THE SCREEN
Westerback, Colin L. Jr.
THE OCCIDENT EXPRESS THE SCREEN One can only dimly guess how Robert Wise's new film, The Hindenburg, might have been inspired, but one imagines, looking at the result, that the muse Clio was...
...Perhaps this explains why the characters in this film have such rubbery relationships with each other...
...dramatic pause] "Vait a minute here...
...The real confusion comes When Ritter's nemesis, Boerth (William Atherton), an anti-Nazi member of the Hindenburg's crew bent on sabotage, is just as wishy-washy as Ritter...
...Nine stories, dat ting, and vut a bagel it cost us to build...
...They are Ritter's world and Boerth's, and the O-O tie in which their conflict ends is supposed to be a sign to us...
...Interspersed with the human drama aboard the zeppelin in Wise's film, there are many shots of the Hindenburg gliding on through space, lumbering soundlessly by like a tree falling in Bishop Berkeley's forest when there's no one there to hear it...
...Vat iss I'm saying...
...A zeppelin is something enormous, yet tenuous...
...Vass gonna be a big grocer, dat film...
...The more enormous it is, in fact, the more tenuous it becomes...
...It is the lever that could lift the world operated from the short side of its fulcrum...
...Why, the Hindenburg is a flying dinosaur," objects Col...
...Well, one might expect the fur to fly between a stiffnecked Prussian militarist and a decadent aristocrat...
...Vill just put an couple of cleaner's bags on her outside, and will paint 'er silver, and will hire back dat Rupert Veiss fellah, and will call der film . . . lemme zee, lemme zee . . . YEAH...
...A zeppelin is a Juggernaught...
...The only trouble with this quick piece of historical strip mining is that it leaves Wise and his three scriptwriters a bit uncertain how to deal with their characters...
...In the end Ritter and Boerth neatly erase each other from history...
...Presumably we are to pick up this sense of things just by rubbing up against the film's stars and special effects the way the Hindenburg'rubs up against a cloud and picks up St...
...For what is a zeppelin, after all...
...Yeah, dat vass der one where vee hat to hab diss vershtumpenuh tower dat vass gonna be der whole 'Proyect Vildfire,' der whole plotz vhere der Zionists bring her bad bacterias and bugs and tings to have a look-see at 'em...
...Of course, it's not unusual in Hollywood for some million-dollar thing of the future to fall over on a deserted back lot and instantaneously become a thing of the past...
...Ugh, there seems to be two sets of bad guys here and no good guys-not very shmart planning, fellahs...
...It is tons of steel superstructure holding up the lightest, sheerest skin imaginable--a skin which itself holds in a gas that's even lighter still, a gas lighter than air...
...It is something that's massively evanescent...
...It is a child's balloon blown up all out of proportion...
...It is what a whole staff of engineers would do if commissioned to design a child's balloon...
...Ritter (George C. Scott) when he's made the great zeppelin's security officer...
...Ohm yeah, now I'm remem-buh...
...For example, when the Countess (Anne Bancroft) has trouble in customs and asks Col...
...It is minimal grace achieved with maximum clumsiness, a habitation where, if this film is authentic, anyway, men climb up metal staircases to live in canvas rooms...
...Thus Ritter, who has by his own account recently returned from bombing Guernica, turns out to be a pretty good chap...
...ZATS IT: Zeppelin of Fools...
...Scene: Dawn, the back lot at Universal City...
...A zeppelin is the restrictively simple made ludicrously complex-a labyrinth of girders built to imprison a puff of hot air...
...It's only unusual for the thing it becomes to be anything as specific as the Hinderburg...
...Beneath that Iron Cross he's been awarded in the first scene there beats a heart of gold...
...From these exterior shots Wise seems to hope we'll get a feeling that what's going on inside the Hindenburg is something suspended in time, a drama clinging to an explosive, transitory moment in history the way the passengers' compartment clings to the soft underbelly of the Hindenburg itself...
...Lemme zee, vass dat der picture...
...Vass a nuttin': vass shtrictly secon' runt...
...On the one hand, the historical issue is clear: the Hindenburg was the property and propaganda of the Nazis, who are history's villains...
...It's as if Wise has resurrected his set for Andromeda Strain and made it ascend into the heavens like a dirigible Christ risen from the dead...
...Vee got der whole zett lyin' right here in der backyard...
...Diss vass from dat zions-fiction picture-vut d'you call-Per Androgynous Shtrain...
...Diss vass der one vass made dere a few years 'go by dat Rupert Veiss fellah...
...Vill make an film about der Hintenbuog...
...Whether this is so or not, however, Wise has certainly found in a zeppelin the perfect vehicle for his kind of filmmaking...
...But in their next scene together, inexplicably, they appear to be old friends dripping nostalgia for the Germany that will never be again...
...It is a vessel built by diminishment rather than development, built to contain more of less...
...The piffle of plot that Wise has tried to envelop in the Hindenburg's story is supposed to be an explanation for why the great zeppelin exploded and burned...
...Zat's it, ZAT'S IT...
...They cancel each other out when the Hindenburg does indeed blow up, but does so in such a way that the whole world thinks it was an accident I suppose that what Wise is trying to pull off is obvious enough...
...On the other hand, though, the present-day issue is equally clear: political terrorists who blow up airplanes and kill innocent people are villains too...
...Now look at it Vut a mess...
...But unfortunately Wise's directing doesn't have the electricity in it to give us the charge he wants...
...A studio executive who has been up all night whacking his brain for ways to save the industry stumbles out of the mist trailing clouds of glory...
...How terribly au courant...
...he says, surveying a great steel tower that has fallen on its side...
...It's a big bag of noxious wind, which brings us back to the subject of Robert Wise again...
...Vass all s'posed to stimulate like it vass untergrount...
...As the zeppelin hangs in air half way between two continents, we are intended to get the sense of people torn between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born...
...Emerging from the gloom he strikes us as a subtle yet peculiarly powerful combination of Mel Brooks and Mickey Rooney, a 2000-year old Andy Hardy...
...The answer, framed with an eye on the present-day audience rather than the historical question, is political terrorism...
...Vass diss...
...Ritter's assistance, he instead treats her with the utmost suspicion and has her luggage double checked...
...Elmo's fire in its lightning rods...
...His characters and plot are mere wisps trapped inside the Hindenburg's vacuous interior, fly specks on the vast, blank blimp of history...
...I couldn't have put the matter more succinctly myself...
...As The Sound of Music shows, Wise always has had mixed feelings about Nazis...
...It is an experiment proving beyond all doubt that a molehill can be made into a mountain...
...Ohm boy...
...VATT a minute...
...He deals with the historical circumstances and moral characters of these people in his films the same way a zeppelin deals with the laws of physics: by ignoring them...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Essentially Wise has tried to solve the problem of having all villains and no heroes by just pretending half the time that he's got all heroes and no villains...
...Looks like some wreck of her Hintenbuog or sumptin' lyin' dere...
...THE OCCIDENT EXPRESS THE SCREEN One can only dimly guess how Robert Wise's new film, The Hindenburg, might have been inspired, but one imagines, looking at the result, that the muse Clio was working overtime...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 1
