It was 1954, and the two main players were still reeling from the shock of what had been done to and by them. Fear--of the invisible, the overpowering, the distorted--grew in the 50s and 60s out of the threat of the atom.
Understandably, it started in Japan, with a towering, mindless mutant beast rampaging through Tokyo. Gojira (better known in America as Godzilla) was a sea-god created by a nuclear explosion. People were afraid of something they couldn't even see, so they imagined it as the greatest, most threatening stuff of nightmares--an unstoppable, 328-foot dinosaur-like creature, at once a monster created by nuclear tests and a metaphor for nuclear weapons in general.
Ishiro Honda wrote and directed the original movie, which starred Akira Takarada and was produced by Toho Film Co. Ltd. Godzilla has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1954 was also the year the U.S. came out with a movie set in the New Mexico desert, the site of the atomic bomb test. Them! starred James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn and James Arness and featured giant ants that threatened Southwestern cities.
In 1959, Stanley Kramer directed Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in On the Beach, the story of people facing the destruction of life on earth.
By 1964's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the radiation threat is reduced to the more human scale of incompetence, aggression and stupidity.
Later movies, like 1979's China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, emphasized the risk of secrecy. The Mad Max series (the best is Number 2, Road Warrior) was filmed in Australia and illustrates the breakdown of society after nuclear devastation.
1989's Fat Man and Little Boy emphasizes the relationship between Gen. Leslie Groves, played by Paul Newman, and Robert Oppenheimer, played by Dwight Schultz.
|
