Word: monumental
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...Washington, D.C., hospital room, Steven Laine also refused to be bitter. An aide to Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, Laine had been walking to his office through a crowd of 125,000 gathered on the grounds by the Washington Monument for a rock festival celebrating-inappropriately, as it turned out-"Human Kindness Day." Wandering gangs of black teen-agers circulated through the crowd beating up whites at random, robbing whites and some blacks as well. One of the muggers attacked Laine, stabbing him in the right eye, which he subsequently lost...
...pants, ruffling his sandy-haired wig, filching cigarettes. He babbles an obbligato of literary cliches in an excessively ingratiating attempt to establish human contact. Richardson's stock character, the failed dreamer, prefers to stay pick led in his past: his arm now is to "drink with dignity." This monument to frozen illusions suddenly shatters in not one, but two thudding, alcoholic stage falls. His identity crumbles like a building under the wrecker's headache ball...
...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 as a symbol of something more. "Maybe we should just leave it standing like it is," says a dejected Paul Newman, "as a monument to all the bullshit in the world...
...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...
...from the hangar that for years has housed Hughes' gigantic plywood flying boat, known irreverently as "the Spruce Goose." Though Howard Hughes last month finally agreed to dispose of the Goose, giving parts of it to the Smithsonian, it remains at present in the hangar, a monument to his single-minded determination...