Showing posts with label George C.Scott. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George C.Scott. Show all posts

Thursday, February 23, 2023

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975 "The Hindenburg"

 

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 


The Hindenburg




This was another of the few 1975 films I am covering on this year long project, that I missed in theaters when it opened in December. As a freshman  debater at USC, we were expected to participate in and help out in the major National Debate Competition held on our campus"The Alan Nichols Invitational". So I was preoccupied at the holidays and never got a chance to catch up. Also in December we had "Lucky Lady","The Killer Elite", "The Black Bird", "Hustle", "The Man Who Would be King", "Barry Lyndon", and  "Sherlock Holmes Smatter Brother". Many of these were released the same day as "The Hindenburg". The reviews on the film were not promising at all. Many reviewers called it a "disaster" of a disaster movie. Some said it was the worst film of the year, and called the acting and dialogue laughable. So it was no wonder that it slipped passed me at the time. 

Many years later I caught up with the movie on a subscription service and my opinion was not nearly as negative. I remember thinking it was a little dull but I did not hate myself for having watched it. Today, I am going to stick to that opinion, the film is serviceable, not great, but certainly not the dregs that were suggested by Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby. The movie was made by Robert Wise, no slouch as a director,and meticulously integrates the real world events in with the fictional story that structures the movie. Several of the characters and the manner in which they escaped from the flaming crash of the Zeppelin, are accurate if dramatic re-creations of those events. I can't say that the acting was excellent but I can say that the cast was. George C. Scott was one of my favorites in the decade of the 1970s. He is trying to play a sympathetic German Colonel who is resistant to Nazi control of the military. He obviously needs the part to be written that way because we would be unlikely to root for a Nazi as our hero.  Anne Bancroft is a passenger on the trip, given a plot line just to justify having the female lead of the film portrayed by a star. William Atherton, who will become the default prick of so many 1980s films, is playing against type here as a crewman with a somewhat heroic but dangerous agenda. 

The rest of the cast was filled with familiar faces:Roy Thinnes, Gig Young, Burgess Meredith, Charles Durning, Richard A. Dysart, Robert Clary, and René Auberjonois. Young had been fired from "Blazing Saddles" a year before  because he was incapable of performing while withdrawing from alcohol. He was typecast as a boozer for very good reasons, and his ultimate tragedy is something you might wan to read about if you are in the mood to be depressed. Meredith and Durning both had two Academy Award Nominations in their careers, Meredith in fact was nominated this year for his performance in another 1975 film, "Day of the Locust" (which also featured Atherton and Dysart). While performances from this film were not honored, the special effects were, two wins for Special Achievement in sound effects editing and visual effects, and three nominations for art direction, cinematography, and sound. 

The best things about the film are in fact it's handsome production. The elaborate reconstruction of the interior of the Hindenburg is impressive. The metal frames and catwalks are intricate and provide lots of opportunities for the actors to run through, climb on, and ultimately fall off of them. The dining hall and lounge areas might make you wish that travel by airship still existed. The luxury of a cruise ship, combined with a view of the Earth from several hundred feet above the surface, is very appealing. The cabins look a little small but they could work if you spent most of your time looking out the observation ports. The manner of loadings, docking, and operating the ship seems to be pretty accurate, and if the plot does not suck you in, at least you can enjoy the details that are provided from the era.  

Basically, we know from the get go, that the Zeppelin explodes at the end of the movie. The story speculates on political intrigue because the Nazis used the Hindenburg as a propaganda tool, and it is still a mystery as to what really caused the explosion. This story postulates that there was a conspiracy to sabotage the airship as a way of indicating that there was a resistance effort at work in the Third Reich. The technical effectiveness of the film is tied up in how the actual film footage of the real disaster is integrated into the filmed sequences depicting what happens to the characters we see in the story. Except for some mild variations in the film stock and lighting, the results are very solid. Anyone who has watched the newsreel footage from 1937 will be amazed to learn that two thirds of the passengers and crew survived the conflagration.




The characters in the film represent a passenger list of 36 and a crew of 61. There is a fun sequence where the Broadway impresario plays a satiric tune on the piano as a vaudeville clown acts out the concepts. The mocking of the Führer was funny but unlikely to get as far as it did with the audience on board.  The movie is filled with red herrings about the plot. There is a clairvoyant, diamond smuggling, drafting sketches, and coded messages which are there to create intrigue but really have nothing to do with the threat to the vessel. Scott is a special security expert, brought on board to respond to a rumored threat, and Thinnes is the Gestapo counterpart who has methods that Scott's Luftwaffe Colonel objects to. 

I did find the film a little dull because of the pacing, but the whole point of a film like this is to build up to the conclusion. I did not find it objectionable but I would suggest that if you decide to watch this, you make sure you are fully caffeinated. I saw the Laser Disc version of this film many times but never pulled the trigger on that so I watched this on a bare bones Blu Ray release. There was literally no menu options except for subtitles. There were no extras, chapters, or other languages available on the media I had. I will say however, the picture looks fantastic and the images of the ship in the air combine the model effects with matte paintings very convincingly and in a beautiful composition. 




Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Islands in the Stream

I'm starting a new series that I hope to come back to on a regular basis. When I have a few of these entries I will put up a page with links to each one so they will be easy to catalog. There are several blog sites that do a very similar theme, forgotten films. I have participated on a few podcasts with one of my on-line friends talking about movies that fall into this category, and perhaps inspired by that, or simply my love for seventies nostalgia, I thought I would start off with this movie.

Islands in the Stream




This has nothing to do with the Kenny Rogers/Dolly Parton hit written by the Bee Gees, although some of the romantic themes in the song could apply to the events in the story if you look hard enough. It is based on a posthumously published work by Ernest Hemingway and features a character clearly based on Hemingway himself. Supposedly it was turned down by Steve McQueen but I can't imagine a more perfect choice for the part than George C. Scott.

The film is set in the Bahamas at the start of WWII. Most of the Caribbean Islands were still British possessions and as such were targets of German U-boat harassment. For the most part, the was is a distant irritation, on the Island here, the main war is an emotional one being fought by an iconoclastic artist and the various people in his life.  Thomas Hudson is a renown artist who has given up painting for industrial sculpture. He has retreated from the social scene he occupied at one point to live and work in relative isolation.

Scott as Hudson appears to be something of a misanthrope, in fact as he awaits the arrival of his sons for a summer visit, he actually won't even go to the plane to fetch them, even though it has been four years since he has seen them. The oldest boy is named after him, Tommy and he is played by future Die Hard White Night Hart Bochner.

Tommy and the youngest boy, Andrew are happy to see their father although they remember him as a stern and cranky man. The middle boy David is the one who has reservations and antagonism toward his father. He and Andrew are the children of Hudson's second wife, the best friend of his first wife that he still carries a torch for. David begins his visit with his father in a surly mood and at one point flails out during what was initially a fraternal pillow fight but turns into a moment of physical catharsis.  Instead of the stern patriarch, Hudson appears to be a patient man who recognizes that his own failings as a father are haunting his middle boy.

Reconciliation occurs through a test of physical stamina and mental will when  David hooks a large game fish on one of their boating expeditions. In what seems like a very macho Hemingway moment, the fish and the boy tussle for the father's respect. Scott conveys real emotional sympathy for the boy but understands his need to prove himself. The surprising resolution to the moment is the emotional heart of the movie.

There is an earlier scene where the chaos of the wold intrudes on the idyllic summer of the family. A British freighter is sunk off the shores of the island and debris as well as one human victim wash ashore on the beach near the artist's house. Hudson manages to keep the boys back away from the dead man but there is some powerful foreshadowing taking place here as he contemplates the fate of his children in a world at war. 

There are some locals that make up the crew that surrounds Thomas Hudson in his self imposed exile. David Hemmings plays Eddy, Tom's close friend and rum soaked partner in the fishing boat charter they apparently own. Eddy becomes a friend to the boys and the voice of gin stoked wisdom at times. His performance is a standout in the film as he conveys a pathetic but confoundingly tragic figure at the same time. Also on hand is Julius Harris as Joseph the Captain of the boat. Harris was an actor I discussed recently on a James Bond Podcast I hosted. His familiar face was a welcome addition and he plays a friendly supporting part rather than the bad guy in this one. 

After the interlude with the boys, there is a third act in the film featuring a reunification, at least briefly of Hudson with his first wife. This sets up the final segment where Hudson makes a commitment that he might have resisted before the summer with the kids and the moments with his true love. This is where the adventure element of the movie kicks in. The film does feel like a series of chapters in a book and it is organized that way for us as well. This may explain the reason that the film feels so satisfying to me, because like a lot of seventies movies, it is a thing unto itself. If you read the copy on the poster at the start of this post, you may laugh at the blatant attempt to market the film as something special. It feels old fashioned, even in 1977 when the film was released. However, it worked on me. This slow film about a man coping with a world he made and one that he has avoided, hooked me with it's cinematography, sentimentality and a score by Jerry Goldsmith that is absolutely beautiful.