Image credit: Looking up at Chicago skyscrapers by Chris Rycroft, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
A gala night that turns into a disaster
In The Towering Inferno, released in 1974 and directed by John Guillermin, Faye Dunaway plays Susan Franklin, the fiancée of architect Doug Roberts, played by Paul Newman. The film is set on the opening night of the Glass Tower, a 138-storey skyscraper in San Francisco, built by James Duncan, played by William Holden, and celebrated with a lavish party on its top floors. Susan has just arrived with news of her own: she has been offered an important job that would keep her in San Francisco, complicating the couple’s plan to leave the city and start a quieter life together. Dunaway plays that announcement with a mixture of pride and anxiety. Susan is not asking permission. She is telling the man she loves that her life has its own direction, and she hopes he will understand.
Then the fire starts. Faulty wiring, installed to cut costs, ignites on a lower floor, and the blaze climbs through the building’s core, trapping guests, staff, and firefighters in a burning tower. Guillermin, working with producer Irwin Allen, stages the disaster on a grand scale, with practical effects, stunts, and a huge ensemble cast. Dunaway’s role in that spectacle is to keep Susan human. While the camera follows fire chief Michael O’Hallorhan, played by Steve McQueen, and Roberts as they fight the blaze, Dunaway gives the audience a personal stake in the rescue. Susan is not a passive victim waiting to be saved. She helps other guests, she argues with Roberts about what to do, and she faces danger with a clear-eyed courage that never feels like mere heroics.
Glamour under pressure
Dunaway had just come from the intense, controlled world of Chinatown, and The Towering Inferno asked her for something different: to be part of a star-studded ensemble, to wear evening dress in a burning building, and to remain believable while the film around her becomes increasingly spectacular. She succeeds because she plays Susan as a real person, not as a disaster-movie type. In early scenes, she is warm, funny, and slightly impatient with the pomposity of the opening-night celebrations. She teases Roberts, she greets old friends, and she makes clear that she is not impressed by the tower itself. That scepticism matters, because the film’s theme is hubris: a building designed to be the tallest and safest in the world, undone by greed and shortcuts.
As the fire spreads, Dunaway’s performance becomes more focused. Susan helps a deaf woman and her children, she stays calm when the scenic elevator becomes a trap, and she trusts Roberts and O’Hallorhan without surrendering her own judgement. In the famous elevator sequence, Roberts rigs a gravity brake to lower a group, including Susan, down the outside of the building. Dunaway plays the terror of that descent without hysteria, and her relief when they reach safety feels earned rather than sentimental. She understands that in a disaster film, the audience needs to believe that survival matters, and she gives Susan a dignity that makes her survival matter.
An ensemble of legends
The Towering Inferno is famous for its cast, which also includes Fred Astaire as a charming con man, Jennifer Jones in her final film role, Richard Chamberlain as a cynical engineer, Robert Wagner, Susan Blakely, and O. J. Simpson. Dunaway holds her own in that company, not by competing for attention, but by being the emotional anchor for Newman’s Roberts. Their relationship gives the film its romantic thread, and Dunaway makes it feel lived-in rather than decorative. Susan and Doug have a history, they disagree about the future, and they love each other in a way that includes argument. That history makes the fire more frightening, because we understand what is at stake for them beyond mere survival.
The film was the highest-grossing film of 1974, won three Academy Awards, and became the definitive example of the 1970s disaster genre. Its success depended on a careful balance between spectacle and character, and Dunaway’s contribution to that balance is often underestimated. She does not have the showiest role, and she does not get the film’s most famous lines, but she gives the audience someone to care about in the midst of collapsing stairwells and exploding floors. Without Susan, the tower would be an impressive set. With her, it is a place where people live, love, and risk everything.
A different kind of Dunaway heroine
It is instructive to compare Susan Franklin with Dunaway’s other 1974 role, Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown. Evelyn is trapped by the past, by family, and by secrets. Susan is trapped by the present, by a building, and by other people’s greed, but she faces that trap with openness rather than concealment. Dunaway plays both women with intelligence, but she gives Susan a warmth and directness that Evelyn cannot afford. That contrast shows her range in a single year: two films, two heroines, two kinds of courage, both convincing.
Susan also represents a quietly modern idea for a blockbuster heroine of the 1970s. She has a career, she makes her own decisions, and she does not apologise for wanting to stay in San Francisco rather than follow her fiancé’s plans. Dunaway plays that independence as natural, not as a speech or a statement. Susan’s job is part of who she is, and Roberts must learn to respect it, just as Susan must learn to respect the risks Roberts takes to save others. Their negotiation, played out against a burning skyscraper, gives the film a human scale that its special effects cannot provide alone.
Why Susan Franklin endures
Susan endures because Dunaway refuses to let her become a symbol of helpless glamour. She is glamorous, certainly, in her evening dress on opening night, but she is also practical, brave, and stubborn. When the tower burns, she does not wait beautifully for rescue. She helps, she argues, she endures, and she survives with her relationship intact but changed. That survival feels like a small victory against the film’s larger theme of human arrogance, and Dunaway makes it feel personal.
Watch The Towering Inferno for the spectacle, the stunts, and the all-star cast, but watch Dunaway for the quiet centre of the film. Notice how she listens to Newman, how she steadies other characters, and how she makes a disaster-movie heroine feel like a real woman with a job, a fiancé, and a future she intends to choose for herself. Susan Franklin may not be Dunaway’s most famous role, but it is one of her most appealing, and it shows a star who could bring intelligence and warmth to even the largest Hollywood entertainment.