The Towering Inferno (1974)

Irvin Allen really never topped himself after this grand spectacle.  The King of Disaster films did something no producer had ever done before and which now you see quite a lot: he convinced two studios to co-produce a film.  In fact this dual theme comes up a lot.  The film is a melding of two novels,  The Tower by Richard Martin Stern and The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson and a story featuring two heroes staring two of the biggest leading men in film history, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen (and it has two directors too).  For such a thin plot, watch a bunch of characters try to survive a skyscraper fire, it's still an entertaining film.  The all-star cast is an obvious gimmick to sell tickets, but they all deliver decent performances for what they have to work with, which is mostly staring at flames and looking scared.  What's most impressive is that at 165 minutes I never once found myself bored or impatient for it to end.  It still holds up as escapist fare if a little bit of a time capsule too.  Grade: B+