Word: infernos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...happen often. Unlike The towering Inferno, which might strike one building in the whole country in an entire year, shark attacks can hit an area five times in two months as they did in Florida this summer. The point is that the chances of getting gobbled up by a shark, however slim, are good enough to get a lot of people thinking it could happen to them...
After Poseidon Adventure, I fear cruising on an ocean liner. After Airport and its followup, I cringe at the thought of flight. Towering Inferno gives me indigestion before I arrive for dinner at my favorite restaurant on the 62nd floor of the U.S. Steel Building. Jaws [June 23] now forces me to abandon my vacation spot on Cape Hatteras in favor of the safety of the Allegheny River. Ah, the brilliance of Hollywood! In one short year it has transformed Americans into cowering paranoids whose only security is found in the tenth row of a darkened cinema...
...building and pours off all four edges of the roof. The Tower becomes a 135-story fiery fountain of cascading water against a perfectly black background. The beauty of scenes like this obviously have nothing to do with the reality of people getting barbecued, but The Towering Inferno is not realistic enough to convince us people are being hurt in the scenes of general destruction. Only when it focuses on scenes of individual danger and heroism does it compel our belief...
Unfortunately, The Towering Inferno is not content to think of itself as a combination of simple moralism, abstract beauty and adventure. Instead, it tries to be a public service film, a sort of Unsafe At An, Height. The fire chief leaves us with the impression that any building higher than seven stories is liable to become a towering inferno, without taking into account all the contrary evidence--that none yet has, and that what was wrong with the Tower was its poor construction, not its design. Yet we are asked to see the charred hulk of the Tower...
...have to ignore lines like that if you're going to enjoy The Towering Inferno, but the view that the movie itself is a monument to bullshit and concupiscence is unfounded. It's very easy to hype a popular film by calling it a cinematic masterpiece, as Pauline Kael has done so unfortunately with movies like Shampoo and Last Tango in Paris. The disaster film is an urban adventure, like a police or hospital melodrama, but the very magniture of the pseudo-events it chronicles--possible only on screen--give it a dignity beyond its intrinsic merit. When combined with...