If you take note of the year this film was made, then you'd know at once that it's going to be carefully crafted rah-rah, hooray-for-us propaganda......solemn, deadly serious, self-important, and deeply reverent and respectful in its depiction of all the real-life figures involved. By the time the final inspirational music swells up at the end.....MGM has taught you to learn to love the Bomb...and everyone who pitched in to think of it, fund it, make it and drop it.
The movie goes right off the self-importance scale at the start (which we can't love enough)...with the entire cast glumly assembled at Redwood National Forest to bury a copy of the movie in a time capsule scheduled for opening in 500 years. The BQ tingles at the very thought of the Redwood park peppered with buried MGM movies........we only wish modern science could keep us alive until 2517....so we can watch park employees (no doubt hovering over the ground with jet backpacks) break open capsules holding copies of "The Green Slime", "Harum Scarum" and "Where The Boys Are"....
Thankfully, MGM allows us to see the movie before it's interred deeper in the ground than Donald Trump's credibility.....
FDR whistles in astonishment (and First Pet Fala gravely barks) when told of the Bomb's potential 2 billion dollar price tag. That blank check gets turned over to Gen.Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy) and we're off to the atomic races with impressive montages of men and machinery building Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. (At one point, Donlevy buries his face in his hands, chuckling with grim irony over the millions he's spending. We doubt if the famously taciturn Groves ever did this, but it still stands as a strange, fun moment in the middle of all the deathly urgent bomb-making.) All of these goings-on are narrated by Dr.Atomic himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, as played by Hume Cronyn. Cronyn's Oppie appears as a calm, gentle-hearted soul here.....so nobody should hold their breath waiting for him to mutter "I am the Destroyer of Worlds" after the bomb goes off......
In its spirit of American can-do optimism, the movie glosses over the tortuous trials and errors of the Los Alamos scientists......though it does stage its own greatly sanitized version of a true post-war incident in which a Chicago scientist fatally irradiated himself to stop an accidental nuclear chain reaction. The MGM guy here,a pacifistic newlywed played by perennial boy-next-door Tom Drake, politely expires with a few beads of sweat on his forehead. (This incident gets a much more realistic take in 1989's "Fat Man and Little Boy",fully displaying John Cusack's agonizing radiation death throes...)
Then it's off to that round trip to Hiroshima on the 'Enola Gay'.......and it's here that the film wisely drops all its somber pontificating, posturing and preaching and simply shows the world's first atomic warfare attack and its aftermath (or at least as much of it as MGM felt it could allow a l947 audience to stomach) 'Enola Gay' crew members gaze in stunned horror as the plane flies over the devastated, mostly vaporized Japanese city. Seventy years later, this sequence still maintains its dramatic power.
The BQ's always been fascinated by atomic bomb history (and rest assured, we'll get to "Fat Man and Little Boy" in a future post)......so we're willing to forgive and overlook the traditional 1940's Hollywood schmaltz that heavily coats "The Beginning Or The End". Of course it justifies the bomb and its use on Japan......and but it's smart enough to know that civilization will have to make that choice inherent in the film's title. Therefore we'll cautiously detonate 4 stars (****).......yes, the movie's a product of its time, but the core (not the meltdown kind) still resonates. Sam Goldwyn was right.....it's dynamite.
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