In a radical but effective choice, Robert Wise cast the staunchly American George C. Scott as the high-ranking Luftwaffe Col. Franz Ritter investigating potential sabotage aboard doomed airship The Hindenburg. This tense speculative thriller and wild disaster film plays at first like a drawing room mystery in the self-contained zeppelin with powerful, mysterious émigrés, like Ursula von Reugen (Anne Bancroft), a widowed countess with a fortune to lose, and Edward Douglas (Gig Young) a German-American ad exec with conflicting loyalties. Will Col. Ritter be able to suss out the saboteur before it’s too late? Or will his ambivalence about the Nazi cause lead him into helping? You know how the story ends, but you’ve never seen it like this.
