Films of the 1970s, No. 28

 


Throughout 2023 I'm looking at my favorite films from the decade of the 1970s. I'll be counting down from 50 to 1 throughout the year, posting a new installment each Friday. Agree? Disagree? Want to share a story? Post it in the comments below!

Greg Minor: [reviewing the film footage that Richard had secretly taken while at the nuclear power plant during the emergency] Whatever stuck valve it was, it's forcing them to deal with the water level. From their behavior, it looks pretty serious. As I remember the control layout, the annunciators they seem concerned with are also in the area of the core water level. I dunno... they might have come close to exposing the core.
Dr. Lowell: If that's true, we came very close to the China Syndrome.
Kimberly Wells: The what?
Dr. Lowell: If the core is exposed for whatever reason, the fuel heats beyond core heat tolerance in a matter of minutes. Nothing can stop it. And it melts down right through the bottom of the plant, theoretically to China. But of course, as soon as it hits ground water, it blasts into the atmosphere and sends out clouds of radioactivity. The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind is blowing. Render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable, not to mention the cancer that would show up later.

The China Syndrome (1979)
Starring: Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemon, and Wilford Brimley
Director: James Bridges
About: In the 1970s we got a lot of films that took hard looks at institutions and asked some serious questions. This film follows that vein. It's about a journalist, Fonda, who is exploring a Nuclear Power Plant. She teams with one of its employees, Lemon, to try and shine a light on the dangers and the dangerous practices of the company running it. I enjoy the performances here and the way the subject is tackled. There were several strong journalism films in the 1970s, and this falls among those films. It's probably not as well known as some on this list, but I enjoyed it, so I included it.

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