Made for television, The Deadly Tower is a recreation of the terrible day in 1966 that a 25 year-old former Marine named Charles Whitman shot his wife and mother and then climbed to the top of the tower at the University of Texas in Austin and started to indiscriminately firing on the people below.  It was one of the first mass shootings of its kind.  What drove All-American boy Charles Whitman, who was eventually taken down by the police, to start his rampage is not known though the autopsy revealed that he did have a small brain tumor at the time of his death.

The Deadly Tower focuses mostly on the efforts of the policeman Ramiro Martinez (Richard Yinguez) and civilian Allan Crum (Ned Beatty) to get to the top of the tower and stop Whitman’s shooting rampage.  (Pernell Roberts, John Forsythe, and Clifton James all appear as other police officials, trying to deal with what was then an almost unheard of occurrence.)  Martinez risks his life to stop Whitman’s rampage while Allan worries that other shootings will follow.  One of the first examples of a true crime event being turned into a movie for television, The Deadly Tower a tense and effective docudrama.  Kurt Russell, who was then still known for being Disney’s top-paid star, plays Whitman.  Russell doesn’t have much dialogue in the film.  He’s blandly friendly while buying bullets and, when he’s sitting up in the tower with his rifle, he could just as easily pass for a teenager out hunting with his father during deer season.  Russell’s clean-cut appearance made him ideal for playing the role of someone who no one would have ever suspected could be capable of committing such a terrible crime.  It took courage to cast an actor then known for Disney films as one of America’s worst mass murderers and it also took courage for Russell to accept a role that was the total opposite of his family-friendly image.

The Deadly Tower used to show up on television frequently when I was a kid.  It’s still a scary movie, even if you know how it’s going to end.  Whitman may have been one of the first of his kind but sadly, he wouldn’t be the last.