Word: fonda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That's what almost happens the day a television news team-Reporter Jane Fonda, Cameraman Michael Douglas −takes a routine tour of a nuclear power plant. They're in the visitors' gallery, looking into the control room presided over by Veteran Engineer Jack Lemmon, when everyone down there starts falling madly about. Some sort of crisis is obviously at hand. Ordered not to shoot...
...film opens with the "tone and bars" test pattern of a T.V. minicam about to feed a live report to the evening news. Cut to Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda), a local reporter hired for her red hair, good looks, and ability to deliver a snappy, well-timed piece of fluff to end the evening newscast. After doing her usual competent but contentless job, she's told to spend the next day filming a special on energy at a nuclear power plant outside Los Angeles...
...China Syndrome is not a disaster film in the style of The Towering Inferno nor Earthquake--it doesn't even rely on ritual seduction scenes to cement the plot. Lemmon and Fonda portray characters who are average people, holding perhaps better-than-average jobs, who act heroically when the circumstances demand it. Fonda is very believable as a success-oriented member of the "Me Generation," at first frustrated far more by her boss's fluffy conception of her than by his cover-up of her nuclear accident story. "I've got a pretty good job, and I fully intend...
THAT MAKES The China Syndrome work as a thriller are its fine details. The nuclear control room set was designed by the man who re-created The Washington Post newsroom in All the President's Men; the T.V. studio and control room were from a real Los Angeles station. (Fonda's anchorman was played by an L.A. anchorman apparantly well-versed in the "Happy News" style.) The plot is well-crafted, and doesn't fall into the predictable action cliches that mar most current action/suspense films...
...many senses, the film is, as Douglas says, an old-fashioned thriller--and a fine one. As Fonda said this week, "It's a genre of film that has good guys and bad guys." True enough. But for better or worse, it's the nuclear power supporters and the corporate executives who are the bad guys in "The China Syndrome." Are you watching, Seabrook...