Gasbag

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE HINDENBURG

Directed by ROBERT WISE Screenplay by NELSON GIDDING

The Hindenburg contains many beautiful, technically ingenious shots showing a model of the great airship sailing majestically through all sorts of weather and cloud conditions. It also contains many lovingly detailed re-creations of the craft's interior--the elegantly appointed public rooms, the bridge, the 804-ft.-long canvas hull where the volatile hydrogen that kept the thing afloat was stored.

This quasi-documentary material keeps the movie afloat because there is something undeniably romantic about dirigibles. A glimpse of the last and greatest of them on its final voyage, which ended with the famous explosion at Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937, is strangely affecting.

The cause of the catastrophe has never been established, but a few years ago a writer named Michael M. Moonew popularized a theory that the ship was sabotaged by a crew member acting for the anti-Nazi underground in Germany. The film tries to dramatize this thesis, but the effort is unsuccessful.

Alerted to the possibility of sabotage, the Nazis place a Luftwaffe colonel (George C. Scott) aboard as a security man. Being a reasonably alert fellow, he cannot fail to observe that there is a feverish, guilty quality about a rigger named Boerth (William Atherton). The screenplay's attempts to generate a little mystery by introducing red herrings from the passenger manifest are laughable, since such worthies as Anne Bancroft, Gig Young and Burgess Meredith constitute nothing more than the customary ship of fools. It is hard to understand why Scott wastes time on them. As the only good guy the movie's got Scott must be portrayed as an anti-Nazi sympathetic to the point of finally becoming virtually a co-conspirator with Atherton--thus blunting the drama of their confrontations.

The film ends, of course, with the

Hindenburg's destruction. This is rather artfully managed through a blending of newsreel footage and well-matched black-and-white fictional material showing what happened to the movie's characters during the holocaust. Again, however, technique not drama holds us.

The effects may be worth the price of ad mission, but the movie remains an adroit memorial to a technological curiosity, cold and incapable of touching us emotionally.

Richard Schickel

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