20 Fantastic Blimps, Balloons, And Dirigibles In Movies
17. The Hindenburg (1975)
They can’t all be fun movies, though, can they? Based on the real-life 1937 disaster, the film was a strange addition to the mostly fictional disaster movie subgenre of the 1970s which included The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure.
Given that the tragedy itself was over in mere minutes, the film primarily focuses on a mostly fictional conspiracy angle that theorizes the tragedy came as a result of a bomb planted by anti-Nazi forces. When the time comes, though, director Robert Wise doesn’t pull any punches, depicting the tragedy in black and white so he can intercut his newly shot images with newsreel footage from the actual event.