The Hindenburg

The Hindenburg (1975) is a historical disaster thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Robert Wise, the man behind West Side Story, directs George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft aboard the most famous airship that ever flew.

The film hangs on something that actually happened one evening in 1937 above a New Jersey airfield: the pride of Nazi Germany, a vast passenger zeppelin, caught fire and dropped out of the sky in seconds while newsreel cameras rolled. Around that real catastrophe the screenwriters spin an invented mystery. Colonel Franz Ritter, a decorated flier turned intelligence officer, boards as chief of security after a tip that a saboteur means to blow the craft apart mid-Atlantic. With landing in America only hours away, almost anyone among the passengers could be the one.

Wise runs two tracks at once — a closed-room whodunit in plush cabins, and the slow drift toward a disaster the audience already knows is coming. The climax stitches staged drama into the genuine footage of the blaze, and the picture's effects work earned a special honor from the Academy. Stately and old-fashioned, it's for fans of retro disaster cinema and aviation history. Stream The Hindenburg (1975) online on iFILM.