The 70’s disaster movie is a curious genre but, at least, the vast majority of those pictures are complete works of fiction. What makes 1975’s The Hindenburg difficult is it is based on the near meltdown at nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. Fine–you got me–it’s about the blimp disaster in 1937. You know what it’s based on. I’ll try to be good from here on out.
Among the problems with this enterprise is you know how it’s going to end. James Cameron addressed this problem with Titanic by having a wraparound story in the present day, and having characters the audience could be invested in. Well, I assume most audiences were, given the bakery trucks of dough that film seems to continue to bring in. I, in my weirdly dogged determination, still have yet to see it.
The minds behind the screenplay unwisely took the approach of telling the story from just before launch to the inevitable explosion at the end. I was surprised a more novel approach wasn’t taken, as this is the brainchild of Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators of Columbo.
Typical of the genre, there’s too many characters here. Unfortunately, almost all of them are barely defined, and I did not care one whit whether any lived or died. Still, there’s a tally at the end, as if the audience has been literally keeping score on the outcome. A selection of portraits are laid across the screen, with the narrator saying whether each person lived or died. The last is that of the dalmatian that had been kept in the cargo hold. We are informed the dog survived, so I’m sure that was a huge relief to audiences. My reaction was a noise halfway between a laugh and a gasp (a lasp?).
I didn’t even care about the plight of George C. Scott, top-billed as the head of security on the voyage. He is given some amount of shading, with a wife we never see again after the launch and a tale of woe regarding his son who had died. I initially assumed his son died while in military service. Instead, he had been painting a swastika on the roof on a synagogue when he fell to his death, an incident which falls in an awkward area between tragedy and darkly ironic comedy.
Second billed is Anne Bancroft as a decadent baroness secretly fleeing Germany while presenting herself as an insouciant traveler. I didn’t believe a second of her performance. She is rarely seen without her opium pipe, which she holds on to so fiercely that I almost felt the actress was using it like a security blanket, some sort of fetish to get her through this production.
The overstuffed cast is filled out with largely second-tier actors, many of whom I was pleased to see but who aren’t exactly marquee names. Some of the better-known are Charles Durning, as the captain, and Gig Young, as a mysterious businessman who keeps drawing unwanted attention from Scott. There’s a curious reunion of three actors from Day of the Locust here, those being William Atherton, Burgess Meredith and Richard Dysart. I am also happy to see Katherine Helmond get work, but she is wasted here by the bland drivel she’s provided as dialog. Rene Auberjonois is an actor I last saw in Robert Altman’s Images, and he has one of the more interesting roles here, as a card shark in cahoots with Meredith. Robert Clary plays a literal clown who chews the scenery when he isn’t bouncing off of it or hanging upside down from it.
Almost all these people will at some sort be suspected by Scott as being a saboteur who has hidden a bomb on the dirigible. Although the cause of the disaster has never been definitively determined, an explosive has always been floated as one of the potential factors. But the problem with this mystery is we know how it ends for all involved, so whoever might have planted such a device will likely be dead before the credits roll.
One deeply irritating creative decision was to have the Germans all voiced by Americans. While it wouldn’t have been wise to have those actors adopt an accent, I never stopped being confused by characters I forgot were supposed to be German. And yet, the Brits in this (well, those who are supposed to be British) have appropriate accents, which makes the AmeriNazis even more bizarre in comparison.
The one area in which the film largely excels are its special effects. There are still some moments which are not fully convincing, such as attempts to overlay smoke on top of the image. But there was one especially stellar moment from a point of view above what must be a model of the zeppelin in the air with a cloud between us and the airship. That cloud looks genuine, though I know it can’t be. It has dimension and casts a shadow on the vessel. If I saw this shot outside of the movie and didn’t know where it was from, or when it was made, I would sworn this was accomplished through CGI.
Unfortunately, The Hindenburg jettisons what little goodwill it had built up with an ending that is dreadful on many levels. Director Robert Wise made the deeply questionable decision to integrate actual newsreel footage of the disaster into his recreations. To accommodate this, the film suddenly shifts to black and white. Even more jarring than that is the unforgiveable sin of using real death for the purpose of entertainment. A more tasteful approach would have been to recreate everything using special effects. An even better approach would have been to not make this movie at all.
Dir: Robert Wise
Starring George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft and too many others
Watched on blu-ray