You know how Smokey Bear is always gravely intoning how only you can prevent forest fires? After watching Flood!‘s sweaty brother Fire!, another small screen entry from Irwin Allen’s disaster factory, we also know what else can prevent forest fires. Not letting convicts smoke cigarettes when they are on forestry detail!
That the Pinetree Prison Camp somehow allowed a con to light up in a dangerously dry forest isn’t really all that surprising for a facility that features a single guard and its own pool hall. It’s also the sort of TV movie prison where the single guard requested a 48 hour hardship leave for the wrongfully accused Frank (Erik Estrada) so he could go to his Indian tribe and put pressure on them to make the real robber confess. Understandably, prison officials were not convinced of this unorthodox legal strategy to appeal his conviction and denied it.
But Frank would get another chance when he abandons his escape plan to help a helicopter pilot blinded in a crash while he was trying to rescue Ernest Borgnine’s girlfriend Vera Miles, Patti Duke Astin, Lloyd Nolan and Donna Mills from a lodge full of 1970s disaster movie cliches.
Borgnine is lumber baron Charles Brisbane who is attempting to convince lodge owner Nancy (Miles) to love him. Patti Duke Astin and Alex Cord are married doctors who don’t see eye to eye on their careers and are headed for divorce unless something like a terrible disaster intervenes and makes them see that the secret to any successful marriage is being so busy saving people and staying alive that you have no time to worry about what a selfish douche you married. Nolan is the kindly small town doctor he always seemed to play later in his career who brags about curing a kid with polio in a confusing effort to convince the two younger doctors to take over for him
Proving that the correctional system wasn’t the only government entity run by clueless boobs in the film, Mills plays teacher Harriet Malone who takes a van load of her students out for a field trip in the forest. Eschewing such modern concepts as parent chaperones, the buddy system or even just freaking paying attention, she mindlessly lets little Judy run off to play with some chipmunks, only advising Judy to also collect some fern specimens while she’s off playing Mark Trail. Judy of course makes a beeline to the fire, Harriet panics and loads all the other kids in the van leaving poor dimwitted Judy behind setting up movie crisis number one.
The fire comes as a bit of a shock because despite the prison telling the forestry service that they put out the fire and the forestry service taking the expert fire fighters from the prison at their word, the fire has reignited! It was hard not to laugh at everyone involved when the forest ranger asked the prison for help and the prison guard said he was sending a “top crew.” Well, a top crew minus the prisoner who got burned up during the earlier fire.
The movie then boils down to rescuing Judy and then once the fire changes direction to threaten the lodge, rescue all those people. There is also some talk about saving the nearby town, but other than Brisbane’s lumber mill there, we don’t know anything about that town so we don’t really care too much.
The battling of the fire plays out as expected with lots of guys running around with shovels, falling out of trees on fire, talk of tying the fire line, and Brisbane leading the rescue of first Judy, then everyone at the lodge with a bulldozer and army truck he had flown in on a moment’s notice.
On balance, this is probably a little bit better than Flood! was for the simple fact that there was no silly story to explain the fire like there was in Flood! In Flood! it was standard issue movie thriller stuff with a mayor withholding information about a damaged dam because he was worried about hurting tourism, while his daughter’s stud boyfriend battled him on the issue, even playing the “crazy old guy who knows everything about the area says the dam is going to break” card. With Fire! it was just human carelessness.
Fire! does suffer from a lack of strong leads and could have benefited from the charisma of a Robert Culp or intensity of his Flood! co-star Martin Milner. Forcing Borgnine to carry the film with Alex Cord didn’t really work since they had no real chemistry together and especially since Cord’s character was such a prick to his wife throughout the movie. (I actually thought his wife was making a mistake giving him another chance at the end of the movie.)
Fire! also benefits from being able to better dramatize its disaster than Flood! was able to. No fake-looking dam breaking and flooded sets here, just stuff on fire. It was also a smart move to have the bulk of the action set in the wilderness because you could really just burn stuff down out there without worrying about how to credibly make it look like a city was on fire. Competently unmemorable 1970s disaster flick whose highlight is watching Lloyd Nolan get run off the road by a bear.
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