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