Word: infernos
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...TOWERING INFERNO...
Among disaster films, The Towering Inferno is the superepic. Based on not one but two bad novels, featuring four stars above the title instead of just one and having several scarcely less important figures (Jennifer Jones, Fred Astaire, O.J. Simpson) among the supporting players, it required an unprecedented combination of two major companies (Fox and Warner Bros.) to produce. Merely to turn out a single skyscraper they conspicuously consumed twice the amount that Universal spent to destroy all of Los Angeles in Earthquake. That near-crash of a 747 in Airport 75 is not even in the same league, fiscally...
...film, after the last flame has been doused, Paul Newman surveys the ruined hulk of his skyscraper. He suggests allowing it to stand as "a monument to all the bullshit" of our age. Probably The Towering Inferno should be placed on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian for the same reason...
ERIC CLAPTON: 461 OCEAN BOULEVARD (RSO). Old Slowhand can still raise up a musical inferno, though now he leans more to swinging blues...
...wished that everyone in the film would go away - violently - and that catastrophe movies would molder with them. Unfortunately, they are not going to. In addition to such current examples as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (see below) and Juggernaut (TIME, Oct. 21), Earthquake and The Towering Inferno will be unleashed in the next couple of months. Somehow, the knowledge that the genre is not yet played out makes Airport 1975 seem even worse...