Word: fonda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing greed for profits far above their concern for public safety. But if the movie, starring real-life Antinuclear Activist Jane Fonda, is unfair in its villainous caricature of power-and construction-industry officials, its basic premise will no longer seem so farfetched to those moviegoers until now unattuned to the nation's debate over nuclear power. The premise: that a nuclear power plant is not nearly as accident-proof as its builders...
Douglas sneaks a reel of pictures. But by the time the newshawks get back to the station, the utility's p.r. man has persuaded the news director that nothing really happened. Douglas, a hot-tempered liberaloid activist, smells a conspiracy; Fonda, a careerist, doesn't much care. She's just another pretty face introducing the human-interest stuff. But Douglas persists, the company steps up its villainy, and slowly Fonda's conscience and consciousness begin to stir...
...going to let fraudulent radiograms be introduced at a certification hearing for their newest nuclear installation. Attempted murder, Lemmon's singlehanded seizure of the plant, with a SWAT team coming through the control-room door and colleagues purposely fouling up the reactor to distract him while Fonda stands by to put his damning evidence on TV live, all follow...
...that may sound improbably melodramatic, but it plays just fine. The credit belongs in part to Director Bridges for his sure handling of the action and in part to a script that makes us really care for Fonda and Lemmon. It seems almost superfluous to praise Fonda anew, but she is truly at the peak of her talent these days. Nobody has done a better characterization of the vacuity of the TV news "personality" −the little moments of makeup-mirror vanity snatched against deadline pressure, the falseness of on-camera performances that must never really look like performances...
...routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins −and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture...