Cheap The Hindenburg (DVD) (George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft) (Robert Wise) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Hindenburg

Sad to say, the movie is even worse than I remembered. I'm a big fan of director Robert Wise, special effects guru Albert Whitlock, actor George C. Scott and many of the other people who worked on the picture, but this is a cookbook recipe of How Not To Make A Movie. The tone is far too serious and portentious. Typical of '70s soap opera-y disaster flicks, there are too many characters with too many problems that really aren't problems at all (or at least, not interesting ones). There are many red herrings, and after a while, like with the boy who cried wolf, we stop paying attention. Hacking away a few of these "subplots" would have made the film leaner and more interesting. (You could leave all of Burgess Meredith and Rene Auberjonois' scenes in the cutting room.) In films like these, the supporting actors tend to be either up-and-coming or fading fast, and most of those here are the latter. Anne Bancroft is underused as the Countess--they can't seem to decide whether to give Ritter a love interest or not. Roy Thinnes is as plausible as a Gestapo agent as Brad Pitt is as a friend of the Dali Lama. And it seems to me they tried to give William Atherton a "devilish" quality that falls flat, probably because Atherton, for all his good looks, has all the charisma of buttered bread. The American officials at Lakehurst and Washington are straight from Central Casting--gruff-but-lovable lugs who just want to see the "flying gas kettle" land safely. (Did the film have to mention one more time that the ship was filled with deadly and explosive hydrogen? Did anyone going into the theater *not* already know that?) About the only mildly interesting supporting cast members are the German captains--Richard Dysart as Earnst Lehman and Charles Durning as Max Pruss have a few mildly memorable moments. Also slightly amusing is Robert Clary as a flaky German acrobat, in part because there was indeed such a character on board the real ship, who was initially the prime suspect in the disaster. (He was quickly cleared.)

Which brings us to George Patton--err, I mean George C. Scott. He seems to be thinking about his golf game most of the time--his performance is phoned in, as were many of his performances after Patton. But what bothers me more is the real spine of the story really doesn't emerge till the move is about 75 percent over. I think the film would have been better if they'd junked most of the silly passenger subplots and concentrated on Ritter being torn between service to and love for his country and the fact that the Nazis are becoming big-time pains in the shorts. As it is, we've long figured out what's going to happen by the time Ritter does, if we're still awake. And by then, it seems neither he nor we care. Oh, and did I mention they make waaaay too much of the Kathie Rauch letter?

As for the visuals, they are very good for 1975 (The takeoff is particularly effective), though in retrospect one can see obvious mattework and multiple exposures. Notice how whenever there's a process shot at Lakehurst or Frankfurt, we see moving figures in the lower part of the screen and the matte paintings in the upper half, but the two sections never cross--the screen is literally cut in two. Today people and vehicles would freely mingle with objects that aren't really there, such as airships, but that was a lot harder back then. As for those who complain that they chickened out by switching to real footage of the crash in the last moments, recreating something that complex would have been impossible in 1975 (they briefly considered it) as well as incredibly costly and dangerous, and I'm not convinced it could even be done today.

Some other positives are David Shire's score--beautiful and faintly nostalgic in the airship sections, a bit heavy-handed in the "Nazi" sections. Costumes and sets are very impressive and as far as I can tell accurate down to the last detail. The landing sequence is interesting just to watch how a crew really landed an 800-foot Zep. (If you've been to Friedrichshafen recently and taken a ride on board the new Zeppelin NTs, you'll know how differently these craft handle today.)

If the visuals are well-done, the presentation is not. This has to be the worst transfer to DVD I've ever seen--was this the best copy Universal had in their vaults, or did they just not look very hard? The picture is scratched and grainy; contrasts are bad, and colors are faded--everyone is a little green in the gills. (Or do the actors just look vaguely ill from being trapped in this turkey?) But there's more. The sound is poorly mixed--the voices are too low, the airship roar too loud. Then at the end the volume of everything suddenly gets very very loud. And despite this being presented in widescreen, and despite my having a widescreen TV, the edges of the credits are slightly cropped.

There are virtually no extras, not even a trailer. Just a few slates that you can click through containing background info on the production. Given the technical award the film justly won, you'd think they'd include a gallery of production stills at the very least. But it would seem Universal is not too proud or fond of this movie. And it's hard to blame them. Much like the event it portrayed, the picture was a disaster that helped bring about the end of an era--in this case, the era of big-budget, glossy disaster epics. So at least the destruction of the Hindenburg served some good!

Excational use of Matte Paintings.
Most of the special effects in this movie were models and matte paintings done by Albert Witlock, who was an oscar winning artists of paintings and whose work appears (sometimes uncredited) in various movies. Hindenburg was I think his best work. Before CGI, there were matte paintings, and many of them were very good, just like this picture was..

Poor DVD quality, dull film with occasional moments
First things first: The picture quality on this DVD is horrendous. Although presented in widescreen, the film print is swimming in scratches and dust. The image is often grainy and ugly, with poor contrast, especially during scenes taking place at night. I really expected better from a major DVD releaser like Universal. Anyone who remembers seeing this in a theater back in 1975 will feel very disappointed with this disc.

As for the film itself, it is another entry in the mid-70s disaster film sweepstakes, although it tries to present itself as more a "whodunit" or espionage mystery; imagine "Murder on the Orient Express" if the trail derailed massively at the finale. George C. Scott, gruff as usual, plays the German Colonel working to determine who onboard the legendary Zeppelin crossing the Atlantic might have a reason for sabotaging the ship. There are plenty of suspects, most of them famous or semi-famous actors (Anne Bancroft, Burgess Meredith, Rene Aberjonois, Charles Durning, William Atherton). Who has the best reason for wanting the Hindenburg to go boom?

This is a fanciful version of the events leading up to the disaster -- the actual reasons for the event have never been determined -- and I have to credit director Robert Wise for maintaining reasonable suspense in a story whose ending is well-known (the DVD cover itself shows you what happens). But, sadly, "The Hindenburg" is mostly hot air: dull, artificial, and a lot of talk going nowhere, and too typical of the formerly great director Wise ("The Day the Earth Stood Still," "The Haunting," "The Sound of Music") in the later phase of his career. Many great characters actors onboard get nothing to do. Burgess Meredith is especially criminally underused. Scott and Bancroft have very little chemistry in their vague relationship, and TV actor Roy Thinnes as the Gestapo agent is laughably bad. The only interesting scene before the big finale is an exciting sequence involving the repair of a damaged fin. David Shire's excellent score really excels here. But otherwise the film is just killing time until the long-anticipated climax.

And the climax is an incredible let-down, using a special effects cheat that will infuriate a lot of viewers. The effects in the film are excellent up to this point (marred, unfortunately, by the rotten DVD quality), but for the main event, the film cops out on us in a big way, relying on archival footage instead of new effects. A few of the character stories are never wrapped up either, leaving the viewer with an enormously unsatisfied feeling.

"The Hindenburg" really should only be seen by history nuts and disaster film completists, and they'll be unhappy with poor DVD quality. The casual viewer will be better off with "The Towering Inferno" or "The Poseidon Adventure." (Geez, I just recommended an Irwin Allen film over a Robert Wise film!)