The Towering Inferno The Towering Inferno The Towering Inferno is a 1974 American drama disaster film produced by Irwin Allen featuring an all-star cast led by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. The picture was directed by John Guillermin. A co-production between 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros., it was the first film to be a joint venture by two major Hollywood studios. It was adapted by Stirling Silliphant from a pair of novels, "The Tower" by Richard Martin Stern and "The Glass Inferno" by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson. The film earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture
The Towering Inferno insults our intelligence for close to three hours, it shouldn't preen itself on its own morality." Gene Siskel of "The Chicago Tribune" gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a stunt and not a story. It's a technical achievement more concerned with special effects than with people. That's why our attitude toward the film's cardboard characters is: let 'em burn." On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 71% based on 28 reviews with an average rating of 6.6/10. The film was one of the biggest grossing films of 1975 with