The Beginning or the End

I remember certain scenes from this movie, which I saw only once, on television when I was a child. I've watched many documentaries and movies on the subject since, and have read several books on the development of the A-Bomb, because I saw this movie when I was young. It was absorbing for me. I do remember the scene where one of the bomb assemblers drops some of the radioactive material and is overcome from the radiation. This scene was repeated in the movie "Fat Man and Little Boy." I have been looking for this film for years on television, with no success. I would think that Turner Classic Movies would play it if it were around.

Someone, find this film! Oh, so interesting a movie.

Americans were almost as shocked by the emergence of the terrible new atomic weapon as anyone. Naturally as the surprise wore off the public became curious about the bomb's backstory since the development was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war. This MGM production was one of the first to bring that secret history into neighborhood theatres.

Of course, being Hollywood and concerned with box office, liberties were taken as the credit crawl states. Nonetheless, the account seems a reasonable one from tentative beginnings to worrisome testing to final delivery. The movie gives some attention to the moral reservations involved, but these are over-ruled by the belief that if we don't get the bomb first, the Nazis will.

The film was made during that brief interval between the end of the World War and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As a result, the script is freed from political constraints that would have colored the account had it been made, say, five years later. Thus there's a hopeful air that the new technology will be used for peaceful purposes now that war has become "unthinkable".

Perhaps the film's chief value lies in just that sort of comparison between the onset of the nuclear age and present day. In fact, war was not made obsolete by nuclear technology, but limits were placed on how far the combatants should go in pursuing their aims. Even so, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 came apparently within a hair's breadth of a nuclear outbreak, while civil defense drills of the 1950's emphasized surviving a nuclear exchange. Clearly, the Cold War had not fulfilled the hopes expressed in the film.

Note also the welcoming line accorded the moguls from America's major industries, e.g. General Electric, who were being recruited to help with the project. Cynics might regard the coming together of big government and private industry as the symbolic beginning of the now notorious "military-industrial complex" that dominates so much of the contemporary economy. Note also how easily government seizes property and relocates its owners to other locales. Here the seizure is portrayed in a cooperative and problem-free manner for understandable reasons. The subtext, however, clearly implies the growth of government in the name of national security.

The film itself understandably plays up a human interest angle by inserting the two young men, Walker and Drake, and their girls at various points. Actually, the screenplay does this pretty skillfully without interrupting the flow, that might otherwise become a distraction. My one complaint is the final scene which really is spread on with an unnecessary ladle, replete with heavenly choir, etc. It's clear that the producers wanted the audience to exit on a decidedly reassuring note following the distressing scenes of a nuclear-devastated Hiroshima and the onset of a threatening new age.

Too bad that the film has become so obscure. Critics largely dismissed the film because of its sentimental side, especially the last scene. However, as an historical artifact, the movie may outrank the value of any other of that year. On the whole, the screenplay puts difficult events in a positive light, but by no means does it overlook the moral dilemmas that arise at key points. In short, it's no whitewash of the complex decisions taken.All in all, whatever one's views on the ethical issues, the film provides an important snapshot of how the nuclear age was first presented to an anxious audience in a popular forum. And in that important sense, the strip of film amounts to more than just another movie.

It has been about 25 years since I last saw the movie, but I throughly enjoyed it, and wanted to see it again. I thought is was a well done docu-drama. It may have some Hollywood in it, but I thought it was a reasonably accurate account on the development of the A-bomb. I hope that some day it will be printed for home viewing.

Although the far more realistic Fat Man And Little Boy deals better with this subject, The Beginning Or The End still is a fine interpretation of the events leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima. No really big star names are in this film probably for the better giving it a nice ring of authenticity.

Playing the parts of General Leslie Groves and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer the partnership of the military and science that created the atomic bomb are Brian Donlevy and Hume Cronyn. Both bear more than a passing resemblance to the real people.

The Manhattan Project, the overall name for the effort to create a super weapon to bring a short end to World War II and get it before the Axis did was probably the best kept secret in all of a human history. I have to say it because it involved the efforts of a few thousand people at the various sites at White Sands, Oak Ridge, UCLA, Chicago and of course Manhattan. My father did his wartime service at Oak Ridge and he was just a regular GI and still had no real idea himself what he was doing there.

Fat Man And Little Boy is far more introspective dealing with the moral decision to use the bomb on a live target. The Beginning Or The End comes down very hard and unquestionably on the rightness of Truman's decision to drop the bomb. Both presidents Roosevelt and Truman are here and played by Geoffrey Tearle and Art Baker respectively.

The peaceful uses of atomic energy are also discussed and trumpeted. Four younger players Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, and Audrey Totter represent a quartet of idealistic young people working on the project who talk about a much better world that atomic energy can create. One of them dies in this effort. As for the better world we've reassessed atomic energy in the wake of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. With our dependence on oil however, nuclear energy is once again being reassessed as an alternative.

The Beginning Or The End still holds up well today with Donlevy and Cronyn heading an impeccably cast ensemble.

The idea for this film was brought to the studio(MGM) by Donna Reed, whose high school science teacher had written to her about the secret WW11atomic bomb research project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Later, Donna and her husband, Tony Owen, received a $50,000 finders fee for this contribution. Always a contentious project, cooperation came from the army, including General Groves, manager of the Manhattan Project and from top scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer, at Berkeley, and Albert Einstein, at Princeton. President Truman knew about the film and met with the producer. The script went through a lengthy development with columnist/screenwriter Bob Considine, and Clark Gable was originally in mind for the Robert Walker part. The Tom Drake scene, scattering a "going-critical mass" with his unprotected hand, is based on an actual incident, and the scientist who did it at the Chicago research lab (and possibly saved a good section of the city), died as a result.

Not successful at the box office, the studio rationalized the picture was too soon after the war and too realistic: audiences were not able to assimilate a story about nuclear energy in the late '40s, they were terrified of the bomb, of radiation fallout; pictures of Hiroshima were still in the news..

The film walks a fine line between fact and fiction (it received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary), but how effective was softening a docu-drama with a fictionalized love story?. The atomic "pile" was constructed on a sound stage, and the shots of the B-29 formation seem an appropriate metaphor for the film's subtext, the power of the nascent military/industrial relationship... moving forcefully ahead into the unknown.