The Hindenburg (1975)
Directed by Robert Wise

Film Review

To this day, the cause of the Hindenburg disaster remains a mystery, although many plausible theories have been put forward.  Robert Wise's 1975 film The Hindenburg presents one of the more fanciful theories, that of sabotage by a lone anti-Nazi resistance fighter.  Michael M. Mooney's book of the same title provides the story, which was developed into a screenplay by Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators and producers of such popular television shows as Columbo, Ellery Queen and Murder, She Wrote.  A stickler for detail, Robert Wise was the ideal person to direct the film, and he spent about a year undertaking meticulous research before the film went into production.  The Hindenburg makes a valiant attempt to bring together two disparate genres, the serious historical drama and the popular disaster movie, but it falls short of success on both counts.  Even though the film was far from being a flop, the critics tore it to pieces and it remains one of Robert Wise's least well-regarded films.  The version of events it depicts has also been largely discredited by the experts.

The script and cast are pretty much what you would expect for a 1970s American disaster movie - the usual line-up of big-name actors struggling to make their one-dimensional characters remotely convincing as the clock ticks down to the inevitable disaster denouement.  Wise does a reasonably good job of maintaining the suspense but this is definitely, if you'll pardon the expression, a slow burner.  Very little happens until the last reel of the film, by which point most of the audience will have either fallen asleep or gone off to do something far more interesting, like watch paint dry.  On the plus side, the special and visual effects are exceptional for a film of this era (these won their creators two Special Achievement Academy Awards, and justly so), but, stunning as they are, pretty pictures of the Hindenburg sailing gracefully across the Atlantic are not enough to sustain the viewer's interest throughout this dawdling two hour long epic.

Not surprisingly, the film only comes to life in its last ten minutes when all Hell breaks loose and the doomed airship earns its place in the history books.  It was an inspired touch to splice in real footage of the actual disaster, although this necessitated that the last part of the film be shot in monochrome.  (Switching between colour and black and white would have been blatantly absurd.)   Given how intensely dramatic and moody the film's denouement is, you can't help wishing that its makers had been a little braver and taken the decision to shoot the entire film in black-and-white.  The confined setting aboard the airship would have been far more atmospheric and Wise would doubtless have had more scope for ratcheting up the tension and suspense - with a better script this could been a riveting character-centric drama.  As it is, what we end up with is a rather formulaic, plodding disaster movie whose only virtue is to remind us of one of the most terrible incidents in aviation history.  No matter how many times we see those horrific images that shook the world on Thursday 6th May 1937 it is impossible not to be shocked and moved by them.  It is genuinely a scene from the Apocalypse.

Film Synopsis

May, 1937.  The German embassy in Washington D.C. has received a letter warning that the Hindenburg, the pride of the German Zeppelin Airline Company, will explode over New York in the near future.  Aware of the propaganda victory anti-Nazi rebels will score if they were to destroy the airship, the German authorities take the threat seriously.  Luftwaffe Colonel Franz Ritter is assigned to see that the Hindenburg comes to no harm on her next commercial flight across the Atlantic.  Assisted by a Gestapo agent, Martin Vogel, Ritter investigates everyone on board the ship, passengers and crew alike, including his old friend, the Countess Ursula von Reugen.  Ritter finally narrows the suspects down to one man, Karl Boerth, a one-time Hitler Youth Leader who plans to blow up the airship with a time bomb in an attempt to galvanise opposition to the Nazi regime.  Boerth has no desire to kill the passengers and so he makes an agreement with Ritter to explode his bomb only after everyone has disembarked from the Hindenburg.  Unfortunately, the airship's arrival is delayed by strong headwinds and Boerth is prevented from putting back the time of the explosion when Vogel unmasks him as the saboteur.  The disaster is now unavoidable...