THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979) C widescreen 122m dir: James Bridges

w/Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas, Scott Brady, James Hampton, Peter Donat, Wilford Brimley, Richard Herd, Daniel Valdez, Stan Bohrman, James Karen, Michael Alaimo, Donald Hotton, Khalilah "Belinda" Ali, Paul Larson, Ron Lombard, Tom Eure, Nick Pellegrino, Daniel Lewk, Allan Chinn, Martin Fiscoe, Alan Kaul, Michael Mann, David Eisenbise, Frank Cavestani, Reuben Collins, E. Hampton Beagle, David Pfeiffer, Lewis Arquette, Dennis McMullen, Rita Taggert, James Hall, Carol Schlanger, Trudy Lane, Jack Smith Jr., David Arnsen, Betty Harford, Donald Bishop, Al Baietti, Diandra Morrell, Darrell Larson, Roger Pancake, Joe Lowry, Harry M. Williams, Dennis Barker, Joseph Garcia, James Kline, Alan Beckwith, Clay Hodges, Val Clenard

From The Movie Guide: "Life imitates art. What began as a fanciful premise in the minds of many turned into reality a few weeks after this picture opened when the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor had a dreadful accident.

"Fonda plays Kimberly Wells, a television reporter trying to advance from cutesy features to harder news. Douglas is Richard Adams, a freelance cameraman she hires while attempting to do a story on nuclear energy. They're fortuitously present at a power plant when a crisis arises, and a meltdown is narrowly avoided by the quick reactions of Jack Godell (Lemmon). Richard has it all on film and rushes it back to the station, but management won't put it on the air. Godell, meanwhile, is outraged when he learns that the authorities have covered up the incident. He searches the plant and finds the problem: faulty welding from a cut-rate construction job. He contacts the reporters and gives them X-rays of the offending equipment. But when sound man Hector Salas (Valdez) is murdered while taking the information to a hearing on a proposed nuclear project, Godell realizes that his superiors will stop at nothing to cover up their criminal negligence. Meanwhile Kimberly's transformation from naif to political activist --- a Fonda trademark in 70s films from TOUT VA BIEN to COMING HOME --- becomes the real substance of the narrative.

"A film more open than most about its political stance, THE CHINA SYNDROME effectively deploys its polemic within the framework of a nightmarish but convincing story. The lack of incidental music adds to the quasi-documentary feel; tight scripting and direction ably maintain suspense during the protracted climax. The sometimes self-conscious and too-earnest Fonda and the occasionally hammy Lemmon both rise beautifully to the occasion, delivering performances that are among their best. In other roles Douglas, Brimley, Hampton, Brady, and Bohrman (an actual reporter who would go on to cover the Three Mile Island incident) offer sterling support. Not a comforting film, but an undeniably potent one."

From Roger Ebert's website (www.rogerebert.com), his 1979 review of the film:

"The China Syndrome is a terrific thriller that incidentally raises the most unsettling questions about how safe nuclear power plants really are. It was received in some quarters as a political film, and the people connected with it make no secret of their doubts about nuclear power. But the movie is, above all, entertainment: well-acted, well-crafted, scary as hell.

"The events leading up to the 'accident' in The China Syndrome are indeed based on actual occurrences at nuclear plants. Even the most unlikely mishap (a stuck needle on a graph causing engineers to misread a crucial water level) really happened at the Dresden plant outside Chicago. And yet the movie works so well not because of its factual basis, but because of its human content. The performances are so good, so consistently, that The China Syndrome becomes a thriller dealing in personal values. The suspense is generated not only by our fears about what might happen, but by our curiosity about how, in the final showdown, the characters will react.

"The key character is Godell (Jack Lemmon), a shift supervisor at a big nuclear power plant in Southern California. He lives alone, quietly, and can say without any self-consciousness that the plant is his life. He believes in nuclear power. But when an earthquake shakes his plant, he becomes convinced that he felt an aftershock --- caused not by an earthquake but by rumblings deep within the plant.

"The quake itself leads to the first 'accident.' Because a two-bit needle gets stuck on a roll of graph paper, the engineers think they need to lower the level of the water shield over the nuclear pile. Actually, the level is already dangerously low. And if the pile were ever uncovered, the result could be the 'China syndrome,' so named because the superheated nuclear materials would melt directly through the floor of the plant and, theoretically, keep on going until they hit China. In practice, there'd be an explosion and a release of radioactive materials sufficient to poison an enormous area.

"The accident takes place while a TV news team is filming a routine feature about the plant. The cameraman (Michael Douglas) secretly films events in the panicked control room. And the reporter (Jane Fonda) tries to get the story on the air. Her superiors refuse, influenced by the power industry's smoothly efficient public relations people. But the more Fonda and Douglas dig into the accident, the less they like it.

"Meanwhile, obsessed by that second tremor, Lemmon has been conducting his own investigation. He discovers that the X-rays used to check key welds at the plant have been falsified. And then the movie takes off in classic thriller style: The director, James Bridges, uses an exquisite sense of timing and character development to bring us to the cliffhanger conclusion.

"The performances are crucial to the movie's success, and they're all the more interesting because the characters aren't painted as anti-nuclear crusaders, but as people who get trapped in a situation while just trying to do their jobs. Fonda is simply superb as the TV reporter; the range and excellence of her performance are a wonder. Douglas is exactly right as the bearded, casually anti-establishment cameraman. And Jack Lemmon, reluctant to rock the boat, compelled to follow his conscience, creates a character as complex as his Oscar-winning businessman in Save the Tiger."

THE CHINA SYNDROME was nominated for four Oscars: Best Actor (Lemmon), Actress (Fonda), Original Screenplay (Mike Gray, T.S. Cook, Bridges), and Art Direction (George Jenkins, Arthur Jeph Parker).