Word: lemmons
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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...
...bird's eye perspective of the visitor's gallery, the shit indeed hits the fan. The building shakes, buzzers blast, and control panel lights flash like a Christmas tree gone beserk. Douglas surreptitiously films the panic unfolding below him, focusing on the contorted face of supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon '47). By adroitly juggling water valves and pressure relief systems, he prevents the plant from destroying itself. But Godell's expressions of horror, prayer, and finally relief convince Adams and Wells that they have a real story...
...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...
...Lemmon, as a former nuclear submarine officer caught in the utility company's middle management, does an excellent job of portraying Godell's belief in "the system" and its safety. Realizing that higher management executives have tampered with his sacred safety procedures and have perverted the reactor that he, with complete sincerity, says he loves, Lemmon's portrayal of Godell's personal struggle carries the film...
...Lemmon also notes that while he is "Diametrically opposed" in philosophy to the character he plays (a man who, until the end, believes that the system will work and that nuclear power is completely safe) he likes the character and admires him because of his heroic act that ends the film. Both Fonda and Lemmon say that the point of the film is that ordinary people, who fear for their jobs, who normally don't give much thought to politics, are capable of extraordinary action when they see something terribly wrong. As Lemmon said of his character, "No Caesar...