THE HINDENBURG (1975) ** Disaster movies were huge in the seventies because they made Americans feel that Nixon wasn't quite so bad after all. I mean, really, being on a blimp on fire...which was more immediately worse? This is another film that's interesting mainly because of different things done by the same actors: George C. Scott is better than serviceable, several actors are visible who would shortly go on to more challenging material in the tv sitcom Bensen...William Atherton gears up for his big role as an EPA bureacrat in Ghostbusters in the similar manner of a Nazi Youth leader with a mania for explosive matter. To be sure he gives the role an authentic German sensibility by saving a dog with his last breath. And what would a seventies flick having anything to do with Zeppelin be without drugs? Anne Bancroft fills the void as an aging heiress using just about anything to light her opium pipe. Her island (Peenemunde) just got absconded with so that the Nazis could develop their missile program, which reminds me of a more interesting documentary that I saw on BBC. The closing slo mo and stop sequence, interspersing documentary footage with the effect of doubling real time is dramatic, but would have been stronger with haunting music and a different 100 minute prelude.