The Hindenburg (1975) – Review

Everyone knows what sank the Titanic (arrogance and ice) but the cause of the great airship disaster that was the Hindenburg remains a mystery to this very day. This is good and bad for filmmakers, on the plus side it gave director Robert Wise free rein to make a movie based on any one of the many theories for the disaster, on the negative side, he was also stuck in a historical piece that does have certain unalterable facts which leads to the film’s biggest problem, that Wise was basically making a disaster film where the actual disaster portion lasted a whopping 34 seconds and that’s a hard sell when it comes to making a big climax. By comparison, the ocean liner Titanic took two hours and forty minutes to sink – which is plenty of time to throw in lots of action, drama, thrills and spills – but when you only have a matter of seconds to depict the event it’s a bit trickier to squeeze all that drama into such a small time frame.

The movie’s other big stumbling block is that it is set in the year just prior to the Nazi war machine kicking off World War II and most of the characters in this film are German including the film’s protagonist Col. Franz Ritter (George C. Scott), the man is sent aboard the Hindenburg to prevent any such terrorist attack, and Hollywood will once again cast mostly American and British actors to play the Germans, without any of them even trying to fake a German accent. Now, to make audiences more sympathetic to the plight of our cast of characters the script depicts most of them as anti-Nazi, and though there were, in fact, many Germans who despised what their country was becoming this movie makes it look like the Nazis were a minority, opposed to the millions of Germans who totally drank the Kool-Aid that Hitler was selling.

Note: This film depicts Zeppelin heads Ernest Lehmann (Richard Dysart) and Hugo Eckener (Herbert Nelson) as both being wary of the Nazi party. In reality, while Eckener hated the Nazis, and spoke against them openly, Lehman on the other hand was a well-known supporter of Berlin in order to advance his career and the fortunes of the Zeppelin Company.

The movie even includes a scene where Broadway producer Reed Channing (Peter Donat) and acrobat Joe Spah (Robert Clary) perform a song number satirizing the Nazi regime, and the bulk of the audience, including Luftwaffe Colonel Ritter, really seem to be enjoying the performance. Only the Hindenburg Captain Max Pruss (Charles Durning) is upset enough to demand they stop. Which I find hard to believe as I’m betting most Germans at the time would have at least faked outrage at such a performance.

Next, they will break into “Springtime for Hitler.”

In reality, Joseph Spah did tell anti-Nazi jokes, and his frequent unaccompanied visits into the hull to visit his dog led him to be a prime suspect, but Spah is just one of many characters the film trots out as suspects like an Agatha Christie mystery.  The actual guilty party in this telling of the Hindenburg disaster is crewman Karl Boerth (William Atherton) and the movie isn’t remotely subtle about it. This character was based on the real-life Eric Spehl, whose girlfriend held communist beliefs and had anti-Nazi connections, but the most damming evidence against him here is that he’s being played by William Atherton, so there is no doubt he’s our mad bomber.

That the fire broke out near the top of the ship, a place that a wandering passenger would have a hard time reaching unnoticed, made Spehl a perfect patsy for theorists, and as he died in the fire he certainly couldn’t refute these accusations, unfortunately, for conspiracy nuts, there is no evidence, physical or otherwise to prove this to be the case.  Instead, the movie tries to create a whodunnit mystery that wouldn’t pass muster on an episode of Murder She Wrote, and with poor Karl Boreth’s guilt uncovered halfway through the movie we don’t even have all that much suspense for long.

Note: To add action to what is basically a drawing-room mystery the filmmakers threw in a scene where there is a tear in the outer cover of the Hindenburg, that has to be repaired mid-flight.  To be fair, this did happen but it was on the Graf Zeppelin, not the Hindenburg.

Being this movie is obviously not a Pro-Nazi endeavour the film’s bomber is not portrayed as a villain but as a sympathetic character who wants to use the destruction of the Hindenburg as a weapon against Hitler and Goebbels’ propaganda machine. The movie then journeys into complete fantasyland when Ritter comes to the conclusion that Boerth/Spehl is the bomber and then attempts to arrest him, but Boerth is able to use some magical rhetoric to win Ritter to his side. We learn that Ritter’s only son was a Hitler Youth member and had died in an accident while painting anti-Jewish graffiti and this was apparently enough to sway this man to the bomber’s side.  Well, that and the assurance that the bomb would be set to go off only after the ship was empty.

If you can’t trust a bomber who can you trust?

The bulk of this movie, unfortunately, comes across more like an episode of The Love Boat than it does a big-budget disaster movie and while Ritter is stuck investigating this bomb threat we must suffer through vignettes of the various other passengers aboard this doomed airship and their problems; Countess Ursula von Reugen (Anne Bancroft) is fleeing Germany to join her deaf daughter in America, Edward Douglas (Gig Young) has to get to New York before a rival ad agency steals his client, Emilio Pajetta (Burgess Meredith) and Major Napier (Rene Auberjonois) are two card cheats plying their trade among the wealthy passengers, and finally we have Albert Breslau (Alan Oppenheimer) who along with his family are smuggling diamonds to hopefully secure enough funds to get his extended family out of Germany. This is the kind of formula that was used successfully in the 1970s movie Airport, but that movie didn’t make you wait until the last ten minutes for the disaster portion of the film to kick into gear.

Anne Bancroft is the hashish-smoking Countess.

When we do finally reach the epic event it is, shall we say, it is less than spectacular. Robert Wise wanted to shoot the whole film in black & white so as to easily integrate the actual newsreel footage of the disaster into his film but the studio wouldn’t go for it, instead, the movie just switches to black & white once the bomb goes off and to say it’s a rather jarring is a massive understatement and it makes no filmic sense other than “Hey, we can save a bundle of money doing it this way” and that’s a shame.  Worse is the fact that they also, for some presumed artistic reason, occasionally freeze-frame the footage at random times, which is almost as jarring a choice as the Black & White switch.

This is a movie about the world’s largest airship bursting into flames, who in their right mind could think black & white stock footage for your climax would go over well with modern audiences? Can you imagine Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno in black & white? No, because that would be ridiculous.  This is the kind of stuff you expect to see in a Roger Corman B-Movie.

“Oh, the humanity of bad choices.”

With this entry, Robert Wise has given the world a movie that is somewhat based on an actual historical event but then he went with a theory that was never even truly believed at the time and then to make matters worse he made audiences wait until the last ten minutes of his two-hour movie to give them this epic disaster before giving them that ending via black & white stock footage of the event instead of a Technicolor action-filled climax. That audiences didn’t demand their money back is the truly surprising element here, and sure, there are some nice model shots and great matte paintings of the Hindenburg in this movie, and the cast does deliver mostly decent performances, but that’s not what most people were paying to see.

“I died for this?”

In 1972 we got The Poseidon Adventure followed by The Towering Inferno and Earthquake in 1974, with those three films setting the bar for the genre quite high, while Robert Wise severely dropped the ball on this outing, and it’s hard to believe that this movie was produced and directed by the same guy who gave us the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, then again, The Hindenburg came out just a few years before he’d make the then thrilling science fiction epic Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so I guess Wise was already sliding into early retirement with these pictures.

Note: The film ends with a collection of photos listing all those who survived and those who did not, and the last survivor mentioned is the dog. In fact, there were two dogs aboard the Hindenburg and both died. It seems that audiences can handle dozens of people dying horribly but not a dog.