Hey movie buffs, How are you all doing? I here to discuss the movie "City on Fire" (1979). Overall, I thought it was a decent disaster movies. For a movie that was made back in the late 1970's, it was pretty good. I know that there are a few movie buffs out there that will think that I am crazy (Hence the 918,a police code where I live for Crazy Person). But the only problems that I found was that the movie was set in Canada and yet they if you look carefully you could see the American flag and how does an oil/chemical works factory that starts on fire burn the entire city. I would sure like to know that. If anybody knows please let me know, please. But other than that, what more can you ask in a disaster movie: great actors/actoresses, crazy plot, for you disaster movie buffs Shelly Winters:). Keep watching movies and long live Hollywood and misc. production companies.

City on Fire is one of the poorest of the 70s disaster films, but not the very worst (Meteor, Avalanche, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure are all a touch worse). It features a stellar cast that includes Ava Gardner, Henry Fonda, Barry Newman and Leslie Neilsen, but most of them seem bored by the material and just hover around in front of the fire, spouting bad dialogue and wondering aloud how much worse it will get and how many more victims it will claim. The fire is started by a disgruntled employee at a power station. Within an hour, it has spread beyond the power station to the whole city, and the film focuses in particular on the hospital, which is fast becoming an unsurvivable inferno. The scenes of patients and doctors running, drenched in water, through the burning streets are pretty exciting, but come so late in the film that many viewers will have switched off by then. Barry Newman is the best actor in it, given a rare leading role and making the most of it. The others, as I've mentioned. don't seem at all bothered. The production is certainly not cheap. It looks very real amid the fire and death, and to have assembled such a good cast obviously took considerable money. Unfortunately, the film is bad though. It takes too long to get going and doesn't try any new things compared with all the disaster movies that have been made before. I'd give this one a miss I were you, unless you're a pyromaniac or hooked on the disaster genre.

"City on Fire" was made in 1979, when the disaster genre was already past its prime - and a dispirited, tired affair it is. Most of the actors (except for the amusingly unbalanced villain) sleepwalk through their roles, possibly knowing that the film had no chance of reviving the genre. At least there are some pretty realistic effects, though the movie never makes clear how exactly the fire spread over the entire city. (**)

Sure, CITY ON FIRE isn't THE TOWERING INFERNO, but if you love disaster movies with a budget this has tons more excitement and action than the more famous (and more boring) METEOR and AVALANCHE. It is also clearly a movie with a big budget and the effects are convincing to the point that you can actually feel the heat and the smoke coming through your tv-set!I used to love the sarcastic trio in Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are times when I feel they may have drained the tank of Really Bad Movies and in dire need of a victim, they throw themselves over movies that -when push comes to shove- really doesn't deserve it's legacy ridiculed and destroyed in this manner. Let's face it, all though at times hysterically funny, the MST3K-gang could even make THE GODFATHER look cheesy! To bad they decided to aim their attack on CITY ON FIRE, one of the few disaster movies of the late 70's that actually had several things going for it. The MST3K-gang definitely did a good job, as the ratings on this movie NEVER were this low BEFORE they "killed it" with their ruthless remarks.And to contradict one of the other user comments in here: Leslie Nielsen actually DID do a good job as the unselfish mayor in the movie (believe it or not).What it all comes down to is this: if you liked THE SWARM and even WHEN TIME RAN OUT get ready for two entertaining hours in the company of Barry Newman, Susan Clark, Shelley Winters, Henry Fonda and Leslie "pre-comedy" Nielsen!In CITY ON FIRE, you really FEEL like you're in a metropolis going up in flames!