But in "The Hindenburg" almost nothing of consequence happens until the last few minutes of the movie. How can you thrill people with the saga of a dirigible floating across the Atlantic Ocean? We know it's going to blow up over Lakehurst, N.J. but we also know, alas, that it's not going to blow up before then. And so George C. Scott searches his conscience, and Anne Bancroft camps it up as a mysterious German countess, and the captain peers confidently out over the wheel, and for nearly two hours little of any consequence happens.

Meanwhile (No. 2 on my list) the movie has to deal with the fact that Nazi Germany used giant dirigibles like the Hindenburg as propaganda devices. They were the symbols of Hitlerism, floating in the sky past the Empire State Building, the queens of the air. Their crews were German. Their makers were German. Their sponsors were Nazi.

And so, while nothing else is happening except that the characters are making inane conversation with each other in futile attempts to piece together vignettes of human nature, the good Germans and the bad Germans and the inbetween Germans climb through the rigging of the airship playing a catandmouse game with sabotage. George C. Scott is an in between German.

He's deeply disturbed, you see, because the Nazi youth movement enlisted his teenage son, and the poor lad was misled by bad company: While climbing up onto a synagog to paint a swastika on it, the hapless youth fell off and broke his neck. This forces George C. Scott into a crisis of agonizing indecision. Meanwhile, we laugh, because the information has been imparted so artlessly, so awkwardly, it seems like a bad, sick joke. Moviemakers talk about "bad laughs." That's when the audience laughs when it's not supposed to. This is conceivably the first movie which is in its entirety a bad laugh.

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