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Doug Roberts, designer and architect of the Glass Tower, the world's tallest building at 138 stories, flies in to San Francisco for the inauguration ceremony. After talking with James Duncan, the Glass Tower's builder, he learns that the ceremony is to be held before all the safety checks have been installed and that Simmons, Duncan's son-in-law, has installed inferior wiring in an effort sanctioned by his father to trim costs. Meanwhile Jernigan, the security chief, has noticed a failure in the video equipment followed by an unusually high rise in temperature in one part of the building. Roberts and Jernigan discover a fire, but Duncan, tied up with Mayor Ramsay, Senator Parker and various other illustrious guests, refuses to move the party out for what he calls a "store room fire", until fire chief O'Hallorhan orders him to do so. By this time only one lift works and the guests form a queue; Roberts' editor girlfriend Susan helps prevent panic. Guests are discovered in parts of the building hitherto thought empty: publicist Dan Bigelow finds himself trapped in an apartment with his secretary Lorrie, and they both perish. Jernigan manages to rescue gallery owner Lisolette's cat but Lisolette herself dies in the fire. A deaf woman and her two children are rescued by Roberts, who breaks into their flat on a floor already in flames and leads them to safely down a shattered stairwell. An attempt to land a helicopter on the roof fails when it explodes. Guests are selected by lots to go down the scenic elevator but another explosion causes it to seize up. O'HalIorhan orders a helicopter to lift the whole elevator off the building to safety. Meanwhile guests leave the banquet suite via a ski lift attached to a nearby high rise building. After the women and children have been saved, O'Hallorhan and Roberts extinguish the fire by blowing up the water storage tanks: Simmons panics before the final blast and dies in the attempt to escape. The survivors are rescued: con man Harlee Claiborne finds he has lost Lisolette but gained her cat; O'Hallorhan finds Robins and tells him that fires like this will continue until architects ask men like himself how to build safely.

Hailing the disaster movie as nothing less than "the new art form of the twentieth century", the trailer for The Towering Inferno - the genre's second incarnation at the hands of producer Irwin Alien (of Poseidon Adventure fame) - falls engagingly wide of the mark. The latest entrant into these particular stakes carries all the more comfortable and familiar earmarks of the workmanlike low-budget science-fiction piece directed by, say, Jack Arnold in black-and-white circa 1956. This film's tall building complex, complete with ingenuous model shots; crowds milling at its foot and oohs and aahs as the lights go up; Robert Wagner's secret romance with his secretary; the ever-so-privileged view we are allowed of the interior of “the world's tallest building", with its gliding visions of futuristic décor and deep-pile carpet - all reinforce this vein. In fact the setting up of the disaster is in every way more interesting than what follows, as we observe the slow progress of the fire, unperceived by the banks of sophisticated computer and video equipment in the Tower's security room, and its rapid escalation to danger level as the guests collect for the inauguration ceremony. (The film's only true villain is unmasked in the person of Richard Chamberlain as the builder's wastrel son-in-law, given to shaving the specifications on the quiet.) Nothing later in the film can really match the sequences in which doors are flung open to reveal walls of flame, a lift arrives and ejects a man on fire who lurches out into the grotesquely soignée surroundings (overtones of Fisher's Frankenstein), or the collapse of a rococo suite as the fire gains hold. From this point, however, John Guillermin drives his film on with a kind of efficiency that sidesteps the exploration of any implicit ambiguities, finally flattening the whole thing to such a degree that only a recourse to ever-more bizarre disasters and ever wilder attempts to rescue are left to maintain interest. Statutory thrills are provided in the shape of hazardous journeys (more than faintly unconvincing) down shattered stairwells, and the film's final set-piece, the plucking of the scenic elevator and the twelve occupants (chosen by lots) from the side of the building by a helicopter. Predictably, the big star syndrome, indulged as excessively here as in The Poseidon Adventure, tends to operate finally to deadly effect as several generations of blue-eyed charmers act their roles as if each were under a separate bell jar. Representing the combined efforts of 20th Century-Fox and Warner Brothers and deriving from no less than two skyscraper novels, The Towering Inferno is everything the film industry understands by the term '"movie magic"; a piece of harmless, resolutely overblown and occasionally effective hokum.

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