The Disaster Movies of the late 1960s and 1970s seem to owe their success to the spectacle involved. If you have a really big building on fire or a gigantic ship sinking at sea or an earthquake ripping down a city, it's very impressive. But once you get past the big set piece, you still have to photograph people and stories in interesting ways or you don't really have anything.
John Ford was once asked why he took his film crews out to Monument Valley for westerns. Instead of speaking of the beauty of the location, the fact that other other sites for westerns were too familiar, he replied "To photograph the most interesting thing in the world: a human face."
Unfortunately, while there are a lot of human faces in this movie, they don't seem to be doing anything we haven't seen a hundred times and more. The lines are well read, John Forsythe speaks his lines meaningfully, Joseph Campanella plays a jerk as well as he ever did, but nothing is ever meaningfully solved. Oh, under the stress of Imminent Death and 1970s pre-disco music, people Figure Out What Is Really Important. But six months afterwards, they probably change their minds.
So all you're left with of potential interest is the fire. And you've seen a fire, haven't you?
John Ford was once asked why he took his film crews out to Monument Valley for westerns. Instead of speaking of the beauty of the location, the fact that other other sites for westerns were too familiar, he replied "To photograph the most interesting thing in the world: a human face."
Unfortunately, while there are a lot of human faces in this movie, they don't seem to be doing anything we haven't seen a hundred times and more. The lines are well read, John Forsythe speaks his lines meaningfully, Joseph Campanella plays a jerk as well as he ever did, but nothing is ever meaningfully solved. Oh, under the stress of Imminent Death and 1970s pre-disco music, people Figure Out What Is Really Important. But six months afterwards, they probably change their minds.
So all you're left with of potential interest is the fire. And you've seen a fire, haven't you?