When George C. Scott has an “uneasy feeling of disaster,” get the hell off the Hindenburg!

There’s something delicious about joining a movie already in progress. It’s like coming late to a party where the people have already been introduced and the chit-chatters have already changed partners two or three times. It’s that sense of leaning into the mid-point of a conversation and trying first to catch up and then to find a suitable jump-in point. Frankly, the experience totally sucks at a party – but with the right movie, it can be a helluva treat.

I got yanked into that sort of movie this morning. And believe me: the experience is about seventy times better on a Saturday morning. Compound this with the fact it was a movie on television and it’s cake. The cherry on top was that the movie was on Bravo and commercial-free (mostly).

The movie in question unfolded (for me) like this.

I came upon George C. Scott, in his prime – an actor I’ve come to appreciate a lot more in the last 10 years or so as I’ve grown to like, love and then adore Dr. Strangelove. He’s a great actor, without question, but he also has this twitchy sort of quality that makes him seem a little uncomfortable in his own skin. Coming onto a Patton-era performance, I stopped flipping channels. Immediately. Then a few other actors started to pop up that I recognized: Anne Bancroft, Burgess Meredith, Charles Durning (looking very young) and best of all…the sleaze-bag from Die Hard and Die Hard 2 (looking very very young). Colour me interested.

But what locked me down for the rest of the movie was the production design (and a Nazi musical number, but that’s neither here nor there) since most of the action unfolds in the interior of an airship, amid catwalks and ladders. The look of the sets is outstanding. (I’ve since learned that the film was directed by Robert Wise in 1975, so there’s early shades of Star Trek: The Motion Picture at play here.) There are also an unnecessary number of external shots of the air ship driving – no, plowing – through the sky like a monster on its way to devour a village. So we’re on a zeppelin. And we’ve got George C. Scott. And near as I can tell, he’s involved in some sort of international espionage, trying to trap a spy.

Spy movie. Air ship. Sweet.

As the saying goes, the plot thickens. Or perhaps, it was already quite thick. But for me, it was just starting to pulp up – a couple of FBI men show up at a house in the American suburbs. A housewife answers the door with “G-Men, lordy.” The woman has had a vision that this zeppelin is being driven straight into New York where it will be blown up over the city, killing thousands. Christ. Suddenly there’s a 9-11 angle, and this is clearly a WW2 movie from the 1970’s. I gotta see where this is going. And why haven’t I heard of this movie before?

The last piece of the puzzle? Turns out this little airship is called The Hindenburg.

For a movie (not unlike Titanic) where so much hangs on the catastrophe in the final reel, I’m not sure what to make of the ending. I don’t think it would be spoiling much of anything (unless you’re unfamiliar with history and Led Zeppelin album covers) to reveal that the ship makes a mighty mess of the landing pad. But what’s interesting, exciting and arguably cheesy about the conclusion is that when the zeppelin explodes, the film shifts to black and white and is (seemingly, I can’t verify this) cut together with the actual newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster. It’s all very stylish and yet impossibly dated. There are also an awful lot of people jumping and/or falling to their death a-la-Titanic, proving both that the trick is always effective and that it was not new to the screen in 1999. (Side note: if The Hindenburg is to be a model of 1930’s manners, it’s entirely chivalrous to throw your wife out the window to her death before succumbing to the fire within.)

Now here’s where I get back to the start. Coming late into a movie like this is a dream. Trying to pull the puzzle pieces together of who did what and who is who to whom and before the air ship explodes is a whole lot better than most things I can think to do on a Saturday morning. So imagine my surprise when I go digging for the title of this movie at http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:22480 and find this:

"The German Air Force is not at all what it used to be," says Anne Bancroft's Countess, about 16 minutes into The Hindenburg, pausing and then adding, "But then, nothing is these days." That seems to sum up the ponderous, irony-laden script and plot of Robert Wise's movie, which is posited — in true post-Watergate fashion — upon notions of conspiracy and cover-up behind the destruction of the German airship.

And then this:

Like its namesake, The Hindenburg is big and bloated. Unlike the famous zeppelin, this film never gets off the ground, let alone soars.

Granted this is only one movie web-site, but these opinions come from two separate (and let’s suppose independent) reviewers. Both cutting The Hindenburg to pieces for being tiresome and obvious. Is it a bad movie? Maybe, it is. But the experience of letting it unfold without context, back story or even complete integrity made it a good deal better than that. There’s something to be said about watching a crumby movie in this fashion. I can’t imagine I could ever have enjoyed it more.

But speaking of enjoying more, this movie, awash with character actors, disaster-movie plot twists and charming 70’s model effects, would make a splendid addition to any Fest.

Oh, the humanity.