Streaming: the best films about the atomic bomb
Two new documentaries available to stream this week are riding the wave of anticipation for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, out in cinemas next Friday. Lest Nolan’s Cillian Murphy-starring biopic of atomic bomb creator J Robert Oppenheimer not serve the facts diligently enough, then Oppenheimer: The Real Story (from 17 July) and To End All War: Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (Now TV) are on hand to fill in any gaps. They join a long line of documentaries on the subject and its adjacent concerns; the surprise is that it’s taken this long for Oppenheimer himself to be the protagonist of a major Hollywood drama.
But the legacy of the atom bomb, from its development to its impact to its all-round political aura, is a rich one, spanning everything from esoteric arthouse films to genre B-movies. For decades after the horrifying outcome of the Manhattan Project, through the long-lingering chill of the cold war, anxiety over nuclear warfare was the driving force behind any number of thrillers and war films. Comedies, sci-fi and even the odd film noir – see Robert Aldrich’s blistering Kiss Me Deadly (1955; Internet Archive), which culminates in a literally explosive allegory – got in on the paranoia.
First, however, the film industry attempted to tackle the subject more directly. Mixing earnest informational film-making with melodramatic fiction, the 1947 Hollywood film The Beginning or the End (Internet Archive) is a fascinating relic of its still-raw era. Dramatising the creation of the bomb and the circumstances building to Hiroshima, it has a dour sternness of tone that allows it to smuggle in some wild fabrication. Scenes of President Truman morally wrestling over whether or not to drop the bomb have the ring of patriotic face-saving. Indeed, there’s more history to be gleaned from the film’s blind spots than its inclusions.
Japan had its turn in 1953 with Hiroshima, another blend of fiction and documentary centred on child survivors in the aftermath of the blast. It’s undeniably wrenching, using a vast number of extras to effectively recreate their own harrowing experience, and while it was unsurprisingly branded “anti-American” in certain quarters, it doesn’t go easy on the Japanese military either.
In 1989, leading Japanese auteur Shōhei Imamura covered similar subject matter with a more distanced perspective in his soberly beautiful Black Rain (Arrow). A portrait of a family rebuilding in the wake of Hiroshima, it intersperses a quietly unfurling study of trauma with blunt first-hand accounts from victims. That same year, Hollywood inadvertently responded with Roland Joffé’s peculiarly misguided Manhattan Project drama Fat Man and Little Boy, previously Oppenheimer’s biggest screen showcase. Still, the scientist plays a supporting role to overseeing army officer Leslie Groves (played by Paul Newman), whose clipped, macho sense of duty spars with Oppenheimer’s cerebral detachment in a way that rather diminishes the bigger picture. There’s a reason you never hear of it today.
You certainly get a sharper, more telling view of the masculine egos sparking and aggravating nuclear warfare in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliantly deranged 1964 cold war farce Dr Strangelove, a film that managed to be both piquantly of its time and wildly ahead of it. It came amid a rush of more serious-minded Hollywood dramas on the same subject, including two released the same year. Sidney Lumet’s cold-sweat political thriller Fail Safe, in which an honourable US president and his advisers fret over an error that has sent a nuclear strike Russia’s way, is better remembered than John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, in which a different imaginary Potus faces military mutiny in response to nuclear disarmament. Both are excellent.
European film-makers, meanwhile, may seem to be left out of the matter, but have contributed in surprising ways. Alain Resnais’s exquisite Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959; Amazon), a pointedly even-handed co-production with Japan, addresses Japanese PTSD and western guilt in the form of a desolate, mutually wounded romance. And the UK entered the conversation in the 1960s with The War Game, Peter Watkins’s stark, unnerving pseudo-documentary vision of nuclear war on home turf: a fiction evocative enough to fool the Oscars into giving it a best documentary prize, though a spooked BBC wouldn’t air it for 20 years. We’ll see next week if the atom bomb on screen can still cause that kind of stir.
All titles are available to rent on multiple platforms unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Evil Dead Rise(StudioCanal) True to its subject, this decades-old horror franchise refuses to die; more surprisingly, it keeps delivering the goods. The latest go-round is an efficient obstacle course of demonic monstrosities in one Los Angeles apartment block, directed with some flair by Irishman Lee Cronin. It’s big on grotesque kills, offhand wit and lines like “Mommy’s with the maggots now”: everything you want from an Evil Dead film, really.
Renfield(Universal) This lumpen vampire comedy, on the other hand, strains way too hard for knowing trashiness, hitching its wagon to the ironic cultdom of Nicolas Cage, and then not giving him quite enough to do. As yet another iteration of Dracula, he gurns and gnashes his fangs with typical zest, but the film is more focused on his eponymous lackey, played by a thwarted Nicholas Hoult.
Thieves Like Us(Radiance) Robert Altman’s wonderfully dry, meandering 1974 crime film gets a lavishly accessorised Blu-ray release – the first in the UK – from the excellent Radiance label, with Altman’s own commentary among the many extras. Though, really, the film on its own would be worth the purchase: enriching its pulp-fiction source with laconic irony and a bleak romanticism, it remains one of the director’s best.