The Towering Inferno was definitely the high point of 70's disaster movies, this may well be the nadir of them. Somehow they managed to get Henry Fonda and dear old Ava Gardner to appear in this travesty, but everything about this is rubbish. Pop trivia.. This is not Leslie Nielsen's first foray into disaster world, he played the ship's captain in The Poseidon Adventure AND Shelley Winters played a main role in the same movie.