ON 5 MARCH 1946, AT WESTMINSTER COLLEGE IN FULTON, MISSOURI, Sir Winston Churchill employed a phrase that immediately entered the international lexicon when he declared, “[A]n iron curtain has descended across the continent,” referring specifically to Central and Eastern Europe. “Iron curtain” was not original. The phrase had even been used by Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who committed suicide with his wife, Magda, after arranging for the murder of his six children with a combination of morphine and cyanide. Churchill, on the other hand, was the British messiah, who appealed to the House of Commons on 13 May 1940, demanding “victory at all costs—victory in spite of terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.” Five years later, victory was achieved, but survival was problematic. Another threat to world peace had emerged: the Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, now our mortal enemy.
At first, Americans felt secure. “We had the bomb, they didn’t” was the prevalent—if cocky—attitude. But could “they” develop one? Could anyone who had access to uranium and knew the formula? And what about Stalin’s boast a year after the war had ended that America would no longer have a monopoly on the bomb? Was that why, in July 1945, Stalin was unfazed when he was informed at the Potsdam Conference that the United States had perfected “a very powerful explosive” that could end the war? Plot lines for screenwriters mushroomed.
The bomb was a plot point even before Hiroshima. Henry Hathaway’s The House on 92nd Street (1945) was produced by Louis de Rochemont, the great documentary filmmaker who revolutionized the newsreel, with The March of Time, raising it to the level of photojournalism. From 1935 to 1951, the series enlightened moviegoers about events omitted, ignored, or encapsulated in the average newsreel. The House on 92nd Street seemed like a March of Time movie, with voiceover narration and a script that replicated the series’ occasional inclusion of staged scenes amid newsreel footage. In lieu of reenactments and archival material, The House on 92nd Street featured a plot loosely based on an actual spy case, with on-location filming, authenticated by omniscient narration soberly delivered by Reed Hadley. With its interweaving of fact and fiction, The House on 92nd Street became one of Fox’s first semi-documentaries, followed by Boomerang (1947), Kiss of Death (1947), Call Northside 777 (1948), The Street with No Name (1948), and Panic in the Streets (1950).
The House on 92nd Street dramatized the relentless quest of New York-based Nazi agents for Process 97, “the secret ingredient of the atomic bomb.” According to the opening title, the film was “adapted from cases in the espionage files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and included information that “could not be made public until the first atom bomb was dropped on Japan.” The screenwriters, Barré Lyndon, Charles G. Booth, and John Monks Jr., worked fast. A shooting script was ready by mid-April 1945, with Process 97 remaining unidentified “until release by proper authority can be obtained.” When House premiered on 10 September 1945, a month after atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Process 97 was still unidentified—but by then it did not matter. Whether named or not, the “secret ingredient” was plutonium, atomic number 94 (the writers came close). The once taboo word was now in the public domain.
If the Nazis had been interested in developing a bomb during the war, what about the Japanese? “Japan Developed Atomic Bomb; Russians Grabbed Scientists” was the dramatic headline of the 3 October 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution. Dispensing with a lead, reporter David Snell cut to the chase: “Japan successfully tested an atomic bomb three days prior to the end of the war.” The site was Konan in what is now North Korea. When Japanese scientists learned that the Russians were advancing toward Konan, they destroyed as many documents as they could so as to keep them out of Russian hands. Actually, Japan had been conducting nuclear research since the 1930s—a fact that was unknown to screenwriters, whose primary concern was developing a post-Hiroshima, one-size-fits-all template. If uranium was needed to produce plutonium, the hunt was on for the talismanic element. Hollywood did not discriminate among the hunters; they could be anyone or any country.
There was no connection between the 3 October Atlanta Constitution news story and Flight to Nowhere (1946), released two days earlier. Distributed by Screen Guild Productions, the film was deemed too insignificant for a New York Times review. Densely plotted, thoroughly implausible, and strangely fascinating, Flight to Nowhere envisioned an international cartel hoping to sell the Japanese a map that pinpointed the site of uranium deposits submerged in the shallow waters off an atoll. How occupied Japan would gain access to the uranium is never explained. However, the screenwriter, Arthur V. Jones, who had been working in B pictures since 1936, was probably inspired by the March 1946 evacuation of Bikini Atoll in preparation for nuclear testing there. Thus, the presence of uranium at an atoll (Bikini, obviously) was not that far-fetched—although the plot certainly was.
Nineteen forty-six also saw the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, in which ex-Nazis in Rio De Janeiro stored uranium ore in wine bottles in anticipation of the Fourth Reich. If Jones had written a script about a colony of Japanese scientists working under the radar in an underground laboratory to produce a bomb of their own in retaliation for Hiroshima, it might also have worked—provided it was as plausible as Ben Hecht’s screenplay for Notorious, in which there were no missing links in the narrative chain. Notorious was a masterful concatenation of cause and effect, time and place, performance and direction, sound and silence, and suspense rather than surprise (a Hitchcock trademark). There was also no violation of verisimilitude. Could the Nazis, although defeated, still be considered a threat? Notorious argued persuasively that they could; Flight to Nowhere evaded the question altogether. There was no time for an answer. The film was rushed into production and shot in about four weeks, between mid-April and mid-May 1946.
Flight to Nowhere opens with a title, “Honolulu,” followed by the murder of a Korean courier in possession of a map. A shot of a mushroom cloud follows, intimating that Hiroshima was America’s response to Pearl Harbor. The Honolulu-Hiroshima juxtaposition, however, was not what Jones intended; rather, he intended to indicate that the bomb ushered in a new era of espionage—atomic espionage, with secrets for sale. The credits then roll, and the torturous plot begins in Los Angeles, where a pilot (Alan Curtis) is approached by mysterious woman (Micheline Cheriel) offering him $500 to fly her and her party to Death Valley. Everyone but the demure Evelyn Ankers is a trafficker in atomic secrets, eager to find the map and sell it to Japan. The ringleader is Jerome Cowan, the embodiment of the dark side of American capitalism. The cartel is exposed, the map retrieved, and Alan Curtis and Evelyn Ankers go into a clinch. Eventually, Japan rises out of the radioactive ashes to become a world player in electronics, many bearing the brand name Sony, which in 1989 became the owner of Columbia Pictures, now part of Sony Pictures Entertainment. The vanquished had become the victor.
Two years after Hiroshima, MGM decided that it was time for a movie about the bomb, a mélange of fact and fiction that would ease Americans into the nuclear age. The Beginning or the End (1947) would be a film about the birth of the bomb, a film about the Manhattan Project. While Hollywood was mythologizing Russia, a group of scientists was working covertly in such unlikely places as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the University of Chicago, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Some of these scientists were émigrés, like Leo Szilard and Edward Teller of Hungary, Niels Bohr of Denmark, and Enrico Fermi of Italy. Others were Americans, like J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Wheeler, and Arthur Holly Compton. All were part of Manhattan Project, headed by Major General Leslie R. Groves. The code name “Manhattan Project,” which sounded like a New York apartment complex, was intentionally deceptive, designed to obscure the real mission of the enterprise: the extraction of plutonium from uranium, which, if successful, could be used to produce “extremely powerful bombs of a new type,” as Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939. Einstein later regretted sending this letter.
Groves demanded absolute secrecy. A billboard at the Oak Ridge facility spelled out his policy:
What You See Here
What You Do Here
What You Hear Here
When You Leave Here
Let It Stay Here.
On 16 July 1945 at 5:30 am, a plutonium bomb, code-named the “Gadget”—the forerunner of “Fat Man,” the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—was detonated in the Alamogordo Bombing Range (code name Trinity), a desert area 230 miles south of Los Alamos. Less than a month later, a uranium bomb, Little Boy, equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT, would fall on Hiroshima. After the Gadget was tested at Alamogordo, Oppenheimer recalled a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita, which he had read in the original Sanskrit: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer was not the only destroyer.
If The Beginning or the End had been a semi-documentary like The House on 92nd Street, it might have had greater impact. But the hybrid genre was alien to the “Tiffany of Studios.” Instead, what should have been the true story of the Manhattan Project became a conventional drama with a mammoth cast that played a mix of fictional characters and historical figures—the latter portrayed by actors who mostly bore only faint resemblances to their real life counterparts. The exceptions were Godfrey Tearle’s uncanny FDR and Ludwig Stossel’s wiry Albert Einstein. As for the others, audiences would neither have known nor cared what they looked like. These characters included: Manhattan Project director Leslie R. Groves (Brian Donlevy); his secretary, Jean O’Leary (Audrey Totter); head scientist at Los Alamos, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atom bomb” (Hume Cronyn); physicists Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) and Leo Szilard (John Gallaudet); and Harvard president James Conant (Frank Ferguson). To audiences, these figures were characters in a movie. And no one would have confused Art Baker with President Truman in a rare instance of an actor impersonating a president who was not only living but still in office. The film’s Truman deliberated over dropping the bomb, but the historical Truman did not. To him, this was a military decision he did not regret. Expediency was all: “[The bomb] seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”
The Beginning or the End was fact-inspired hagiography, designed to tell the world that the end of the war heralded a beginning—but of what? MGM had high hopes for The Beginning or the End, a title inspired by President Truman’s response to the proposed film, implying the either-or consequences of nuclear power. Press kits attesting to the film’s accuracy, with an endorsement from the president himself, were distributed to exhibitors and reviewers. Although press kits are notoriously flawed, this one at least documented the movie’s genesis, which began with a fan letter from a star to a scientist.
When MGM contract actress Donna Reed learned that her former high school chemistry teacher, Dr. Edward R. Tompkins, had been part of Manhattan Project, she dashed off a letter on 25 October 1945, thanking him for helping to bring the war to an end. The letter prompted a reply from Tompkins, which included a suggestion for a movie about “the personalized drama of the men and women who bent to their will the forces of the atom bomb”—in short, a movie about the Manhattan Project that would answer critics like William D. Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who likened the bombing of Hiroshima to the carnage wrought by “the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Reed showed Tompkins’s letter to her husband, agent-producer Tom Owen, who in turn passed it on to MGM’s legendary story editor, Sam Marx, who was so enthusiastic about the idea that he agreed to sign on as producer. But first Owen and Marx needed President Truman’s blessing, which they received, along with a title. Tompkins also received a credit as “scientific technical advisor,” and Owen received one for his “Cooperation.”
Frank Wead, who blended fact and fiction smoothly in They Were Expendable (1945), one of the better World War II movies, wrote the script for The Beginning or the End, in which the “personalized drama” overshadowed the historical. At the heart of the film is the story of Manhattan Project scientist Matt Cochran (Tom Drake, the eternal boy next door), who died of radiation poisoning. Cochran was modeled after Canadian physicist Louis Slotin, who died of exposure to a lethal dose of radiation at Los Alamos in May 1946. In the film, Cochran dies before Hiroshima, not at Los Alamos, but on Tinian island in the Marianas, where Little Boy was assembled, and from which the Enola Gay took off around 2:45 am on 6 August. Although Cochran was conflicted about the bomb (and Drake’s face was made for youthful angst), he resolved his doubts and left a letter for his wife (Beverly Tyler) in which he all but justified his death in the interest of a higher cause: “God has not shown us a way to destroy ourselves. Atomic energy is the hand He has extended to lift us from the ruins of war and lighten the burden of peace. . . . Men will learn to use this new knowledge well. They won’t fail. They can’t fail. For this is the moment that gives all of us a chance to prove that human beings are indeed made in the image and likeness of God.”
Cochran’s letter reads like the peroration of a sermon, which may have comforted the congregation, small as it was. In 1947, most moviegoers gravitated to non-atomic MGM films: Good News with June Allyson, This Time for Keeps with Esther Williams, It Happened in Brooklyn with Frank Sinatra, The Hucksters with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and the studio’s new star, Deborah Kerr, and Green Dolphin Street—with its spectacular earthquake and tidal wave, along with Lana Turner, who also costarred that year with Spencer Tracy in Cass Timberlane.
MGM had not given up on the bomb. Five years later, it released Above and Beyond (1952), a biopic about Colonel Paul Tibbets (Robert Taylor), the pilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. A few moviegoers might have remembered that Barry Nelson played Tibbets in The Beginning or the End; if the bombing of Hiroshima looked familiar, it was because it came from the same stock footage used in The Beginning or the End.
Above and Beyond opens with a prologue stating that the film could not have been made without the release of classified information. The information was nothing as revealing as the McGuffin in The House on 92nd Street that turned out to be plutonium. Instead, it was the toll the oath to absolute secrecy took on Tibbets and his wife (Eleanor Parker). Determined to prevent any leaks about the creation of the bomb that would end the war, Tib-bets behaved autocratically, issuing color-coded passes and ordering dismissals for the slightest infraction. He was more haunted than tragic, and his wife was a mater dolorosa who must endure her husband’s mood swings and spend her days not knowing when he will come home or, at times, even where he is. If their tension-riddled marriage ended in divorce even before Hiroshima, it would not have come as a surprise. The Tibbets eventually divorced, but did so in 1955, three years after the film’s release.
Above and Beyond dramatized the crushing responsibilities the mission imposed on Tibbets, who subordinated everything—wife, family, and friends—to its success. After President Truman “regretfully” authorized the use of the bomb, Tibbets was confronted with a dilemma that only he could resolve: If the bomb could save five hundred thousand American lives and end the war, would it be worth the loss of a hundred thousand Japanese lives? With Pilate-like washing of the hands, Tibbets’s superiors leave the decision to him. If anyone’s hands were to get bloodied, they would be his. Above and Beyond did not canonize Tibbets. When an aggressive reporter asked how he felt about what he had done, Tibbets replied angrily and perhaps out of guilt: “Ask them [the Japanese] how they felt about it.” The historical Tibbets was totally dispassionate: “It was all impersonal.”
Above and Beyond did mediocre box office in a year filled with more memorable MGM fare, such as Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor), Million Dollar Mermaid (Esther Williams), Pat and Mike (Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), Because You’re Mine (Mario Lanza), and The Naked Spur (James Stewart). Robert Taylor had a better vehicle in the highly profitable Ivanhoe, costarring Joan Fontaine and the violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor. This was the Robert Taylor audiences wanted: the Saxon knight, not the pilot who ushered in the era of fear and trembling.
The Manhattan Project returned to the screen again in Fat Man and Little Boy (Paramount, 1989), with Paul Newman as Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves. Newman dominated the film, unlike Brian Donlevy in The Beginning or the End, in which Groves was a supporting role. Although Fat Man and Little Boy was overlong, it avoided hagiography in its depiction of the scientists who behaved like ego-driven academics at a faculty meeting, and it did not gloss over the fact that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a leftist for a lover. Still, it is worth seeing for its characterization of Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz) as a brilliant but arrogant scientist who could barely conceal his contempt for Groves.
The definitive bomb movie derives from a Mickey Spillane novel that does not feature any historical figures, although it is haunted by history. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) weaves such a web of entrapment around its characters—pulling in the audience—that all a viewer can do is remain within its strands until they snap. Ironically, “bomb” is never uttered; all we know is that a number of people are involved in the quest for a “whatzit,” which is only identified as such in a climactic image. Everything is askew in the film, including the credits that roll backwards. Clues are ellipses: a line from an obscure poem by Christina Rossetti, a swallowed key in a corpse, a locker with a leather box that is literally hot, a bogus roommate who may be a murderess, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony serving as a metaphor for an unfinished woman, and a coolly perverse private eye who breaks a Caruso record in front of a would-be opera singer and closes a desk drawer on a greedy hand.
Adapted from, or perhaps more accurately, inspired by Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly (1952), the screenplay by the sadly ignored A. I. Bezzerides—novelist, short story writer, and Hollywood’s unacknowledged littérateur—is virtually an original work. Bezzerides retained Spillane’s series detective, Mike Hammer. He even reproduced the novel’s opening scene: a woman in a trench coat caught in the headlights of Hammer’s car, which almost hits her. Then he goes his own way—from the mean streets of Spillane’s New York, to the meaner ones of Los Angeles, where day is eye-squinting glare and night is a skein of shadows. Bezzerides’s Hammer is more of a sleazy shamus than a tough-talking gumshoe. His Hammer is also ambivalent about his female factotum, Velda (Maxine Cooper), whom he both loves and manipulates when he needs evidence for a case. Yet when she is kidnapped, he rescues her from a burning beach house as if he were a fire fighter. Best of all, Bezzerides kept Hammer’s integrity from reaching zero, even when it seemed about to plummet. “Integrity” is not part of the vocabulary of Spillane’s Hammer, who has no qualms about pulling the trigger to settle a score.
Hammer is not one of Raymond Chandler’s displaced detective-knights, like Philip Marlowe. Chandler portrayed Marlowe not just as a private eye, but as a knight, whose “code is hopelessly anachronistic in the modern world.” When Marlowe enters the Sternwood mansion at the beginning of Chandler’s The Big Sleep, he notices the stained glass image of a knight trying to untie a damsel from a tree: “I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him.”
“Thus was born the private eye as knight figure, as rescuer of the weak and defenseless.” But Spillane’s Hammer has no pretentions about being a grail seeker. Hammer is only a private eye who can make it uncomfortable for uncooperative suspects. His favorite sport seems to be shooting men in the eye. If he wore armor, it would have been tarnished and dented. His signature attire is unpressed suits and shirts with loosely knotted ties and functional cuff links. He can be tender in his hardboiled way, giving Velda a perfunctory kiss before sending her out on a job, but the “whatzit” is all that matters. As played definitively by Ralph Meeker, Hammer is not on a quest for the black bird or the mystery woman, but for the “whatzit” that dares not speak its name—and in fact never does, except through inference. Bezzerides’s Hammer steps out of Spillane’s pulpy world into the whirlpool of ultra-noir, a black and white limbo with no grey scale.
The villains in Spillane’s novel were mafiosi, and the “whatzit” was narcotics. Spillane was influenced by Malcolm “Mike” Johnson’s articles about corruption on the New York waterfront, which appeared in the New York Sun in 1949. Spillane was also attracted by Senator Estes Kefauver’s Senate Crime Investigating Committee, which left “thirty million households . . . with the distinct impression that something was rotten in U.S. cities.” When Bezzerides read the novel, he knew he could do better, and he did. The Mafia did not dominate the news in the 1950s; the bomb did. Atomic testing was occurring on a regular basis in Nevada. The Soviet Union, which tried out its first atomic bomb in 1949, exploded two more in October 1952. Klaus Fuchs admitted that when he was at Los Alamos, he passed on classified information to the Soviets, as did David Greenglass, who also implicated his sister, Ethel, wife of Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were electrocuted in 1954. From the Army-McCarthy hearings, one would get the impression that communists were ubiquitous. Even J. Robert Oppenheimer was denounced as a traitor, who had “worked tirelessly . . . to retard the United States H-bomb program.” Worse, he was branded a Soviet spy, denied security clearance, and barred from military installations. Certainly his romantic involvement with the physician-psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, a party member who committed suicide in January 1944, did not enhance his image. It was a case of last year’s savior, this year’s Satan. America was ripe with paranoia, the feeding ground of film noir. Kiss Me Deadly would reap the harvest, radiated though it was.
When Hammer has still not figured out the nature of the “whatzit,” his police detective friend, Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), gives it to him in three short blasts: “Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Trinity.” That is all he needed to know, and Bezzerides assumed the same of the audience—at least a 1955 audience. The villains are atomic thieves; the prize, a radioactive isotope apparently stolen from Los Alamos. The climax is a conflagration like Spillane’s, but a high-grade one, a junior-size Hiroshima.
The three-name clue is typical of Bezzerides’s allusion-sprinkled script. He changed the name of the woman caught in the headlights from Berga Torn to Christina Bailey, named after the pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti, whose sonnets she knows intimately—so much so that, before Christina is tortured to death and strung up like a deer carcass, she leaves a two-word note for Hammer: “Remember me.” With some help from Velda, Hammer locates the “Remember me” sonnet, finding a clue in the lines: “But if the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts we once did have.” Christina, who had known darkness and corruption, left a “vestige,” even though she is now a corpse lying in a morgue. Spillane’s Hammer could never have engaged in such exegesis. Bezzerides could, and did so through a stand-in played by Ralph Meeker, a Northwestern University alumnus who gave ample evidence that he had been exposed to the New Criticism. The vestige is a key Christina had swallowed which was removed during an autopsy. The key belongs to a locker containing a leather case, which, if opened just a bit, sears the flesh.
The suspense, like that in most noir, is not calibrated, but ratcheted up until it can go no higher, then followed by a dénouement that is often an unmasking. The film is nearing the end and needs to wind up. Kiss Me Deadly observes that tradition, redeeming it as well. Bezzerides went beyond Spillane, who ended the novel in a blaze of horror. In Spillane, the bogus Lily Carver opens her terrycloth robe, revealing the effects of a fire that left her “a disgusting mass of twisted, puckered flesh from her knees to her neck.” Pressing a gun against Hammer’s belt, she demands that he kiss her “deadly” before she pulls the trigger. Hammer obliges by flicking open his lighter and igniting her robe, “turning the white of her hair into black char.” Bezzerides devised a different incineration, this time nuclear, at the beach house of Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), where the leather box has been taken and where Velda is being held prisoner. Soberin is a smart dresser and a suave sadist with a mistress/moll, Gabrielle (the German-born Gaby Rogers, whose accent suggests an international conspiracy). Gabrielle, who posed as Christina’s roommate and may also have murdered her, covets the box, assuming that its contents will provide her with the good life. Soberin, an erudite villain, as versed in mythology as Hammer is in explication de texte, cautions Gabrielle against opening the case, warning that doing so would make her another Pandora. The allusion is lost on Gabrielle. Nonplussed, Soberin continues spouting mythology, comparing the contents to the head of Medusa, the snaky-haired gorgon who turned whoever gazed on her to stone. But like Pandora, Gabrielle cannot resist temptation. After shooting Soberin, who likens himself to the three-headed dog Cerberus guarding the entrance to Hades, she opens the box, which contains the radioactive isotope.
What looks like a phosphorescent block of ice turns her incandescent and sets off an explosion, suggesting what might have been in store for Los Angeles. The house detonates in a burst of blinding light that glazes the sand, driving Hammer and Velda into the ocean. A doctored version of the film released shortly after the May 1955 premiere suggests that they did not survive, presumably demonstrating that even the invincible Mike Hammer is not immune to radioactivity. Mickey Spillane fans who saw the other version would have assumed their hero pulled a Houdini and went back to work, eventually moving on to television, where he was portrayed by Stacy Keach in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and later in the syndicated Mike Hammer: Private Eye. A series detective is killed off by his creator, not an editor who excises some frames. But even if Hammer and Velda perished, the message would have been the same: No one is safe these days, so learn to live on the edge.
Once the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949, America’s nuclear monopoly was at an end, as Stalin had predicted—unless it could come up with a super bomb. Enter the hydrogen bomb, tested successfully at Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands in November 1952. The following year, the Soviets detonated their own H-bomb, which was not as powerful as the one tested at Eniwetok, but still a start. A year later, in 1954, the United States tested an even deadlier H-bomb at Bikini atoll, where the explosion “ejected several million tons of radioactive debris into the air.” Although Bikini was then uninhabited, residents of other atolls were left with radiation poisoning, which in some cases proved fatal.
At least this time, Oppenheimer, who was initially skeptical about the H-bomb, would not have to say that he had become death. But his attitude was deemed unpatriotic, and his belief that the United States should share its nuclear knowledge with the Soviets resulted in accusations that he was a communist sympathizer. It was not until 1963 that Oppenheimer was vindicated, only to die four years later.
In The Story of Mankind (Warner Bros., 1957), news of a “super bomb” causes consternation in the heavens. A tribunal is convened in outer space to determine—by measuring its achievements against its failures—whether humankind is worth saving. Warner Bros. assumed that if a crash course in world civilization did not attract audiences (it didn’t), the cast of moderately well known actors—playing cameo roles and traipsing through the centuries—might (it didn’t). The movie’s perverse fascination lay in wondering who will pop up next: Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra, Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc, Agnes Moorehead as Elizabeth I, Reginald Gardiner as Shakespeare, Helmut Dantine as Napoleon, Marie Windsor as Josephine, a bloated Peter Lorre as Nero. Arguing on behalf of the species is the Spirit of Mankind (Ronald Colman), and for its annihilation, Vincent Price as the bomb’s creator, Mr. Scratch (Stephen Vincent Benet’s name for Satan in his short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster”). Scratch’s identity is evident from his red accouterments: cravat, pocket-handkerchief, notebook, and telephone. The bomb, then, is literally an infernal machine.
It was rather daring in 1957 to attribute the H-bomb to the devil, although there is no further mention of such a connection in the film. The studio need not have worried about being branded un-American. The Story of Mankind is popcorn history, slavered with butter and sprinkled with salt for viewers to munch on during their history tutorial. The spirit invokes the achievements of Moses, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, da Vinci, Galileo, Shakespeare. Scratch counters with examples of humankind at its worst: Neronian Rome, the Salem witchcraft trials, the slave-holding South, two world wars, and Hiroshima—the latter, an image too iconic for comment. The spirit calls a final witness, a toddler representing the world of tomorrow. “Let there be a tomorrow for the planet Earth,” the spirit pleads. Although he argues eloquently that evil, when crushed, has made humankind stronger, the tribunal is unimpressed. The scales of history are balanced, with neither good nor evil outweighing the other. The species is given another chance to redeem itself. “The choice is entirely up to you,” the chief judge warns, looking straight at the camera and leaving the audience less hopeful than they were when they arrived. At least they may have had a few laughs: Harpo Marx appears as a harp-playing Isaac Newton, hit on the head by an apple, and Groucho delivers one-liners as Peter Minuet. When an Indian chief greets him with “How!” Groucho replies, “Three minutes and leave them in the shell.” Corny, but it was moments like these that made sitting through this “history for dummies” bearable.
“The choice is entirely up to you” mandate was very much in keeping with the ethics of the age, reflected in the court’s ruling that humankind’s capacity for good equals its capacity for evil. By invoking free will, The Story of Mankind allied itself with The Next Voice You Hear and The Day the Earth Stood Still, which also challenged humanity to redeem itself, ignoring the fact that a tribunal would not have been necessary—and The Story of Mankind would not have been made—if the bomb had not been created.
The bombing of Hiroshima was first seen in movie theaters. In August 1945, a typical bill consisted of a movie, a short subject, previews of coming attractions, and a newsreel. In some theaters, particularly in large cities, double features were common. Saturdays were special. In addition to the main attraction and a below-the-title movie, there was also a newsreel, a chapter of a serial, perhaps a travelogue or short subject, and a cartoon, making it possible for kids to spend the entire afternoon in the thrall of the daylight dream. Hence, the incongruity of a bill with a comedy like Out of This World (1945), followed by a newsreel on the bombing of Hiroshima, or, earlier in 1945, footage of the liberation of Auschwitz on the same program as Bring on the Girls. Hiroshima had become an epochal event captured on film—but purely as part of the program, not the main attraction. Still, the bomb could be a main attraction; in fact, it could become a versatile plot generator.
In World War II movies, falling bombs carried no symbolism; they simply killed people, like bullets in crime movies and arrows in westerns. For the post-Hiroshima moviegoer, explosions were no longer simply a burst of fire and smoke. They were a cumulonimbus of death, over which hovered the mushroom cloud. Hiroshima had become a lower-case holocaust. In his interview with director Raoul Walsh, Richard Schickel brought up the climax of White Heat (1949), with Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) screaming, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” amid exploding chemical tanks. Schickel asked Walsh if he intended the explosion as a metaphor for Hiroshima, or at least a reminder of the first atomic bomb. Walsh pondered the question, never answering it fully but suggesting that, unconsciously, he may well have. Explosions were not the same after Hiroshima. They were louder, more ominous, and uncomfortably atavistic, reflecting the “fear of the cataclysmic destruction of civilization, mayhem of an unimaginable higher order than we had ever seen before, the beginning of the end of life as we know it.” That kind of paralyzing fear was at the heart of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), in which the news that China had the bomb drove a simple fisherman to suicide. Winter Light is haunted by Christian symbolism and existential questioning of religion’s ability to assuage humankind’s fear of annihilation. American filmmakers, more commercially oriented, avoided the overwhelming question—or answered it with a homily. They preferred to dramatize the effects of the bomb, largely in terms of the monstrosities it produced: the giant ants, grasshoppers, and sea creatures of the science fiction film. But if the bomb’s progeny are so grotesque, what does that say about the parents?