- Directed by John Guillermin
- Written by Richard Martin Stern, Thomas. N. Scotia, Frank M. Robinson
- Stars Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Faye Dunaway
- Run Time: 2 Hours, 45 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nch1URmJvMA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
It’s another long epic movie with a big cast of heavy hitters. It’s also a classic that still holds up pretty well. And it’s not strictly horror, but there’s a big body count of trapped people who are victims of fire and falling.
Synopsis
We watch an impressive cast list on the screen as a helicopter flies over the countryside. It flies over the Golden Gate Bridge and eventually deposits architect Doug Roberts atop the tallest building in the city, which he helped design. It’s actually the tallest building in the world.
Doug tells his boss, the building owner, Jim Duncan that he’s moving somewhere really boring and getting away from all this. Jim tells him that Senator Parker is coming to the big dedication tonight, and he plans to advocate for more of these buildings that Doug can design. Jim thinks Doug’s quitting isn’t serious.
Doug goes to his work office and deals with some problems with the building. He stops in his private office to host his wife Susan; he’s got a bedroom and is not afraid to use it. Susan complains that she doesn’t really want to leave the city. She’s just gotten a promotion at a job that means a lot to her, so the two of them are in for a rocky situation.
Harlee Claiborne is a cheap old man who cheats the cabbie out of his tip. Mrs. Allbright is a deaf woman with two children who do sign language with her.
While working on the generators, some wiring burns out in the electrical room. We see in a storage room elsewhere that the same wiring has started a small fire in the utility room. Jernigan, the head of security, sees the sensor about the fire, but it’s not showing on their cameras.
Doug looks at the bad wiring in the electrical room. It should have been conduit, and it’s not. He goes up to Jim’s office and yells at him about the shoddy wiring in the building. Dan Bigelow, Jim’s assistant, comes in, and they explain that they almost had a fire. They haven’t even finished installing all the safety equipment. The electrical construction guy, Simmons, can’t be located.
Doug goes over to Roger Simmons’s house. Doug accuses him of “screwing around with the electrical specifications.” Simmons thinks it’s none of Doug’s business. Simmons swears everything is up to code, but Doug says that’s not good enough. Roger is married to Jim’s daughter, so it’s a family problem. Everyone knows Roger was getting kickbacks on the wiring.
Harlee knocks on Lisolette’s door; they have a date to the big party tonight. We also see that he has a suitcase full of fake certificates for something. Many celebrities and politicians are arriving for the building’s dedication ceremony tonight. The senator has a few words, and the mayor also shows up. They cut the ribbon and turn on all the lights at once. Meanwhile, in the utility closet, the fire continues burning.
Dan goes to his office to make out with his secretary Lorrie; he turns the phone off so as not to be disturbed. Harlee feeds Lisolette a line of bull about destiny and how he just got home from the south of France. He’s a poor guy trying to pass himself off as rich to impress her.
Doug continues inspecting the wiring, and it’s all too hot. He orders that some of the lights be turned off. He didn’t realize that all the lights in the building were turned on all at once. Jernigan calls the fire department about the sensor and goes down to the 81st floor to check on what’s going on.
Doug and his assistant get there first, and the assistant gets burned to death when he opens the utility room door. Doug calls Jim about the fire below them. He thinks the fire is under control, but if the wiring caused it, there could be fires everywhere.
Downstairs, the fire department arrives, and it looks like they brought all the trucks. Chief O’Halloran arrives and talks to Doug, who acknowledges that the sprinklers aren’t working yet. O’Halloran warns that they can’t fight a fire over the seventh floor, but Doug says it’s not his fault. O’Halloran is surprised that the 300 partygoers wouldn’t evacuate.
O’Halloran goes to the Promenade Room to get those people out of there, but Jim doesn’t want to cooperate. Jim yells at Roger, who admits he changed the wiring diagrams for the building to save costs. Jim tells the guests about the fire fifty floors below them and says they need to move the party downstairs to the lobby.
Something explodes, and the fireball is super obvious even outside the building. O’Halloran tells Doug to tell Jim to tell everyone not to use the elevators. “Use the scenic elevator. Don’t overload it.” Roger accuses Jim of cutting all kinds of corners to shave money off the budget; it wasn’t just him.
Jim tells the people not to use the main elevator, but a bunch pile in anyway. That goes badly for them. Lisolette runs to tell the deaf woman about the fire, since she probably didn’t know about the evacuation orders. The elevator returns to the Promenade Room, and burning people spill out. Party’s over!
Dan and his secretary Lorrie smell smoke. The lobby of their office is on fire. He tries to call for help, but the phones are off, so he pretends to get through to them to keep Lorrie calm. He soon comes clean about his lie. He puts on some wet towels and makes a run for help, but he doesn’t get very far before burning to death. Lorrie breaks a window and falls to her death.
Jernigan hears about the deaf woman on 87 and goes down to evacuate them personally. Doug goes with him, and they find the mother unconscious. The kid was wearing headphones and didn’t hear anything. The fire has spread to several widely-separated floors by this point.
The partygoers are still evacuating, but the one safe elevator only holds twelve at a time. They find that one stairwell is full of smoke, and the other is blocked shut.
Doug, Maisonette, and the two kids head down the one usable stairway, but a gas explosion wipes out the metal stairs. Doug carries the kids down, but Lisolette has to climb down on her own. It’s all very tense, but they make it. They find an elevator but can only go up since the fire is below them.
In the electrical room, the generator burns out. This causes everything to get even more difficult. Doug, Maisonette, and the kids finally make it to the party room.
With most of the characters in the same room now, we switch to character mode. Harlee admits to Lisolette that he’s a poor con man, but she already knows that. She doesn’t care; she still likes him. Doug and Jim argue about building codes and safety systems. The mayor and his wife have family regrets.
The partygoers have no way out, so the air patrol brings in a helicopter to airlift the partygoers, but that goes badly and the helicopter crashes and explodes. So now the roof is on fire too. The firemen break out some of the windows to run a line to the neighboring building. They tie off the lines and get everything set to run a basket to the next-door building’s roof. They start wheeling people over, one-by-one. Jim’s daughter gets out safely this way, but it’s really slow.
Doug gets the scenic elevator working, but only for one trip of twelve people coasting down on gravity. Maisonette kisses Harlee goodbye, as does the Mayor’s wife, Doug’s wife, and the kids as they board the elevator. Partway down, there’s an explosion, and Lisolette falls out of the damaged elevator that’s dangling by a cable. O’Halloran hooks himself to a winch on a helicopter to lower the elevator to the ground. This also works.
The deputy fire chief comes up with the idea of blowing up the water tanks two floors above the party room. The falling water should put out most of the fire. They “volunteer” O’Halloran to set the charges.
Time is running out in the party room; they only have fifteen minutes left. O’Halloran tells Doug the water tank plan. Some fire appears in the stairwell, and Roger and a bunch of guys jump on the basket all at once. Roger kicks the Senator off, falling to his death. Then the wire snaps and Roger falls too.
O’Halloran takes a copter up to the roof with a bagful of explosives, and Doug meets him there. O’Halloran shows him how to set up the explosives, and they get to work.
The bombs go off, the water tanks explode, and water runs everywhere. The water rushes into the party room, and some of the people get washed right out the windows. It looks like most of the water just pours out the windows, but eventually, all the fire burns out. O’Halloran, Doug, Harlee, and a few others make it out.
Harlee goes looking for Lisolette and learns that she didn’t make it. Jernigan catches up with him and gives him the dead woman’s cat. O’Halloran looks at the firemen in body bags. He says they were lucky; the body count was less than 200.
Commentary
These disaster movies had proven themselves to be really popular, so the casting choices just kept getting more and more big names. They were also getting longer and more epic; this one’s nearly three hours long, which was nearly unheard of in the 70s.
Funny how the firemen were spraying tons of water on the fire, and it didn’t make any difference, even in small rooms. Almost as if the fires were fake and gas-powered or something. Was it 160 floors of wood and dynamite? There’s so much fire everywhere with occasional explosions, but there’s not nearly as much smoke as there should be. That little Navy helicopter could lift twelve passengers plus the elevator itself? No. Could the water in the tanks of the top floor make it very far with all those broken windows up high? No. A lot of the stuff in the film just isn’t as bad as it should be. Still, this is one of those movies you watch for the cast, not because it’s particularly realistic.
In the end, the building is essentially uninhabitable. How does one go about demolishing a building that tall? One floor at a time, I guess.
The performances are good, the plot moves quickly, and the cast is unsurpassed.