Timely and Untimely

Whatever else it isn’t, The China Syndrome must be the luckiest film ever made. This story of near-disaster in an atomic power plant was heralded by circulars from various scientific bodies assuring us that it was a disaster movie of the worst kind because its scare tactics had a more realistic look and played on more fundamental fears than all those supercolossal potboilers about blazing skyscrapers and killer bees. Yet. . . hardly had the film opened across the nation when a strikingly similar incident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility located at a town named, with the perfection of a press agent’s dream come true, Middle-town. A line in the film says that such an accident could wipe out an area the size of Pennsylvania— which is where Middle-town is. What has Columbia Pictures done to deserve this much from fate?

In The China Syndrome (a metaphoric term for a catastrophic melt-down in a nuclear reactor), Jane Fonda plays a rapidly rising Los Angeles TV reporter who is straining for more serious assignments; she and her cameraman, Michael Douglas, an unreconstructed Sixties student radical, find themselves on a routine tour of a nuclear power plant. A near-catastrophe (later pooh-poohed by the management) occurs, and Douglas surreptitiously films it. The footage, almost as explosive as the atom bomb, is shelved by the pusillanimous TV station manager (Peter Donat), under pressure from the powerful chairman of the board of the power plant—to Douglas’ utter and Miss Fonda’s considerable rage. Douglas steals back his film while Miss Fonda gets in touch with Jack Lemmon, the plant supervisor, in whom she stirs up doubts about whether the event was really so trivial as they had been told, and even about the desirability of nuclear power plants.

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John Simon

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Whatever else it isn’t, The China Syndrome must be the luckiest film ever made. This story of near-disaster in an atomic power plant was heralded by circulars from various scientific bodies assuring us that it was a disaster movie of the worst kind because its scare tactics had a more realistic look and played on more fundamental fears than all those supercolossal potboilers about blazing skyscrapers and killer bees. Yet. . . hardly had the film opened across the nation when a strikingly similar incident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility located at a town named, with the perfection of a press agent’s dream come true, Middle-town. A line in the film says that such an accident could wipe out an area the size of Pennsylvania— which is where Middle-town is. What has Columbia Pictures done to deserve this much from fate?

In The China Syndrome (a metaphoric term for a catastrophic melt-down in a nuclear reactor), Jane Fonda plays a rapidly rising Los Angeles TV reporter who is straining for more serious assignments; she and her cameraman, Michael Douglas, an unreconstructed Sixties student radical, find themselves on a routine tour of a nuclear power plant. A near-catastrophe (later pooh-poohed by the management) occurs, and Douglas surreptitiously films it. The footage, almost as explosive as the atom bomb, is shelved by the pusillanimous TV station manager (Peter Donat), under pressure from the powerful chairman of the board of the power plant—to Douglas’ utter and Miss Fonda’s considerable rage. Douglas steals back his film while Miss Fonda gets in touch with Jack Lemmon, the plant supervisor, in whom she stirs up doubts about whether the event was really so trivial as they had been told, and even about the desirability of nuclear power plants.