Zeppelin (1971)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) As much as war offers plenty of great real stories to tell, I’ve long had a fondness for imagined war stories, willing to work within historical fact to present an added jolt of tension from wholly fictional events. At first glance, Zeppelin appears to fit the bill, with its British protagonist infiltrating a WW1 German Zeppelin mission to steal nothing less than the Magna Carta. That’s just ludicrous enough to be interesting, and you can imagine wily screenwriters working in plenty of explosive action sequences, heightened thrills and wild tangent unbothered by the historical records. Alas, those screenwriters must have been missing or working-to-rule on Zeppelin, because the film ends up being a bare-minimum kind of thriller: Michael York (acting like a budget version of James Mason) is ordinary as the protagonist recruited by the British to spy on the Germans, then by the Germans to infiltrate the British. The sequences on the way to the end are slight and disappointing, while the high concept of the film isn’t really fully realized. There are still a few likable things about the result (I mean—making a zeppelin the main character!), but that only works if you don’t expect too much from it.