YMMV / The Towering Inferno

• Adaptation Displacement: This film is more remembered these days than the novels that inspired it.
• Awesome Music: John Williams' score really was enjoyed, and the Award-Bait Song "We May Never Love Like This Again" won an Oscar.
• Funny Moments: O'Hallorhan calls up Doug to tell him that they're going to blow up the water tanks. What he leaves out is that, because he's the only person on the scene qualified with explosives, he's going to have to do it and he can't get down afterward.
  Roberts: How are they gonna get the explosives up here?
  O'Hallorhan: (giving a look to his own supervisor) Oh, they'll find some dumb son of a bitch to bring it up.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Fire Chief O'Hallorhan's last lines... 27 years before 9/11.
  • The whole movie, post-9/11, actually. Particularly as production wrapped on September 11, 1974.
    • For more than two decades it was Swedish Television tradition to air this movie on January 1st, beginning within an hour of the new year. After 9/11 the tradition was abandoned.
  • The scene with the secretary jumping out of the window was eerily similar to people doing the same thing on 9/11.
  • The fact that both source novels The Tower and The Glass Inferno are set in New York, with the fictional World Tower Building from the former novel actually being in close proximity to the World Trade Center, and the North Tower being used to evacuate people via the breeches buoy, just makes it worse.
  • The movie also looks more uncomfortable after the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London. Building management had also apparently been skimping on fire safety to save money, with flammable materials being cited as a factor in the fire's spread. The fire also started due to an electrical fault.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: O. J. Simpson breaking into people's apartments. Granted, it's to make sure nobody's left behind, and he saves a cat, but compared to what he did later in life...
• Moral Event Horizon: Roger Simmons. His cutting corners on the electrical costs is what leads to the fire breaking out. He crosses it when, in his last moments, he commandeers the breeches buoy, throwing other desperate people off to their deaths including Senator Parker (who was trying to save their lives), before the rope snaps and he falls to his death.
• Retroactive Recognition: The secretary Lorrie is now famous as Stephanie Forrester.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Get a load of the groovy Seventies fashions and hairdos in the film. Though Irwin Allen made sure the men's hair wasn't that long and the fashion wasn't too loud, meaning the dissonance isn't as extreme as it might have been.
    • Still, Holden's red tux jacket, Wagner's bright blue, Vaughn's ruffled shirt, and especially Chamberlain's brown tuxedo completely date the film to the 70s. However, the color was probably added to make those characters stand out from the sea of black tuxedos worn by the extras.
  • The Glass Tower is said to be the tallest building in the world at 1,688 feet (515 m). While this would still be a very impressive height today, it would barely crack the top 10.
• The Woobie:
  • Harley Claibourne, and to some extent, Patty Simmons.
  • Many of the people who died.

---