Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

moonspinner55 Fictionalized account of the lives that were lost and those who survived after the German airship Hindenburg crashed in flames just prior to landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey on May 6, 1937, having just completed its first round trip between Europe and North America. Director Robert Wise delivers a handsome film here, yet humorless, methodical Wise was probably the wrong filmmaker to take on this melodrama. Despite his effective usage of actual newsreel footage that gives the picture its third-act punch, "The Hindenburg" is basically a disaster movie in the sky, recognized on its release as part of the disaster movie cycle popular in the 1970s. But these movies were popular because they were trashy, popcorn entertainments. Wise doesn't stoop to such vulgar lows; he wants his film to be prestigious, a masterpiece, but after spending two arduous hours with the various 'colorful' characters on the guest list, one isn't inclined to be emotionally involved in the who-lived-and-who-died wrap-up. Most of the actors are miscast, anyway, particularly Anne Bancroft as a German Countess (by way of the Bronx) and Joanna Moore as a pregnant Broadway show-person with a Dalmatian (the Hindenburg did have two dogs aboard, but their fates differ from the happy ending given this screen pooch). Charles Durning has a thankless role as the ship's captain, barking commands until the disaster arrives, when he suddenly becomes human and shouts "No!" George C. Scott is effective as a colonel assigned to board the airship as a security officer in response to a bomb threat and Roy Thinnes does a good job as the ship's photographer who may not be what he seems. The cinematography by Robert Surtees is indeed marvelous, but the picture just doesn't deliver the genre thrills or suspense you may be hoping for. Wise mounts the proceedings carefully but without any flair. The idle chit-chat up in the air seems monotonous and pointless, and the only thing to look forward to is the finale, a long time in coming. ** from ****

sddavis63 Everyone's familiar with the Hindenburg disaster. "Oh the humanity" (cried out by radio reporter Herbert Morrison as he reported on the crash live) has entered our vocabulary when horrible things happen (or when flightless turkeys are dropped from a helicopter, as in WKRP in Cincinnati.) In any event, no one really knows why the Hindenburg crashed. The most widely accepted hypothesis is an electrical spark caused by a buildup of static electricity. This movie goes in a different direction. It emphasizes the sabotage theory - a theory rejected by both German and American investigators, but nevertheless tailor made for conspiracy enthusiasts and movie making.The movie's pretty well done. It has a feel of authenticity to it. I know about the Hindenburg disaster, but I never really had a sense of what the Hindenburg was like for its passengers. The movie gives us a pretty good sense of what it would be like to be a passenger on such an airship. It's not as luxurious as an ocean liner, apparently, but it would have been a pretty exciting voyage. I liked the sets, and the bit of a picture we get of how the airship flew. That was all well done.There's a large cast of characters in this, headed by George C. Scott playing Col. Ritter, a Luftwaffe intelligence officer who's assigned as head of security for the ship. The sabotage angle is played up with that character, plus a Gestapo agent who's both helping him and watching him, in that delightful fashion Nazi Germany had. Both suspect sabotage; both are looking. As is normal with this kind of movie, there are all sorts of possible suspects on board the ship, and no particular reason to suspect one above any other. In that sense, the movie lost a bit of an opportunity to create more suspense by giving away the identity of the saboteur maybe half way through. Ritter turned out to be anti-Nazi enough to be willing to let the sabotage happen, as long as it didn't endanger the passengers. In the end, the real tension comes from the fact that the Hindenburg's landing at a Naval Air Station in New Jersey was delayed, meaning that the bomb would go off before the passengers disembarked, unless Ritter could stop it - which, of course, he couldn't.The movie has a good cast. Aside from Scott, there's Ann Bancroft and Burgess Meredith and Charles Durning among others. There's even a bit of humour thrown in as a pianist and acrobat on board put on a show for the passengers and crew that turns out to be a shot at the Nazis, poking fun at Hitler and the party with a song called "There's A Lot To Be Said For The Fuhrer." In the end, the portrayal of the fire and crash of the airship is extremely dramatic and well done."The Hindenburg" is an interesting movie. It's highly speculative, but if you're interested in the sabotage theory, this presents at least one plausible sabotage scenario to consider. (6/10)

vincentlynch-moonoi I'll go against the consensus and say that I think this is a pretty decent film.I think it suffers from being called a disaster flick. There's a big difference. Most all the disaster flicks were fictional stories. There's some pretty good history here, although admittedly Hollywood has fictionalized it somewhat...but after all, it's not a documentary.So if it's not a disaster flick, what is it? Historical fiction. A very different genre with very different expectations.The special effects and sets here are awfully good for 1975. I give it very high marks in that category.In terms of the story, it's one version of what happened to cause the disaster. Is it the correct story? Who knows? And since it's not a documentary it has no responsibility to present alternate hypotheses.The cast is rather impressive. George C. Scott is good in a somewhat subdued performance as a Luftwaffe Colonel assigned as special security for the Hindenburg. I'm not much of a fan of Anne Bancroft...and after this film I'm still not a fan...but she does her job. I was glad to see Burgess Meredith, Richard Dysart, Robert Clary, and Charles Durning in the supporting cast.I do have two big criticisms of this film. The first has been mentioned by a couple of other reviewers. I wish the German characters had an accent so we could tell more about each character's nationality without having to work at making conclusions. They all sounded too American. Secondly, I don't think going to black and white for the conclusion was effective at all, although I imagine it saved them lots of money rather than trying to recreate the crash/explosion in color. Too bad colorization of newsreel film couldn't be done effectively in 1975.Nevertheless, I say give this movie a shot. I think you'll like it. It was a money-maker when it came out, so lots of people did like it back then. Perhaps its too historical to be exciting enough for some light weight audiences.

James Hitchcock Apart from the sinking of the "Titanic", the loss of the German airship "Hindenburg" at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 was perhaps the most famous disaster of the twentieth century, so it is perhaps unsurprising that this film should have been made during the 1970s, the Golden Age of the disaster movie. There is, however, a difference between "The Hindenburg" and the standard seventies disaster flick in that it is a period piece based on a real-life disaster; most such films were set in the present day and told fictional stories.There is another difference between this film and films like "The Towering Inferno", "The Poseidon Adventure" or the various versions of the "Titanic" story. In those films the disaster happened over a longer period of time; the "Titanic", for example, took over two hours to sink after hitting the iceberg, so when James Cameron filmed the story he was able to use the second half of the movie to show the disaster as it happened, in virtually real time. The fire which destroyed the "Hindenburg", by contrast, took only a few minutes to consume the airship, and only takes up a small part of the film's running time. The film-makers, therefore, needed to come up with something else to make a full-length feature film out of the disaster.The true cause of the "Hindenburg" disaster remains unknown to this day, but the film explores the theory that the airship was destroyed as a deliberate act of sabotage by forces opposed to the Nazi regime. The main character is Franz Ritter, a Colonel in the Luftwaffe and the "Hindenburg's" security officer. Ritter discovers that there is a plot to destroy the airship and works desperately to thwart it. He himself, however, is becoming disillusioned with the Nazis (whom he originally supported) so has some sympathy with the anti-Nazi opposition. In reality no firm evidence for sabotage has ever been found, but there is also no firm evidence which would definitely rule it out, so this aspect of the film is not so much a distortion of history as an exploration of a possible, if unproven, theory. In some respects, however, the film-makers do alter the facts to suit the story. For example, in the film the airship's captain Max Pruss delays his landing because of adverse weather conditions (a key plot point), whereas in fact no such delay took place.The film's main drawback is that it just does not work as a thriller. We all know that the "Hindenburg" was indeed destroyed and we therefore realise that Ritter's efforts to prevent its destruction will prove vain. It therefore generates very little tension. Films about the "Titanic" disaster suffer from the same drawback, but both Cameron and the makers of the earlier 1953 film about the sinking are able to overcome this problem by creating characters we can care about. The important question therefore becomes, not "will the ship sink?" (we know it will), but rather "can Jack and Rose, or the Sturges family, survive the sinking?" "The Hindenburg" does not give us any characters we can identify with in this way. Most of them, including the saboteur, are fairly sketchily drawn. The only one to be fully developed is George C. Scott's Ritter, and even he is not particularly sympathetic. A man who has taken four years to realise that Hitler might not actually be the great saviour of the nation he was hoping for makes an unlikely hero for a Hollywood blockbuster. The other major star in this production is Anne Bancroft as Countess Ursula von Reugen, an old friend of Ritter, but she does not have a lot to do. (Although both Scott and Bancroft were big stars in their day, and had leading roles in many films, both today are largely remembered for one single role, General Patton in his case and Mrs Robinson from "The Graduate" in hers).On the plus side, the final scenes of the disaster are reasonably convincing, as is the period reconstruction of the 1930s, and there is a witty comic song called "There's a Lot to Be Said for the Fuehrer", actually an ironic piece of anti-Nazi propaganda, which sounds like something . Overall, however, this is one of the weaker disaster movies of the seventies, better than "The Cassandra Crossing"- it would be difficult to be worse- but not as good as, say, "Jaws", "Earthquake" or "The Towering Inferno". There's not a lot to be said for "The Hindenburg". 5/10 A goof. One of the German characters has the surname "Boerth". In German this would be pronounced (approximately) like the name "Bert", but throughout the film it is mispronounced to rhyme with "fourth".