Cold War Movies

Bloc mirror…

In a climate of McCarthyism, ’50s sci-fi crystallised public fears. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers spliced anxieties about conformism and takeover; It Came From Outer Space channelled the fear of the ‘other’;

The Day The Earth Stood Still imagined nuclear proliferation from an alien’s perspective; while The Manchurian Candidate birthed the conspiracy thriller from quasi-sci-fi paranoia basics.

The Cold War didn’t invent spy movies, but the genre bloomed in the ’50s and ’60s. While Bond stood firm on slippery moral ground, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold saw compromises on both sides of the Wall. East German accounts included For Eyes Only, often viewed as Dr. No’s bleak opposite. The Third Man’s Harry Lime capitalised early, while films from North By Northwest to The Ipcress File mainlined its film potential.

Nuclear brinkmanship has long rattled cinemagoers. Seven Days In May mounted a paranoid scenario; Fail-Safe made tortured work of an unimaginable gaffe; BBC faux-doc The War Game presented a Soviet attack; The Hunt For Red October brimmed with submersible suspense.

Before Kubrick skewered the scenario of superpowers stockpiling weapons they couldn’t use in Dr. Strangelove, The Mouse That Roared saw satirical potential in the bomb. The Eastern Bloc also saw the joke in mock-spy frivolities such as There Is Nothing Finer Than Bad Weather.

The joke lasted well into the ’80s, in overt comedies (Spies Like Us) and the inadvertently hilarious Rocky IV.

Cold War fears wouldn’t die easily, resurfacing in popcorn pics such as Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide and nerve-shredders such as Roger Donaldson’s nuclear stand-off story Thirteen Days. Later, The Lives Of Others and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anatomised Cold War psychologies, while Steven Spielberg’s spy-swap drama Bridge Of Spies found reasons to be cheery in the Checkpoint Charlie era. KH