Nuclear Movies

Broderick | Nuclear Movies Mick Broderick M.broderick@afc.gov.au Nuclear Movies Joyce A. Evans. Mushroom Clouds: Hollywoodand theAtomic Bomb. Westview Press, 1998. (216 pages; $65.00) Evans' focus concentrates on films produced within the Hollywood system and makes a case for analysing this output as an economic commodity influenced by various market forces, while inheriting "residual elements" from prior cultural artefacts and accumulated genre works. While the author occasionally chides film scholarship which "simply" looks for correlations between reflecting social values at the time of production, she privileges an analysis which concentrates on "economic pressures inherent in Hollywood's industrial mode of production" and the "personal ideologies of individual filmmakers." Yet for titles such as The Lady from Shanghai and Above and Beyond which are discussed in the "cultural atmosphere " of political and economic influences (HUAC and Korea), they are wrongly dated and contextualised years after their actual production and release. Such historical flaws can lead to potentially dubious inference and argument. Evans' study, based on her Ph.D. dissertation, explores Hollywood films concerned with nuclear issues from 1946 to 1964. Why Evans limits the study to this period seems rather arbitrary. Certainly the bulk of nuclear movies have been made in the years after 1964, but it is specifically those produced within the postwar Hollywood system that interest her. There is nothing inherently wrong with Evans' defined criteria for selecting these films, nor the breadth ofher study; merely it is the frequent inconsistencies which lessen the impact of her findings. Even at the definitional level there are problems. Over the course of the introduction Evans continually contradicts her stated parameters. After announcing the study commences in 1946 (1) there is an incomplete discussion ofseveral 1945 movies . Next, the study is defined as starting in 1947 (15) and later on the same page, 1949. Similarly, the book is confusingly rendered as concluding in either 1964 or 1965. Nor is the work strengthened by a highly derivative time-line ofsignificant nuclear events run in parallel with a chronology offilms which Evans defines as "nuclear." This taxonomy (which commences in 1945 and ends in 1965) is full oferrors and omissions. For example, StrategicAir Command is cited twice (1955 and 1957); the first U.S. nuclear submarine is listed as developed in 1960, six years too late; and the allegorical White Heat is cited as an overt nuclear film, contradicting her own definition that a motion picture must make "specific reference to atomic war or its aftermath, atomic testing and its effects, radiation, atomic technology, postatomic holocaust societies on earth or imagined planets, or atomic scientists" (15). A passing glance at the first few years of the chronology suggests that from Evans' own criteria she neglects movies such as Shadow ofTerror, Flight to Nowhere, The Best Years ofOur Lives, and Rendezvous 24—to name a few. There are far too many errors to detail here (most of which judicious editing should have eliminated), but a representative howler is Evans' claim that the reason for studio special effects creating the A-bomb explosions in MGM's official Manhattan Project docudrama The Beginning or the End? was that "actual footage of atomic explosions was unavailable to Hollywood at the time." Despite the fact that this type of footage had been used in drama features (and newsreels) within weeks of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. Evans is at her best when describing the multitude of economic influences affecting Hollywood such as antimonopolisation legislation, official government propaganda campaigns, the impact of television, the emergence of independent B-movie producers in the mid to Iate-1950's, and the substantial baby-boomer market emerging around the same period. However, the analysis of individual movies and their newly auteurist B-film independents is eroded by omission. After highlighting Roger Corman's industry impact several nuclear films are discussed but the filmmaker's generically significant postatomic Teenage Caveman is noticeablely absent from the book. Similarly, the veracity ofher arguments is often undermined by erroneous conclusions. After discussing films which address postnuclear scenarios Evans claims that " despite their individual plot variations, these films never suggest that the human race would not survive a full-scale nuclear confrontation. Humans, albeit in...