OVP: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Film: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, OJ Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, Susan Flannery, Jack Collins

Director: John Guillermin

Oscar History: 7 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Fred Astaire, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score, Song, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Steve McQueen's career hit its financial peak in 1974, when he starred with Paul Newman in today's film The Towering Inferno.  At this point, Newman & McQueen were two of the biggest names in movies, and there were quite a few arguments over who would get top billing in the picture (ultimately it was a draw, with McQueen's name first but Newman's name higher), but after this both would suffer career lulls.  Newman would rebound eventually in the 1980's with films like The Verdict and The Color of Money, the latter winning him his only competitive Oscar, but McQueen would never regain this position.  He'd make an ill-fated Ibsen film in 1978 (one that would basically disappear from public consciousness), and then a pair of pictures in 1980 (Tom Horn and The Hunter), both decent-sized hits that might have hallmarked a comeback, but that wasn't to be.  Just over three months after the release of The Hunter, Steve McQueen would be dead.

(Spoilers Ahead) But before we get into that, let's get into the height of his career, at least commercially.  The Towering Inferno was a landmark movie in terms of its box office in 1974.  In the previous years, films like Airport and The Poseidon Adventure had found a formula for success-put a bunch of famous stars, including at least a few studio system legends that can scoop up a supporting acting Oscar nomination, and place them in an insane disaster situation, one that will have at least a few of them die, but the audience can look on in horror as we wonder who from this insanely-stacked call sheet might be safe.  This film is no less than these, and arguably has the starriest cast  of the bunch, but is much more in the vein of Airport (which I did not enjoy) than The Poseidon Adventure (which I did enjoy, in large part due to Shelley Winters' solid work).  The film has the tallest building in the world on fire, and all of our characters, including architect Newman and firefighter McQueen, fighting to stay alive as more-and-more paths to the ground floor are forfeited.  Along the way, some live (including, surprisingly, conman Fred Astaire), and some die, most shockingly Jennifer Jones, who in a morbid twist would be flung from the top of a giant building in the movie two years before her daughter would commit suicide in exactly the same way.

If only the movie was any good.  Technically, this is impressive-the set design, effects, and especially the stunt work are out-of-this-world, but the film spends no time trying to develop the characters, giving us two-dimensional feats from genuinely talented actors.  It's not like someone like Faye Dunaway or Paul Newman can't add a bit of three-dimensionality to their work, but there's no call for it.  Our star of the month, Steve McQueen, feels almost ancillary to the plot of the picture even as he's supposed to be the hero.  Fred Astaire would receive his only competitive acting Oscar nomination for this movie, and man is it unnecessary-he barely has anything to do, other than shout for a dead Jennifer Jones toward the end of the picture.  It feels weird to live in a world where Fred Astaire (whom I love) never got a competitive acting nomination, but, like...over John Cazale in The Godfather, Part II or John Huston in Chinatown...let's not be ridiculous here.

As I said above, Steve McQueen would disappear from movies after this, having a bit of a nomad period where he just went out into the country in a motor home, in the process turning down parts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now that might've dramatically changed his legacy.  But his health by the late 1970's was in terrible shape, and he developed mesothelioma (likely due to asbestos exposure from his time in the Marines).  The National Enquirer, at that point most famous for its ongoing coverage of the death of Elvis Presley rather than the right-wing attack ads that it would become known for to modern supermarket shoppers, broke the story that McQueen was dying shortly before his death (he'd been trying to keep it a secret), and McQueen attempted a number of experimental procedures, including a surgery to remove a tumor from his liver in Mexico, a procedure he couldn't have performed in the United States because no doctor would do it (since it would kill him).  12 hours into the surgery, the American doctors were proven correct, and Steve McQueen died at the age of only 50 from a heart attack.

Next month, we're going to talk about a man who was good friends with McQueen, even if they also had something of a professional rivalry during McQueen's early stardom.  Like McQueen, he also would die young, but unlike McQueen, that death would cement his legacy in a way that would in many ways outlast any films he made in life...and would become the source of near constant conspiracy theory in the decades to come, in ways that would haunt his family for generations.

OVP: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Film: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston

Director: Norman Jewison

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"The Windmills of Your Mind," Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Coming off of the success of The Cincinnati Kid, for the rest of the 1960's, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film actor who was more consistently bankable and electric than Steve McQueen.  In 1966, he won his first (and only) Academy Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles, a commercial triumph which got 8 nominations in total (McQueen would lose to Paul Scofield for A Man for All Seasons).  But it was in 1968 that he arguably hit his peak.  The most famous film of his career came out that year, the action flick Bullitt, which would be considered by many to be the greatest action film ever made (I liked it, but am not going to be quite that superfluous).  But I'd already seen that film, and with the Saturdays with the Stars, we stick entirely with movies I haven't seen of these actors, so we're going to focus on the other Oscar-winning film that McQueen made in 1968, a movie that was more polarizing with critics but nonetheless continued his trend of printing money: The Thomas Crown Affair.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is odd, and I'm going to start that right out because the plot is a bit thin.  It essentially follows Thomas Crown (McQueen), a bored millionaire who recruits a bunch of men (who know neither him nor their conspirators) to rob a bank, which they do successfully (and somewhat amusingly) in the film's opening moments.  It then shifts gears, with us meeting Vicki Anderson (Dunaway), a breathtaking blonde who is also clever, and who quickly figures out that Crown surely robbed the bank.  But there's a problem-there's no evidence other than common sense (and intuition), and both Crown & Vicki are mad horny for each other.  So Vicki is torn into a game of cat-and-mouse, with her seemingly closing in on him...all the while not realizing that she's getting played.  The film ends with Crown attempting another robbery, one that works perfectly and that he's confessed to Vicki already, implying to her that she loves him too much to stop him.  When she does, by showing up in the cemetery, she realizes that he did not, in fact, trust her, giving her the money from the second bank robbery for sport (along with his spectacular navy blue Rolls Royce), while he jets off to anonymity with the money from the first robbery.

Like I said, the plot doesn't resonate in a big way.  As I explained it above, it's quite straightforward, but doesn't read that way when you're watching the movie.  This is in part because it's severely underwritten-we don't get a lot of sense of who these characters are out of context with each other.  McQueen's Crown is essentially a thrill-seeker, a playboy, but we don't get much more.  Meanwhile, the only thing we learn about Dunaway's Vicki is that she doesn't play by the rules, which of course means that to all of the men around her, she's portrayed as a bitch (even though most of her best traits are lauded in Crown).  It's frustrating, and it feels stretched, like we're trying to make an excuse for this movie to exist.

But you see a 4-star review for a reason, and that's because it looks incredible.  The cars, the beaches, the costumes, the grand camerawork, it's all sublime.  There is a scene where Dunaway & McQueen, both just impossibly sexy, play the randiest game of chess you can ever imagine, us darting from his icy blue eyes to her pillow lips, each of them thumbing the pieces as if they're taking off each other's clothes.  Combined with a grand score, and the classic "Windmills of Your Mind" (one of the best movie songs of all time), it all adds up to film being a visual medium: who cares if none of it makes all that much sense when you are just looking for a cigarette to light afterward.

The Three Musketeers (1974)

Film: The Three Musketeers (1974)

Stars: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch

Director: Richard Lester

Oscar History: No nominations, though Welch won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, so it's possible she was close?

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I said last week, Raquel Welch's career after Myra Breckinridge never really recovered-she was never able to properly transition away from sex comedies, or roles that traded on her beauty (and curvy figure) in a comic or exploitive way.  That being said, Welch was a star in major studio films throughout the 1970's, and what is generally considered to be one of her best roles (and best films) of that era was The Three Musketeers, a retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, though told with more comedic elements than you'd generally expect from this story.  The film is an ensemble & star-studded, and while Welch is one of the lead characters, she's not one of the most important, a testament to Welch's inability to land solo roles in films that might have elevated her beyond her plastic screen persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie actually sticks pretty closely to the novel, though it only tells half of the story (the movie was followed by The Four Musketeers, and then many years later The Return of the Musketeers, a film that resulted in the tragic death of one of its stars, though that's a story for a different day).  We have young, naive d'Artagnan (York), starting from his humble beginnings in hopes of someday becoming one of the king's musketeers.  After inadvertently challenging all of the three musketeers (Reed, Finlay & Chamberlain) to duels, they start out on adventure to try to stop Cardinal Richelieu (Heston), who is undermining the Queen (Chaplin), who is having an affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Ward).  Despite the Cardinal and his accomplice Milady de Winter's (Dunaway) intentions, the Musketeers (including d'Artagnan) & the Queen's dressmaker (Welch) are able to help the Queen save face, and hide her affair from the King...though we get over the closing credits an indication that there will be more mad adventures with those involved.

The film is more fun than it should be.  The script is meandering, the characters are all two-dimensional, but Richard Lester (who made several films with the Beatles, who at one point were intended to star in this film), knows how to craft comedy, and the action sequences are played for maximum effect.  No one in the film is giving a great performance, but everyone is game.  We see several actors (Welch, Dunaway, & Heston specifically) totally trade on their real-world personas for maximum comedic effect, and the central story around the Queen trying to hide her affair works.  This was a hit for a reason-it's mindless, but pleasant fun.

The movie has a weird place in Hollywood history that I'd be remiss not to mention.  If you watch the movie in its original cut (as I did) you'll notice a preview to the sequel over the end credits.  This was something that films occasionally did at the time (we saw that during our month devoted to Nancy Kwan with The Wrecking Crew advertising a sequel that never came out).  However, this was unusual because the actors involved didn't know they'd made a sequel; the two movies were intended to be one four-hour epic, and the stars of the film only found out that they'd made two movies for Fox when they attended the premiere.  This was technically legal at the time-there were no guarantees that a studio couldn't do something like this, but the stars (who were only paid for one movie) were enraged, and eventually there was a union clause set out by SAG that actors had to be informed how many movies they were being asked to film prior to the release of a film.

Welch won a Golden Globe for this film, and is fun in it.  This is not stretching for her-we see men fall over themselves, including Michael York, trying to bed her in the movie, but at least she feels like she's in on the joke here.  The movie would not, however, win her an Oscar nomination like we saw for Ann-Margret.  The competition was fierce in 1974 (a legendarily good lineup by AMPAS), and had one of those women left, my gut says that Liv Ullmann in Abdication would've bested Welch for this slot (Ullman was deemed ineligible for her seismic performance in Scenes from a Marriage, and considering the hubbub Oscar might've wanted to go with her for literally any performance as a way to acknowledge her work).  

This was the only time in Welch's career she came close to a nomination.  She would continue making bad (but sometimes successful) sex comedies or action-adventures for the remainder of the decade, until the troubled production of Cannery Row cost her her career.  Welch was accused of diva-like behavior on the set, causing the studio to dump her as its lead, and instead cast (the younger) Debra Winger.  Welch sued, and would win over $10 million in the lawsuit for breach-of-contract, but this essentially ended her career.  No one sues the powers-that-be in Hollywood & gets away with it, and while Welch would do television & theater throughout the decade, she'd make no feature films between 1977 and 1994, and even after that her work was simply in cameo roles.  She'd make tons of money on beauty & health products (at 80-years-of-age, Welch still is fashionable & looks decades younger), but her time as a movie star was over.

And with that, the traditional film sex symbol also seemed to fade.  Welch was the last real star of that mold-the kind of buxom, sex goddess role-that had a sustainable career in film.  Some blips on the screen like Bo Derek or Megan Fox popped up, but they disappeared just as quickly.  Television became a much more lucrative spot for these types of stars (think of Farrah Fawcett or eventually the quintessential TV sex bomb, Pamela Anderson), as did modeling, pop music, & reality television.  The only star that comes close to the heyday of sex symbols in the modern era is Jennifer Lopez, who really treads the line between music & movies in a way none of her predecessors would've had to.  We will start a new theme, and a new year of Stars next Saturday, but before then we'll take a look back at what we've seen this season tomorrow as we close out our year devoted to Classic Hollywood sex symbols.

Top 10 Favorite Femme Fatales

There is literally no film character trope I love more than the femme fatale.  Thankfully the "femme fatale" trope is not always literal as many of the women that are considered "femme fatales" don't exactly end up being the killers, just leading our heroes to dangerous situations, so I feel like I can do this list without having to worry too much about revealing spoilers.  As a way to kick off my vacation (I'm on vacation if you're reading this within a week of it being published!), I wanted to countdown my ten favorite femme fatales of cinema, in order (though not necessarily in order of best performance, but instead within the confines of this...you know what, just enjoy the list and provide your own, and recommendations of underrated femme fatales as I am always looking for recommendations!).

10. Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce

9. Kim Novak in Vertigo

8. Gloria Grahame in Crossfire

7. Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai

6. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard

5. Rita Hayworth in Gilda

4. Jane Greer in Out of the Past

3. Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

2. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity

1. Gene Tierney in Laura

The Good, the Bad, and the Insane at Last Night's Oscars

Well, that was a show, huh?  In what will go down in history as the strangest Oscar finale of all time, we had not one but two Best Picture winners for a brief moment.  I know a number of people (including my father, who was tired and headed upstairs to bed once La La Land won), may be wishing that they had stuck around a bit longer, but man was that an ending.  As a result, let's get to the good, the bad, the WTF,  and undecided of last night.

The WTF

We'll start here because this is really what we all want to talk about, right?  Never, in my wildest dreams, could I have anticipated such a scenario as the wrong Best Picture winner being called.  My mom and I both stood up there aghast (we were both standing, anticipating that we'd quickly see a pithy aside about Donald Trump from Kimmel right before the credits rolled) and then suddenly Jordon Horowitz proclaimed Moonlight the winner.  At first, quite frankly, I thought what was happening was a Jack Lemmon/Ving Rhames situation, where the producers of La La Land wanted to bring their counterparts to the stage in an act of recognizing that, perhaps, more than one Best Picture is worthy each year.  But no, it was a staggering mistake of epic proportions.

Conspiracy theorists will postulate this was planned for the rest of time, but honestly I don't think that Dunaway or Beatty are that good of live performers (if they can still pull off something like that, why aren't more casting agents on them?).  No, based on what we're hearing this morning the wrong envelope got in Beatty's hands (you can see this in the pictures/video pretty clearly), he was confused, Dunaway just saw La La Land in giant letters and was assuming he was being cute, and then the catastrophe was set in motion.

Aside from proving once-and-for-all that Marisa Tomei did win that Oscar years ago (the real loser tonight is Judy Davis), this was both the best and worst of live television.  It was SO awkward and yet SO stunning, it ranks in the same sort of "can't look away" live television as the David Niven Streaker or Janet Jackson's half-time "wardrobe malfunction."  I feel truly bad for the La La Land producers (though I'm not going with the "grace and class" line so many are saying, as Jordan Hurwitz literally yanked that card out of Beatty's hands even though it clearly wasn't his fault; I'm not saying I would have behaved differently, but I probably wouldn't have had the gaul to rip anything out of a screen icon's hands).  I feel worse for Dunaway and Beatty, both of whom are going to be accused of having a "senior moment" when in reality there's a PriceWaterhouseCoopers accountant backstage who is updating their LinkedIn profile right now.  All-in-all, though, this was insane television, and thankfully it was La La Land to Moonlight, and not the other way around (or something involving Hacksaw Ridge).  And it led to arguably the first time I've seen Twitter erupt in chaos over something that didn't involve our president.  So that's a win in my book.  Either way, I won't forget about this for a looooong time.

The Good

Other than the Best Picture fiasco, the show had a number of great credits to its name.  I know that it's a popular past-time to mock the host, which Kimmel pointed out at the beginning, but honestly-I thought that Jimmy was aces and should become a regular.  He was edgy enough to keep the politically-inclined happy, several of his bits worked for me (I thought the potential trainwreck of the tourists coming in paid huge dividends, particularly Denzel marrying those two people and if nothing else it served as the soundest indictment of America to PUT AWAY YOUR FUCKING PHONES rather than recording things, as you're missing out on meeting movie stars by recording everything).  I loved a few jokes, and actually thought the Gibson jokes were just enough, and I was fine with the candy bits because the stars (particularly Meryl Streep, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson) got into it in a major way.  I know he joked about never coming back, but that'd be a damn shame-he's clearly the most able host to take to the Oscars since Ellen, perhaps even Steve Martin.

Obviously I could celebrate a few of the wins (Moonlight taking Best Picture a decade after Brokeback Mountain is going to hit me at some point this morning, but my 20-year-old self is pretty proud right now considering I wore black for days of mourning after that), and I loved the way that The Salesman win was handled, though obviously having Asghar Farhadi there would have been better (Donald Trump is always on the "ugly" list).  Mahershala Ali gave a great speech, and the Hidden Figures section of the audience was by far the most fun (I loved "Cookie" aka Taraji P. Henson asking Octavia Spencer to share her cookies part in particular).  It wasn't superbly executed, but Katherine Johnson coming out was damn cool, and though it won't ever happen again at this rate, I loved the nod to Old Hollywood with Dunaway/Beatty.

One of the best bits of the night, one I wish I'd seen a bit more of, was the pairings of actors with their heroes (ie MacLaine/Theron and Fox/Rogen), as it nodded back to movies as culture, and it was a great way to show how actors inspire other actors.  Oh, and while I hardly wanted Hacksaw Ridge to win any awards, A) its sound mixing was better than La La Land's and B) Kevin O'Connell finally winning that damn Oscar and giving a beautiful ode to his mother made that moment worth it for me.  All-in-all, I think that while there were bits that I could have skipped, this was a very tight, strong Oscars, so anyone complaining this morning needs to state what they expect out of the Academy Awards...other than they hand the right envelopes out. #understandable

The Undecided

Viola Davis and Casey Affleck still have me undecided, to be honest, so let's start with Viola and work our way down.

I am glad Viola Davis has an Oscar.  Viola is one of the best actors in Hollywood, and this was a long time coming (I'd have given her two trophies by now).  But the category fraud thing has got to stop at some point.  Alicia Vikander and JK Simmons means it's three years in a row now, and if we don't end it soon, we're never going to get rare wins like Mahershala Ali's in Moonlight, a tiny gem that added SO much to Moonlight but in reality doesn't have the screen time to compete with someone like Davis in terms of sheer impact.  I'm usually one to look past that (it's easy to be calmed by one of your favorite actors getting a trophy), but can't we end this at some point?  Also, I have to say that while Davis is arguably the best orator in Hollywood right now when it comes to picking up awards, the "only" occupation to know what it is "to celebrate a life"-what about doctors, funeral directors, the white helmets, etc?  I think that this entered indulgent hyperbole even if I knew where she was going.  Still, it's a better world that we live in that Viola Davis now has an Oscar.

Casey Affleck I have no issues with his performance.  It's in my opinion by far the best of that category.  But I'm going to be honest here-I was hoping he'd lose.  I would have voted for Denzel, and part of me was hoping that this was that moment Ryan Gosling randomly picked up the trophy.  I could see in the lack of a proper standing ovation for him and the way that Brie Larson refused to clap that this is someone a lot of Hollywood doesn't believe in the charges against him, and I am a little confused about whether or not I will put a picture of him on my Facebook banner all year, as I do every year with the Oscar winners (apparently there's a few photos of just the other three winners circulating that would be a solid option, but then you get your conservative friends on Facebook who want to make an example of everything and...Facebook sucks, let's leave it there).  Either way, I'm going to remind myself that he almost certainly deserved this for his work even if he didn't deserve it personally.

The Bad

Since I'm not putting the Best Picture fiasco here (because it was fascinating if awful), there's not a lot to do here.  I have my most consistent complaint about the sound quality of the musical production numbers, which never seems to be as good as the Tonys and the Grammys.  I thought they might have it fixed after that well-launched opening number by Justin Timberlake (I loved the look at the lobby for the Oscars, which I'd never seen) as Timberlake sounded superb, but then the Moana singer came in and the balance felt off.  On a night where they correctly identified a La La Land weak spot (the sound mixing), you'd wish that they could address the same in their own telecast.

I will say that while Timberlake's opening felt a little too "the Grammys" for me, considering we weren't going to get a musical number from Kimmel this felt about right, though I could have done without Timberlake for the rest of the evening, greeting every person in La La Land as if he was in their movie, and that whole bizarre mugging thing when Kimmel was talking to him fell insanely flat.  I don't know-I don't like Timberlake personally at all and while I'll acknowledge there's talent there, it's more in the sense of live performance and less personality-based for me.  That, plus Sunny Pawar as The Lion King and the Donald Trump tweet sections were the only bits that really didn't work for me of Kimmel's, which is a solid track record but still worth pointing out.

Oh, and while the Meryl Streep bit was funny and took it a step further than usual, we probably need a new Meryl bit at this point, right?  We all know her routine of hiding behind Don (who clearly is completely over going to these things at this point), and part of me wondered if the producers were hinting at this when they chose such a slight clip from FFJ and not, say, a dying scene.  And don't go crying for a spoiler alert there-I don't know if you'd catch it, exactly, from the clips, but we saw serious spoilers from Fences and Hell or High Water in the acting clips last night.  I didn't want to say anything to my parents in the room with me during Jeff Bridges' clip as they haven't seen the movie yet, but Fences all three of us noted that "that's giving away something."  Probably better chose the clips next time.

Arguably the worst moment of the night was Vince Vaughn's weird, inexplicable Sal Mineo joke.  What was that about-was it meant to be homophobic?  I think that anyone with Vaughan's politics should probably resist cracking about slain gay actors, and while he somewhat recovered, he doesn't have the comic sensibility of a Whoopi Goldberg or even a Ricky Gervais to make inside baseball jokes that will land outside of the Kodak.

All-in-all, though, I had a great time-please share your thoughts below in the comments of what you thought of last night's Oscars!