[1974] The Towering Inferno

In the “normal” course of a “normal” person’s “normal” morning or evening, things happen both to and around the individual . These things are stimuli of various levels of control. In some instances, the individual acts on a thing that directly affects his or her environment and other times things happen in quick succession outside of anyone’s direct control. As living creatures, humans react and respond to external stimuli either consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously, and as rational beings some among humans understand the relationship among many causes and effects, feedback loops, iterations, and dead-ends. Enlightenment via order is certainly a waste of precious time considering that we float through space with the capriciousness of the things that happen to us and to everyone else. To wrangle is to fight entropy – a natural state of chaos and disorder. This is true, normality is a subsection of chaos. The “normal” accident, then, is one of a confluence of seemingly random happenings en route to disaster. Thus simplifies the premise of The Towering Inferno.

The film itself is straight-forward, but seems to stall for about two hours in between the introduction of the problem and the eventual resolution. An as-of-yet-to-be detected fire starts in an inconspicuous closet on a single floor of over a hundred, and because of dramatic necessity, the whole building bursts into flames while hundreds of people panic 50 floors up. The story weaves through character profiles whose motivations do not really matter, so the sense of urgency falls somewhat flat, and whose outcomes feel random – normal even. Both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman vie for the audience’s affections, and mostly succeed, though they both seem to want this love in its entirety. Fred Astaire makes a legacy performance worthy of an Oscar, Jennifer Jones exits on a high note, and O.J. Simpson practiced his own peculiar brand of acting, for which he would soon become infamous. Together, this ensemble cast in this situation should have made The Towering Inferno an exciting and enjoyable watch. Normally, it would have been, but the specifics behind the scenes somewhat doomed this picture to bloat and disorder.