Some Hot Air on The Hindenburg

May 6, 1937 was the day of the Hindenburg disaster.

Your correspondent has always been a big fan of the stately majesty of airship travel. I not only love the beauty of it, I love the PACE of it. In my utopia there will no longer be any need for frantic speed, for instantaneousness. You’re already where you need to be, and where you are at any given time should be savored. While I appreciate the practical boon of highways and airplanes, I detest what they have done to the landscape. If I were Zeus, I’d wave my wand or whatever he does and put every road designed for automobiles in tunnels 12 feet under the ground, and all the airports on offshore platforms just over the horizon (it’s only seven miles). This is a fantasy, so please don’t be a literal-minded idiot and try to have an argument about it.

I know the risks of suspending humans on bags of inflammable gas. This is a post about the Hindenburg disaster, after all. My attitude about risk is, “You don’t like it? Go ahead and stay in your house. Things are presumably very safe there. But stay out of the bathtub — from what I understand, it’s a death trap.” Incredibly, the painting at the top of this post, Catastrophe, by Doris Lee, was completed a year before the Hindenburg disaster. (I saw this painting at the Metropolitan Museum last fall and it made me a fan, hence our earlier post about her Thanksgiving.) There’s a bit of science fiction and wishful thinking in Lee’s painting, i.e. the use of parachutes as “life vests”. But there’s truth, too. There had been many airship explosions prior to the Hindenburg just as there are accidents on planes, trains, and automobiles, and also boats, bicycles, and pogo sticks. If you think about it, why bother to come out of the womb at all?

Also, without airships, we would never have had a band called Led Zeppelin.

What’s always astounded me about the Hindenburg is that ANYONE survived. Those horrific images, those huge flames and the vessel still dozens of feet in the air when it happened. And yet, of the 97 people on board, 62 survived. No, I wouldn’t have liked to have been any of them, dead, injured or unscathed. I also don’t want birds to shit on my lawn chairs, but it happens every summer.

Incredibly, crew people outnumbered passengers on the Hindenburg by nearly 2 to 1. I can’t see how such a thing can be made cost effective (on top of the insurance bills!) but apparently it was. As it happens, one of the passengers was a vaudeville performer. I wrote about him just a month ago. But there’s also another show biz angle to the topic, and that’s where this gas bag is going now at its own doddering and leisurely pace.

Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg (1975) was one of the big movies of my youth, and for all its myriad problems I’ve always loved it, for the same reason I love all the disaster movies of that era. Those in the know will recognize that the format of this poster directly mimics that of The Poseidon Adventure (1972). The Graf Zeppelin take on the genre came directly on the heels of Earthquake (1974), Towering Inferno (1974) and Airport 1975, and was understood in that context at the time.

But there are other aspects to it as well. It’s something of a genre mash-up, actually. A conspiracy theory lays at the heart of the film’s plot. This was the era of Sunn Classic Pictures, and paperback bestsellers about Bigfoot, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, and the like. (I know it is STILL that era, but this is when it all began). The Hindenburg is based on one such book, by one Michael M. Mooney. It is based on the idea that some had (and still have) that the explosion was caused by sabotage. So it’s done as a kind of locked room mystery, with George C. Scott as the dashing, conscientious Nazi security officer tasked with trying to ferret out the saboteur before the bomb goes off.

Yes, you just read that last sentence. This movie thankfully does contain occasional reminders that Nazis are evil, but it also has an unfortunate tendency to fetichize Nazi aesthetics. Look at those Germanic typefaces on the poster! By now it’s a minor literary and cinematic subgenre: good cops who have the bad luck to live and work in totalitarian systems. This is an early example of this kind of thing. Scott wears the uniform but his heart doesn’t really belong to the Fuhrer. He is presumably still in his job because he is so good at it. Unfortunately, totalitarian systems don’t work that way. In real life, if you’re ideologically suspect under such a regime, invest your savings in a butter factory, because you’re toast. That’s why all such governments are incompetent and ultimately doomed. I don’t know why writers love to do this. It’s fresh in my mind because at present I’m watching the preposterous A Gentleman in Moscow. I find this kind of cotton candy warm and fuzzy kind of portrayal of life under totalitarianism dangerous in the extreme. Now, in particular. For the ship of state, too, is a vulnerable vessel.

Like any good disaster movie of its day, The Hindenburg features an all-star cast of characters. The plus-sized Charles Durning plays the Captain, spawning many dirigible jokes at his expense at the time. In a bit of stunt casting, Robert Clary of Hogan’s Heroes plays that vaudeville clown I wrote about. Anne Bancroft plays a decadent Countess. There’s the ubiquitous William Atherton (who starred in The Day of the Locust that same year). And also Gig Young, Burgess Meredith, Rene Auberjonois, Alan Oppenheimer, a pre-Soap Katherine Helmond, Jean Rasey, Roy Thinnes, et al. Richard Dysart has a good role (interestingly, he had a track with several other cast members: he’d been in Petulia and The Hospital with Scott, and on Broadway he had been in The Little Foxes with Bancroft and That Championship Season with Durning). Greg Mullavey of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman plays the real life radio announcer Herbert “Oh the Humanity! Morrison.

The Hindenburg was a moderate hit when it came out, and was shown on TV periodically thereafter, which was how I came to watch it about a half dozen times. Like any Robert Wise picture, it is very well made. The Hindenburg is definitely the film where Wise first mastered endless shots of a slow-moving behemoth of a vehicle filling the frame, which later characterized (or bogged down, depending on your POV) Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). But the acting is great, sets are great, effects are great, editing is great. Yet critics were justifiably hard on it. For at its heart, the premise is cockamamie. The flaw is pretty obvious. As we’ve established, you don’t need a BOMB to make a hydrogen filled balloon blow up. A stray spark will do the trick. And above all, the film puts us in a very strange position. Isn’t a saboteur whose mission is to destroy the ultimate symbol of Nazi aeronautics prowess kind of the hero of the movie, collateral damage notwithstanding? In this film, the hero is a guy who wears swastika armbands. Forgive my German, but that shit’s fucked up! And we also know the outcome of the story, so the plot of the thing is a sort of charade really. We’re just on board for the unsavory, ghoulish climax. Will LeBeau from Hogan’s Heroes make it out alive?

I caught the two-part German TV mini-series The Hindenburg: The Last Flight (2013) on some streaming platform a few weeks ago and that’s what precipitates this post. I thought, “Surely a German take on this story will be interesting. I loved the recent remake of All Quiet on the Western Front.” Haha, but no, no. Can you imagine? This movie uses the same cockamamie plot premise about sabotage. To be fair to the film, it’s not unique. There are tons of cheesy “documentaries” perpetuating this theory. But one would think a new angle would be not just welcome but mandatory here. The main virtue of this show is the visual aspect, the sets, and the CGI-assisted effects. There are some really nice shots in it. But the story is a complete hash: confusing, boring, meandering, sprawling. And the story actually OUTDOES the 1975 in being implausible. Stacey Keach and Greta Scaachi play an evil capitalist AMERICAN couple who destroy the Hindenburg for business reasons! I didn’t take particular note of what those reasons were because why would I? but I think it was that they owned stock in helium, so they wanted to frighten everyone about the dangers of hydrogen. For real! (Or…unreal).

I’ve just learned of the existence of a zany-looking travesty of the Hindenburg disaster sub-genre called The Hindenburg Explodes (2016) with Leslie Bibb and Robb Cordry. Which makes me say “Damn!”, because I wrote just such a parody when I was in high school and have always had at the back of my head to do something more with it. But there’s always the possibility that the movie is terrible. And since I never heard of it before today, I reckon there’s a pretty good chance that it is. I’ll let you know!

But for now, on this special day of days, I wish you and yours a safe and Happy Hindenburg.

For my take on all the Titanic movies go here. And for more disaster movies go here.