Big budget disaster flick destroyed by ludicrous dialogue and characters

preppy-3

**MINOR SPOILERS** Fictional story about what happened on the Hinderburg back in 1937 on its last journey where it exploded. German Col. Franz Ritter (George C. Scott) is assigned to be security on the zeppelin. On board we find the same sort of one-dimensional characters and situations that were in every other disaster flick of the time. There also is a anti-Nazi man on board who plants a bomb to blow up the zeppelin.

This (supposedly) took two years to make. Universal went all out with this one. They took great pains to recreate exactly what the Hindenburg looked like inside and out. It paid off--the movie looks and sounds great. It won well deserved Oscars for special effects, sound effects and cinematography. Unfortunately the characters aboard are ridiculously fake and their back stories uninteresting. Bad dialogue too makes this hard to sit through. It's a crime to see good actors like Burgess Meredith, Katherine Helmond, Gig Young, Charles Durning and William Atherton working with material well below their talents. Also Anne Bancroft plays the Countess (that's exactly how she's introduced in the opening credits) and overacts to an embarrassing degree. However Scott gives a great performance in his role. Also, as a big disaster flick, this doesn't work. Everybody knows how it ends so there isn't much suspense and you could care less about which characters are going to live or die.

Universal promoted this film nonstop when it came out. I still remember the huge color ads they had in newspapers. From what I remember this was not a big hit and faded away fairly quick. This is worth seeing just for the technical and sound effects. The final 10 minutes, which show actual footage of the disaster inter cut with new footage showing who lived and died, is impressive but depressing. All the other disaster movies were based on fictional characters and events--this was based on a true tragedy which makes it sort of disturbing. I give this a 5.

score 5/10

preppy-3 29 August 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1937504/