City on Fire (1979)

A pyromaniac, ex-employee of a city oil refinery creates an explosion at the facility which starts a chain-reaction of fires that engulf the entire city.

Director:

Alvin Rakoff

Writers:

Jack Hill, David P. Lewis,

Stars:

Barry Newman, Susan Clark, Shelley Winters

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Barry Newman	...	Dr. Frank Whitman
Susan Clark	...	Diana Brockhurst-Lautrec
Shelley Winters	...	Nurse Andrea Harper
Leslie Nielsen	...	Mayor William Dudley
James Franciscus	...	Jimbo
Ava Gardner	...	Maggie Grayson
Henry Fonda	...	Fire Chief Albert Risley
Jonathan Welsh	...	Herman Stover
Hilary Labow	...	Mrs. Adams
Richard Donat	...	Fire Captain Harrison Risley
Mavor Moore	...	John O'Brien
Donald Pilon	...	Dr. Matwick
Terry Haig	...	Terry James
Cec Linder	...	Councilman Paley
Ken James	...	Andrew - Deputy Fire Chief

Storyline

William Dudley is a corrupt mayor of a nameless Midwestern U.S. city who has allowed a chemical refinery to be built right in the center of town, far from any river, lake or reservoir. On one typical hot summer day, Herman Stover, a dangerously disturbed employee at the works has been denied an expected promotion and in addition, finds himself fired. He then decides to take his revenge against the works by opening the valves to the storage vats and their interconnecting pipes, flooding the area and sewers with gasoline and chemicals. It doesn't take long for this act of petty vandalism to start a fire, which starts a chain reaction that causes massive explosions at the refinery, destroying it and spreading a mushroom-cloud of flame that soon engulfs the entire metropolis! The drama focuses on a newly built hospital which, like the refinery and all civic buildings that went up during the mayor's crooked administration, is shoddily built and poorly equipped where the head doctor, Frank ...

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Plot Keywords:

fire | city | explosion | mayor | hospital | 

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Taglines:

What Happened to Them Could Happen to You ... In Any City Anywhere!

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Genres:

Action | Drama

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Certificate:

R

Details

Country:

Canada USA

Language:

English French

Release Date:

31 August 1979 (USA)

Also Known As:

Cidade em Chamas

Filming Locations:

Montréal, Québec, Canada

Box Office

Budget:

$5,300,000 (estimated)

Company Credits

Production Co:

Astral Bellevue Pathé, Astral Films, Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC)

Technical Specs

Runtime:

106 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

German Import DVD has a Super-8 Version (German language only), as a special feature on the disc.

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Goofs

TV station call letters in the USA start with K (for western states) or W (for eastern states), not C which are for all of Canada's provinces.

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Quotes

[last lines]
Chief Albert Risley: All it takes is one man, could be anybody... your neighbor, my neighbor... one man to destroy a city.

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Connections

Referenced in Bad Movie Beatdown: Meteor (2009)

User Reviews

ugh!

This movie sucks out loud and in living color. Yes, it's a disaster movie (thank goodness that genre is dead), but the real disaster is how this movie plays out.

It involves Leslie Nielsen (!) playing a corrupt mayor who allows an oil refinery to be built in downtown somewhere. Meanwhile, Ava Gardner portrays a Barbara Walters-wannabe with a HUGE drinking problem who can't decide whether to put her hands on another bottle of Absolut or James Franciscus' body (ewww). Shelly Winters plays a nurse with some conviction, while Henry Fonda mails in a performance as the fire chief.

The movie starts out with a psychotic who is denied a promotion (see SST: Death Flight) at said refinery and who also has a crush on Webster's mom, a wealthy socialite with a whore complex. The only thing they have in common is homeroom in high school. Our neighborhood psycho decides he's going to go John Hinkley in pursuit of his Jodie Foster. He eventually buys it at the end, but as Crow said on MST, "we all paid for it".

Meanwhile, to give us some honest to goodness firefighting, we are shown a couple of kids in a tree house. One of the kids pulls a Clinton (no inhale) and tosses/drops his smoke in the trash, which burns the apartment building where he lives and puts his sister in the ICU.

The fire itself is the main attraction. Everything in town is combustible, and the main drama is whether the fire will suck all of the oxygen away from the new hospital before everyone can escape. None of the big stars appear in scenes together, except for Franciscus and Gardner, and that's too frightening to consider.

Sterno says put City on Fire to the torch.