The Towering Inferno" is a nearly three-hour suspense film for arsonists, firemen, movie-technology buffs, building inspectors, worry warts.The film, which opened yesterday at the National and Trans-Lux East Theaters, is a gigantic cautionary tale for people who want the worst to happen. It's this year's best end-of-the-world movie—the world in this case being represented by a 138-story, glass-and-steel San Francisco skyscraper that, on the night of its dedication, becomes history's biggest Roman candle. It doesn't burn down, just up.It's not a movie that bothers too much about the specifics of how it happened (something about cheap wiring). It's mainly concerned with what happens during the holocaust, that is with an almost interminable succession of rescue episodes involving lovers, frauds, villains, a little girl, a small cat, a mayor and his wife and other assorted characters whose life spans conform roughly to their billing: actors at the head of the cast live longest.Granting that end-of-the-world movies are not designed to test the intellect but, rather, to provide second-hand thrills of a visceral sort, "The Towering Inferno" must be everything its producer (Irwin Allen) and its two distribution companies (20th Century-Fox and Warner Bros., paired in a one-shot marriage-of-convenience to finance the film) could have possibly desired.The special effects are smashing, better than those in "Earthquake"

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