

And let’s face it, the supporting cast of William Holden, Fred Astaire, Faye Dunaway, Robert Vaughn, and Richard Chamberlain isn’t too shabby either.  Add a lot of fire, a lot of smoke, a lot of flaming, charred, burned up humans, some of them falling 100 stories or more to their death, and you have the makings of a box office bonanza. It's amazing that the budget was held down to a mere $14 million dollars even in 1974 dollars.  The film grossed $116 million dollars which was quite a princely sum in those days.  Not to mention that the film still does well on DVD and is now on blu-ray where you see every little blister on burning bodies bubble up and spew pus all over the place.  Okay, well maybe not that graphic.

Despite the abundance of headlining actors in The Towering Inferno, the true star of the film is the disaster itself, just as it is in any of these concoctions. Allen directed the action sequences with John Guillerman handling the rest of the thankless chores. Once we get past the initial plot set ups that enable us to get to know the characters well enough to know who to root for, who we wish to become a crispy critter, who we wish weren’t here at all, and who to feel really really bad about when they become a flaming diving fireball dropping out of the sky, the action and suspense only lets up for brief intervals so all these high priced superstars can get some screen time.  There’s nothing more mesmerizing than watching a flaming body fall a hundred floors or more to the ground.

Allen also does well at piling on and keeps you on edge for long periods of time, with such things as a long climb up a flaming exploding stairwell and a long decent down a scenic elevator that will have you wringing your hands. The fire sequences are all well staged as you can almost feel the flames leaping through the screen and smell the smoke circling around the room.

Just like most disaster films with the good, there is generally some bad and Inferno is no exception. Some of the dialog in this film is truly horrendous.

Duncan: How bad is it?
Halloran: It's a fire. All fires are bad

Doug Roberts: I'm not a cheeseburger.
Susan: No, you're way better, all protein, no bread, now all I need to take with you is eight glasses of water.

James Duncan: Find me the architect that designed you, and who needs Doug Roberts?
Susan: I do.

James Duncan (after his building has killed almost 200 people): You know there's... nothing that any of us can do to bring back the dead.

The silliest moments were reserved for Dan and Lorrie.

Dan:  You know what astonishes me?
Lorrie:  What?
Dan:  You make love with a girl…
Lorrie:  Mmm..hmm
Dan:  And afterwards there’s no visible evidence, nothing to mark the event.  I mean look at you.  You look like you could be going to church.

Uh, maybe Dan ought to be conversing with the maid that has to clean his dirty sheets.  I’m sure she’s seen more commemoration over the years than she’d care to remember.  A few seconds later:

Lorrie:  Did you leave a cigarette burning.
Dan:  That’s not a cigarette.

At which point Dan opens the door to the outer office just long enough to find out two things:

1.  Lorrie’s sense of smell is practically non existent.
2.  Somebody decided to build a bonfire and there isn’t any ribs, chicken, steak, hamburgers, hot dogs, or even marshmallows in his portable fridge.

The best of the performances is turned in by Steve McQueen. As Chief Michael O'Hallorhan who is called to put the fire out, he seems to relish has role as Fire Fighter in Chief.  In fact, Allen initially wanted him to play the part of the architect, but McQueen knowing what suit would fit him well,  and that the part of a glorified high rise doodler was for that other guy by the name of Newman, makes the most of the opportunity.

Paul Newman on the other hand is a mixed bag. When he's playing his scenes with McQueen, he’s okay. At other times he seems a bit stiff and uncomfortable.  Then again, maybe it was resentment.  By contract, both Newman and McQueen were to have equal number of lines in the script.  By the time some dildo brain opens that utility closet door to actually get the real  movie started, Newman has already used up about half of his. 

Much of that was wasted on a lot of pointless dialogue with the very wooden Faye Dunaway who was undoubtedly signed solely for name recognition, and whose character could have been written out completely and not be missed.  Her presence is mostly pointless filler.  And the story goes that Faye Dunaway was extremely difficult to work with, so much so that she had to be threatened by William Holden to get the job done. But hanging out at the top of a high rise doing particularly nothing has to be a bit of a comedown for an academy award nominated actress.  But she would bounce back and win the golden statue for Network, then go on to do real cinematic masterpieces like Mommie Dearest and Supergirl.

 

Fred Astaire as con artist Harlee Claiborne out to bilk Lisolette Mueller fares a bit better. At least both he and Jones are given real things to do, and in the case of Jones, she plays a very unlikely heroine.  This was in fact, Jennifer Jones last motion picture gig and it’s nice to see her go out in a blaze of glory. 

Wagner as Dan Bigelow is a charmer but we just can't buy into his relationship with Lorrie no matter how hard we try.  But like some others, they are only here to be kindling for the weenie roast and nothing else. 

 

Susan Blakely as Patty Simmons, Holden's spoiled daughter and the wife of Roger (Richard Chamberlain) has nothing much to do except chastise her husband for causing Daddy a big headache, and whine about her failing marriage. Chamberlain, on the other hand, seems to like playing the role of the villain and he does it smarmily well.

I guess I have to mention O.J. Simpson aka Nevada Inmate 02648927, as much as I hate doing so.  The less said, the better.  The best thing I can say is that he disappears from the movie at the 1 hour and 13 minute mark holding a cat and doesn’t show up again until the 2 hour and 37 minute mark still holding his pussy. I always hope they’ll re-edit the movie with the murderous bastard showing back up as a char-broiled corpse or flying out of a top floor window.  No such luck.  One can only dream.

After having the number one hit single “Morning After” come out of his previous hit film, The Poseidon Adventure, gives it another go here and tries to one up himself.  It was Maureen McGovern who made the previous tune a humongous hit, although she didn’t perform the song in the movie.  This time, Allen shoots her up to the Penthouse of The Glass Tower to personally perform a little ditty called “We May Never Love Like This Again.”  Lightning in a bottle did not strike twice as The Towering Inferno song only made it up to number 83 on the Billboard 100.  Whether McGovern made it down or was burnt to a crisp is left to the imagination depending on how you feel about her or the song.  As for the rest of the score it was penned by the Great John Williams, and as with any Williams score fits the film well but except for the title sequence, it isn’t particularly memorable.

 

No matter. The Towering Inferno will still entertain you for the most part. At 165 minutes, you'll only be looking at your watch in the first half hour or so as you wait for that one tiny spark to ignite a spellbinding night of suspense. Irwin Allen pulled it all together to put quite a spectacle on the screen, making the most of the fact that he had the use of two novels, The Tower" by Richard Martin Stern, and "The Glass Inferno" by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson, two major studios, two film superstars, and an astronomical (at that time) budget.  It is easily the best disaster film to come out of the silly seventies, despite some of the slow moving business early in the film before things get lit up. 

Unfortunately after having reached this pinnacle of success, Allen would not even come close to reaching it again and with each subsequent film his productions went from being somewhat bad to being truly mediocre. Considering how much I really liked this film, it's a shame.  But if you are the best of a genre of a whole decade known as much for it’s silliness as anything else, I have no choice but to give you my grade and in this case it’s a B+. 

Clyde’s Movie Palace: One Magic Christmas (1985)

starring
Mary Steenburgen
Gary Basaraba
Harry Dean Stanton
Elizabeth Harnois
Robbie Magwood
Arthur Hill
Wayne Robson
Sarah Polley
Graham Jarvis

Some of the more successful Holiday films always seem to have an element of fantasy.  I guess that goes with the territory.  After all, it is the season of Santa Claus, Flying Reindeer, Red-nosed reindeer, Christmas Cookies, the North Pole, Gremlins, and  Elves. 

And let’s not forget the religious themes that  permeate the  holiday season.  That’s when the screenwriters trot out angels, lessons about why it is better to give then to receive, Christmas Ghosts of past, present and future, and discovering the true meaning of Christmas.  You know the drill.  It’s not about waking up to that big 60 inch screen flat screen stuffed  into your Christmas stocking.  It’s about giving and sharing, being with family, and doing unto others before they do it to you.  On the other hand, that 60 inch flat screen HD-TV does kind of help set the tone for the rest of the day.
 
I’ve always tried to have a good outlook about the holiday season, although some years it’s kind of tough.  As you get older, it seems to get more and more difficult to get into the Ho! Ho! Holiday spirit, especially when you seem to be living in a world inhabited by a growing population of Grinch's.  It’s even worse when some of those Imitation Scrooges inhabit the same dwelling as you do. 

But when things seem to be going totally in the crapper, a good Christmas film always seems to lift my spirits.  Or at least it did back in the day when there was someone around always willing to share the cinematic experience with me, regardless of how many times they had seen Chevy Chase screw up the holiday or George Bailey wished he’d never been born.  What really gets my goat is that some people can sit and watch a Lifetime movie five dozen times over, sometimes all in the same day.   But when you ask them to view a Christmas film they’ve seen maybe once or twice, they run away as if Santa had just dumped a hot lump of burning cool in their underwear.

But things could be worse.  Much worse.  If having a down and out Christmas is becoming the normal in your life, just visit the Grainger Family. 

To say that the Grainger Family is not having a good Christmas, is putting it mildly. The father, Jack (Gary Basaraba) has been laid off. His wife Ginny (Mary Steenburgen) is working long hours at the local supermarket as a cashier for low pay to help make ends meet. The children, Abbie and Cal (Elisabeth Harnois & Robbie Magwood) often overhear their parents arguing about money. To make matters worse the Grainger's are being evicted from their house, owned by the company Jack was laid off from and they have to be out by New Years.

Despite all these problems Jack and the children manage to keep a certain amount of Christmas spirit. Jack piddles his life away in the basement fixing bikes, including one for neighbor kid, Molly Monahan.  Without someone like Jack nearby, who has the Christmas Spirit in abundance, Dirt Poor Molly’s chances of having a bike would be zero percent.



Jack also has this dream of opening up his own bike shop, because let’s face it, the man has mad mechanical skills. But Ginny, says nah baby nah! You have to get a job, a real job, just like the shit job she’s working down at Glenn’s Supermarket where she has to cater to the young twerp Herbie who's her boss. 

 
This is one thing the film industry always gets right.  Having experienced this situation myself and knowing others who have, when you go to work for a young shit like Herbie who’s half your age or even more, they generally treat you as if you’ve just been secreted from a dog’s ass.  This is true.  I swear to it on a stack of gingerbread men. 

And Herbie is no exception.  He forces Ginny to work a double shift on Christmas Eve, simply because he knows her situation at home is desperate and she isn’t about to say no.  Herbie also has Ginny make his store announcements for him, for no particular reason, then gives her a load of crap about her line being backed up when he’s the cause of it.  So after surveying the situation at home and at the store, I’d have to say sorry Jack, it looks like it’s the AM/PM or 7 Eleven for you bud, and not bicycle city.

And then there’s the nasty customers Ginny has to put up with.  Customers like Harry Dickens (Wayne Robson), whom she has to deal with when she accidentally double rings a bag of chips, to which Harry shows why he’s in the running for customer jerk of the year.

Harry:  Hey, you already rang up those Dorito chips already.
Ginny:  Oh, okay.  You’re right, I’ll take it off your tote.
Harry (to another customer):  See what she tried to pull on me?  See that?  (then very loudly) Next time I’m going to the A&P.
Ginny:   Please.  Be my guest.  Next time go to the A&P!
Harry:  All right!

  So what does random jerkoff customer Harry have to do with this story?  You’ll find out.

Right behind Harry is the next customer, Molly Monaghan and her mother whose items come up to slightly more cash than she has on hand, not to mention she’s totally embarrassed by the fact that the cash she has on hands is actually food stamps.  I can see why she would be a bit sheepish.  This was smack dab in the middle of the St. Ronald Reagan era when he had the whole wide world convinced that every child bearing female on food stamps or government aid was a welfare queen riding off into the sunset in their government financed Cadillac's, thus stigmatizing those desperate and in need forever.  And as far as I can tell, the Repugnicant Party has only gotten worse since,  doling out billions to their corporate benefactors while squeezing the crap out of the rest of us.  

Mrs. Monaghan’s purchases come up to $26.83, but she only has $25 in stamps. Ginny, who despite having her own problems, offers to loan her the difference, showing Ms. Monaghan and us that beneath the Scrooge-like layers, there’s a heart encrusted in there somewhere.  But instead, of taking the loan, Ms. Monaghan puts back a box of snacks that she had bought for Molly.  Tough luck kid!

Jack is also conspiring with another friend and neighbor to collect money in order to obtain and fuel up a generator to light up the town’s Christmas Tree, because I guess the City Council says there isn’t enough money in the city coffers after having bought themselves a fleet of BMW’s.  And what does wife Ginny think of all this?  She thinks Jack is pretty much pissing his life away, and that the kids are annoying as hell every time the words Santa and Christmas come out of their mouth.

”I’m getting a little sick of hearing all this talk about Santa Claus from you,” she tells Abbie.

 
Ginny is in a mood so foul you might even think her body has been inhabited by the spirit of the Grinch, twice over, or that she was clone directly from the gene pool of Ebenezer Scrooge.    Therein lies the crux of this holiday entertainment. The question is whether or not Ginny can once gain find the spirit of Christmas and realize that the most important thing in life is still the love of your family and without that you’ve got nothing.

It's your basic Christmas movie plot, which means you need a Christmas crises intervention. In this case it comes in the form of Gideon (Harry Dean Stanton). 

We have already met Gideon at the beginning of the film.  He is sitting in a tree playing his harmonica when he is given his mission to head north to Medford, and help Ginny find her Christmas Spirit.  Why is he sitting in a tree playing his harmonica?  I guess that’s what Christmas angels do the rest of the year when they aren’t out interfering in the lives of people like Harry Bailey or in this case, Ginny Grainger.  Or maybe he gets his party groove on with Monica and Tess.  Details are sketchy.

Gideon meets up with Abbie when she sneaks out of the  house to mail a letter to Santa.  After magically retrieving her letter, he tells her how he became a Christmas Angel:

Gideon: Can you keep a secret?
Abbie: Yeah.
Gideon: Well, uh, I'm an angel. A Christmas angel.
Abbie: Oh, no, you're not, 'cause my dad told me you can't see angels. They're invisible.
Gideon: Well, they're invisible sometimes, but sometimes they have to show up.
Abbie: So, what's your name then?
Gideon: Gideon.
Abbie: Gideon? Was you a good person that died?
Gideon: Good person? Well, I was a cow hand... out, out west. And one Christmas, a long, long time ago, I was riding along the Snake River, and I heard this little... kid, uh, yelling to somebody, and, uh, so I jumped into the river to save him. Well, I saved him, all right, but I got myself drowned. 'Cause I didn't know how to swim. And, um, after that they, they made me a Christmas angel.
Abbie: What do Christmas angels do?
Gideon: Well, my job is to, every Christmas, have to help one person, that's feeling down, to get into the Christmas spirit.
Abbie: One person?
Gideon: Yeah.
Abbie: Could it be my mom? Could you make my mom like Christmas better, Gideon?
Gideon: Yeah. I think so, if you'll help me?
Abbie: Okay.

Gideon tells Abbie that instead of mailing the letter to Santa, to give it to Ginny to mail instead because this will help Ginny get into the Christmas Sprit.  But it’s not going to be easy.  Ginny is dead set against getting the kids anything more than a tea set and an etch-a-sketch.

Gideon pops in to see Abbie once again, and in a bit of showboating, busts her snow globe and then makes it so it isn’t broke, explaining that’s what they have to do for Ginny.  She’s broke, but the only one who can fix Ginny is herself.  He also warns Abbie that no matters what happens, not to be afraid, and that if she needs to find him, just listen for the sound of a harmonica coming from the nearest tree. Well, not really, but he does tell her to check out the angel at the town’s Christmas Tree and he’ll show up as if he’s the first cousin of Mary Poppins. 


You have to hand it to the writer (Thomas Meehan) for coming up with what happens next. I understand there must be a little tragedy in life for someone to find the true meaning of Christmas,  but Meehan gives Ginny enough heartache and tragedy to fill three or four Christmas movies because her Christmas hasn’t been quite crappy enough up to this point in time.  It makes Jacob Marley and his ghostly crew seem like a day in the park with Grumpy, Sleepy, Dopey, and Bashful, just by way of comparison.
 

In short order we get: a bank robbery, a murder, a kidnapping, and a car crashing off a bridge upside down into a river. How's that for Christmas cheer folks? It does tend to make your worries about your Christmas credit card bills seem kind of insignificant by comparison.  And it’s even worse than that because out of necessity I’m leaving out some very important details.



And therein lies the biggest problem with this film.  For a movie that’s supposed to be uplifting, it piles on so much darkness and despair that by the time  the lights do come on so to speak, you’ll be  grateful  just to be able to breathe a sigh of relief let alone think about breaking out into a chorus of Deck the Halls or as Gideon would prefer, Hark The Herald Angels sing.  Talk about a movie being downbeat.  This may be a Disney movie, but I’d give serious thought to not sitting the younger tykes down in front of the TV to watch, at least not without letting them in on the plot beforehand.  Even the street this family lives on is photographed in a way that’s more fitting for Tim Burton movie.



I admire Mary Steenburgen a lot as an actress, and have loved most of her work from Goin’ South, to Melvin and Howard, to Time After Time and more.  But she is given an almost impossible task here.  Initially, Ginny has to show that she’s a loving and caring parent so that we can root for her redemption, but at the same time the director or writer or somebody also required her to be a cold, joyless, heartless, self absorbed, bitch, especially around  Abbie and Cal.  You can’t mix oil and water.



As if that’s not  enough, Ginny  then has to go from that mixed up frame of mind to one of total despair when she is forced to live out her worse nightmares.  Moments later she finds partial solace, which should have been enough to give her a new attitude, but it doesn’t.  Gideon still has to work a little more Angel magic to get Ginny to come around, but by the time we get to that point, I wasn’t buying it. 

There may not be an actress alive who could have accomplished all of this and do it believably, especially when it’s all so discouraging.  Perhaps ten or fifteen minutes early on of letting us visit the Grainger’s when times were good so we could see a nice Ginny in action would have helped.  I mean, with an 89 minute running time as it is, adding on those few moments to make us actually give a crap about this woman wouldn’t have hurt. 

Gary Basaraba who plays Jack is pretty generic and isn’t given much to work with.  He plays a good guy like he’s a good guy, and that’s all the part needs and that’s all that one can ask.  

Harry Dean Stanton is quite deadpan as Gideon.  I think I figured out how Gideon drowned.  He was saving that kid in the river, and having done so, he fell into a coma.   It’s fitting and proper that he’s dead because he’s not very lifelike as an angel.  But he does get the job done and that’s all that matters in a film such as this.  Just don’t invite him to your Christmas Party as entertainment.  You’d be better off with a mime.

Elizabeth Hanois and Robbie Magwood come off a lot better than the adults here, which is good considering that after Gideon and Ginny, the film rests on the very young shoulders of Hanois, who was all of five years or maybe six years old when the movie filmed.  The  worst thing that can happen are child actors who will either be encouraged to be overly cute and sweet, or they’ll come off as obnoxious brats.  That does not happen here.  Abbie and Cal do in fact exhibit the kind of behavior one might expect from kids their age with the caveat that I’m not sure any kid Abbie’s age that I know would begin talking openly to an unshaven scruffy rag-a-muffin person like Gideon claiming he was an angel.  You shouldn’t talk to strange strangers, kiddies.  But whatever.   Hanois alone is almost enough to save this film all by herself.  She’s perfect even if you do have to check the captioning once in a while to understand her.  But five and six year olds talk that way.

Arthur Hill  makes an appearance as the Grandfather.  Hill was an excellent actor, but was given nothing to do here beyond giving Abbie a Christmas Globe then bringing some welcome news to Ginny later in the film.  I would suggest watching him in some old episodes of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, but you’ll play hell finding those anywhere.  Look for them in aisle B, write next to the old Ben Casey episodes.

Back in 2003 I posted a shorter review of this film on the IMDB.  Only four out of ten people cared for my film expertise and that review taught me a lesson:  If you go knocking Christmas Movies or Classic Disney Movies, people are going to get their panties all bent out of shape.  But having watched again for this review, my opinion hasn’t changed at all.

I didn’t hate One Magic Christmas.  I just don’t care for it much and it wouldn't have mattered if my Christmas mood was good or just plain lousy.  Too much of it is way too gloomy, and Ginny is just not likable until it’s too late for any hope of our recovery, let alone hers.  You probably might like it a lot better if you’re already high on Christmas Spirit, but don’t expect to stay that way watching this stuff.  If you’re looking for the right vehicle to lift your spirit, then may advice is to find it elsewhere.  And if I have to give that kind of advice I have no choice then to show my holiday spirit by slapping a grade of C on One Magic Christmas.

Clyde’s Movie Palace: A Night to Remember (1958)

Starring
Kenneth More
Ronald Allen
Robert Ayres
Honor Blackman
Anthony Bushell
Michael Goodliffe
Kenneth Griffith
Frank Lawton
David McCallum

My first encounter with Titanic came when the 1953 Titanic film starring Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck ran on the old NBC weekly film showcase, Saturday Night at the Movies. But it was Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember which I read some many years later that actually made my interest in Titanic soar. It was considered at that time to be the Titanic bible.
 
It was an up close and personal look at everything leading up to the sinking and its aftermath, including facts, minute details, and more importantly interviews with the survivors. But it would be even longer until I would have the chance to view the film version of the book, which was made to set the record straight about the many myths and fallacies depicted in the 1953 film.

Trying to compare A Night to Remember to Cameron's Titanic is something that probably shouldn't be attempted or is even a fair comparison.  But unfortunately, there’s a good number of self proclaimed fans of A Night to Remember, who view the film as nothing more than a tool to beat and bash Cameron’s epic film, and can’t review this film without announcing their disdain for that one from the mountain tops as if one has something to do with the other.   Up until Cameron’s ultra successful film was released, a good portion of those who discovered their instant love for A Night to Remember  had long forgotten about Lord’s book and the film that bears it’s title.  Generally, their review (if you want to call it that) will consist of paragraph after paragraph as to why A Night to Remember is so superior to Cameron’s just totally useless and shitty film, instead of just reviewing A Night to Remember on it’s own merits and leaving Cameron’s film out of it.  But having put up with that horse crap for the past 14 or so years, turnabout is fare play.  But there is a difference between my comparison and theirs.  It really is possible to like both films for what they bring to the table.      

For instance, Cameron had the advantages of a huge budget, and certainly his film benefited in some ways from present day technology and facts that we have learned about Titanic since A Night to Remember was released back in 1958. Cameron benefited greatly from the discovery of the wreck by Robert Ballard and his crew, and by his own expeditions down through the ocean depths to encounter the ship wreckage. Add to that today's computer technology, which has pretty much been able to deconstruct the sinking from the time it hit the iceberg to the time it landed in its final resting place on the Ocean floor, and the advantages Cameron had in that regards become readily apparent.

A Night to Remember is a fairly accurate portrayal of most of the events leading up to and including the sinking of the Titanic as told in Lord's book, but it is not nearly as expansive or filled with the wealth of details that the book was. On film, that would have been impossible to do. A Night to remember is a black and white film and was released almost forty years before James Cameron's epic retelling of the story. Although it doesn't come close technically to Cameron's version, it is a good film in many aspects.

Most of the film is played out as a "You Are There" type of docu-drama where we meet many of the people who were on the ship at the time of its demise. The film centers on Second Officer Lightoller, played by British Actor Kenneth More.
I first came to admire More when he played Jolyon in The Forsyte Saga way back in the late sixties when PBS aired it here in the states as the opening salvo in what would later become Masterpiece Theater. More is the kind of actor that no matter what role he is playing, you can instantly identify with him or the character he is playing just because he always seemed so damn likable.

But since A Night to Remember is a British film, I will be careful not to belittle one of our allies cinematic accomplishments. I won't do that because I learned an important lesson in the first few minutes of A Night to Remember. As Lightoller and his wife Sylvia are on a train headed to Belfast, he is reading a soap ad from a magazine proudly proclaiming itself as the official Titanic soap. Lightoller ends the reading by jesting "for first class only of course, the rest of the passengers don't bathe." At which point a stuffed shirt sitting in the same compartment admonishes Lightoller and his wife for mocking England’s crowning achievement, The Titanic.

Lightoller's wife is more than happy to inform Mr. Stuffed Shirt that they quite agree as her husband is headed to join the Titanic as the ship's second officer. It's a brief scene, but it is one that accomplishes quite a bit. We learn that indeed, there is a class distinction in which the Upper Class is seen as civilized and everybody else are unwashed cretins. We also discover that there is a strong belief that the unsinkable Titanic is a symbol of man's greatest accomplishments and demonstrative of his final victory over nature and the elements.

We quickly jump off the train so that we can join Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous in progress. The stay is brief but it is just long enough for us to bear witness to their overly pampered lifestyle of the upper crust and their total disdain for anything and anyone beneath their station in life. This includes watching a group of workhouse orphans standing by the side of the road waving goodbye.

"What are they doing," the woman asks.
"Assuring themselves of their Christmas turkey," the man replies.

After a meet and greet with Captain Smith (Laurence Naismith), Thomas Andrews and Chairman Bruce Ismay (Frank Lawton) we watch as Titanic sets sails. Director Roy Baker and Screenwriter Eric Ambler don't spend time letting grass grown under the bough as we jump immediately to the fateful day of the sinking on April 14.

We spend a bit of time watching the first class passengers dine and then hop downstairs as the steerage passenger’s party in the lower decks. Director Baker doesn't linger with either group, but stays just long enough to let us understand that in 1912, just like in 2011 there are the haves and have nots.

We had already seen earlier the disdain that the upper crust has for the less fortunate, but it is a scene that is unfortunately not followed up on here, although one gets the feeling that those in steerage don't hold it against the aristocrats for their lot in life. It's as if class distinction is just the way life is meant to be. Or at least that is what the writer and director would have us believe initially.

We are then whisked away so that we can meet Molly Brown (Tucker McGuire) as she is retelling the story of how her and her husband had struck it rich. But again, we are not privileged to know whether or not those she is having dinner with view the fact that she wasn't born into their station in life as something to look disdainfully down through with their noses.

Baker prefers instead to concentrate on the missed communications regarding ice and icebergs between Titanic and other ships in the area, particularly the infamous Californian. Captain Smith acknowledges the first two telegrams regarding the ice with the comment that "they'll keep a sharp eye." When more telegrams arrive over the wireless, they are accidentally discarded instead of being delivered to Smith or one of the other officers.

It's kind of odd to watch as the Californian does it's best to inform the Titanic of the ice fields, and yet later would become the goat of the disaster by not recognizing that the Titanic was in distress when it was within visual range of those keeping watch. Worse yet, when the Californian tries to send a final warning, the wireless operator on the Titanic tells them to butt out while they send the all important greetings home for the passengers.

When the collision does come, it is over almost as quickly as it happens. We see the Titanic shake a bit, we watch as ice falls onto the ship, and we watch as some of the crew escape from the flooding engine rooms before the water tight doors close behind them.

Afterwards there seems to be no sense of urgency among anybody. The passengers are told there is nothing to worry about, and even the crewmen who continue to stroke the fires as they stand in water up to their thighs aren't sure there is anything to stress over. When one of the stewards is questioned by a passenger, he simply tells them that the reason the ship stopped is so that in case of an iceberg they wouldn't want to have to run over top of it as if the unsinkable ship could do such a thing.

Even as Andrews relates to the Captain that the ship will indeed sink, everything seems to be taking place in a calm orderly matter of fact manner. Amazingly, even as Smith is giving out assignments to get the passengers off of the ship there is no sense of urgency despite the fact that Andrews had just related that there was only an hour and a half left before the ship would sink.

In the first class cabins the stewards knock until the doors are opened and go inside each compartment to pull down the life jackets. In the lower decks they knock, yell for the passengers to put on their life jackets and quickly move on. Making matters worse is the fact that many of those in steerage speak little or no English.

When it comes to getting on the lifeboats to escape, Director Baker pulls no punches with the first class passengers as he seemed to do earlier. Here they are shown for the spoiled overindulged pompous jackasses that they were.

Crew member: Will you kindly step into the boat ma'am?
Woman: What? And catch my death of cold?
Woman: This boat is too small. I can't be comfortable in a boat such as this.

And to top it off, many of them descend on the ship's purser to get their jewelry and valuables out of the safe before heading for the lifeboats. I say they should have let them drink salt water.

The steerage passengers are left to find their own escape. We follow one group who finally makes it to the first class dining room and upon entering, stand almost in awe of its stunning opulence. They are like a child seeing the Magic Kingdom at Disney World on their very first visit.

Although the Californian ignores the distress calls of the Titanic, further away an alert radio man aboard the Carpathia recognizes the SOS, awakens the Captain who then orders his ship to turn around at full speed through dangerous ice fields in a heroic effort to make it to the Titanic. Also heroic are the workers below deck of the Titanic, doing their best to not only keep the ship afloat but to keep the generators cranking out power as long as possible.

Like I mentioned before, Night is almost a documentary retelling of the Titanic film while Cameron used a fictional story as a backdrop for his Titanic. It's hard to argue with either choice, as both methods work well for what they want to accomplish. The main difference is that in Night, because of its style, it is much more difficult to become as emotionally involved in what is going on. We see lots of different stories about why the ship sank, but the story of the passengers and what they went through is not delved into as deeply as in Cameron's film. Some may nit pick Cameron's love story, but by focusing on it, he enables us to know the passengers better through Jack and Rose, the people they associate with be they friends or enemies.   Night, by virtue of it’s documentary styling,  jumps around from story to story and has to crowd an awful lot into a running time of just over two hours.

Don't get me wrong, there are moments that you'll be effected by in Night, but they are much fewer and lack the dramatic impetus that they should have had because Director Baker chose not to focus on the human element, and instead decided that basically filming a checklist of events from Lord’s book was the way to go.

We see the passengers, we know who they are, what they are about, we know the class system that was in effect, but we never really can relate to them on a personal one to one level. Surely we feel for their tragedy, but no more or no less than we did when we watched the three part documentary that ran on A&E several years ago.  You find out more about Olympic athletes in an Up Close and Personal segment than we do about the passengers on the Titanic in this film.

On the other hand, A Night to Remember, gives us more details of certain events that are left out of Titanic. Mainly, the Californian and Carpathia story was hardly touched on in Cameron's film. Cameron explained this in later interviews saying that by taking the film away from the events happening on the ship, it would perhaps make the film lose its focus on the story he had to tell. He wanted us to concentrate almost entirely on the human tragedy and not be distracted from it by wandering needlessly around the ship. And for what he was trying to do and the success that he had one certainly can't argue with him for that.

There are a lot of small but memorable scenes in A Night to Remember. A woman returns for her lucky pig while leaving her jewelry behind, a shady gambler who shows more class than those he was winning money from, a drunken crewman throwing chairs overboard for passengers to float on, and a heart breaking scene where an elder gentleman tries to comfort a young child who lost his mother. Certainly there will be some scenes that you'll quickly recognize if you've seen Cameron's film including Thomas Andrews telling a young couple what to do when the ship sinks, just as he did for Rose in Cameron's film. But if Baker wanted to have a greater emotional impact, perhaps he should have centered his story telling on just a few of the real life passengers, have them intermingle as Rose and Jack did, and worked from there.

The fact that most of the lifeboats did not attempt to rescue anyone, was portrayed much more dramatically in Titanic. This films show us their last moments in the water, but it is sanitized to a at least some degree. When a boat finally does return, there is not a mass of frozen bodies for it to float through in order to execute a rescue.

Night does examine the fact that several of the early lifeboats that were lowered into the water with far less than capacity and that if you were a guy and went to the other side of the ship your chances of being in a lifeboat increased ten fold. In fact, the point is touched upon in the beginning of this film that the lifeboats could have carried 1200 but as you know, just over 700 were saved. But it certainly was an issue that could have been covered more in depth in both films.

Another major difference in Night is that we get a captain who is more a victim of circumstances than anything else. In Titanic, Cameron portrays him more as a bumbling fool, who made too many mistakes and compounded the tragedy with his inability to take charge even to give a simple order to evacuate passengers. Whose portrayal is more accurate? That is something we may never know except for this: The fact that many lifeboats were launched half full and the fact that it took so long to begin loading the passengers, would leave me to believe that Captain Smith was totally inadequate in a crisis situation. And although not getting the final ice warnings were not entirely his fault, his actions and reactions to the ones he did receive left something to be desired.



It’s hard to say much about the acting here, because so much of it is unimportant as to what is happening on the screen since most of the cast, except for the Captain, Lightoller, and the rest of the crew, have only brief scenes. The passengers remain an enigma. But you may watch for David McCallum as a telegraph operator. Most of you know him as Dr. Donald Mallard from NCIS. I know him better as Illya Kuryakin of The Man From Uncle.

I will not even compare the technical aspects as obviously, Cameron's film would come out way ahead because as I said earlier it was filmed forty years later. With what they had to work with, A Night to Remember does well to recreate the ship and the sinking, along with the many reasons for it. But though the film is certainly worth watching for many reasons, I can't help but feel that although Roy Bakers direction gets the job done and is workmanlike, for a film of this subject matter and this much intensity it lacks imagination in the way many of the scenes are filmed and framed. 

Despite that, and the fact that certain aspects don't hold up well, the film should be viewed if you have never seen it before. It fills in the gaps and provides much information that you may not have know about previously and it offers it up in a very engrossing narrative that draws you in from the very opening scenes. And when a film does that, any film, I have no choice but to give it my grade which for A Night to Remember is an unsinkable B+.