NUKE THE KIDS!........BQ DUCKS AND COVERS WITH "LADYBUG, LADYBUG"

Ladybug Ladybug (1963)    Yes, boys and girls, once upon a time, a whole generation grew up with a mushroom cloud hanging over their heads........the very real threat of....uh....what Slim Pickens in "Dr. Strangelove" referred to as "Nookleer combat, toe to toe with the Rooskies!'

                When the Rooskies' Soviet Union finally collapsed, some folks foolishly thought the Cold War and Nuke-slingin' were things of the past.........heh, heh, heh, heh.......

                  Hardly.  Not when Russia's ruled by a KGB poison eel........and not when our very own Baby Orange dreams of nuking hurricanes and hires people who think nuclear war is winnable.........(we can imagine this idiot impersonating George C. Scott's Buck Turgidson in "Stranglove".......("Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed........I do say no more than 20 million killed.....tops..Uh, depending on the breaks"...)

                  So let's detonate an atomic throwback to that queasy era of bomb shelters, civil defense air raid sirens and 'duck and cover'  drills to help us baby boomers survive a nuclear blast in our classrooms........(the only vital instruction missing from that drill.....they forget to tell us to put our heads between our legs and kiss our sorry asses goodbye.....)

                 The tiny little movie "Ladybug Ladybug" based its grim story on a true incident.......in which the Principal of a suburban elementary school couldn't get through to anyone who'd explain why the school's Civil Defense alarm began to wail as if  Russian nukes were zoomin' in at any moment............

                  Following protocol, he evacuates the kids, busing out most of them and sending the kids who live within walking distance on homeward hikes, accompanied by teacher chaperones.....

                   And there's your set-up.......as the kids and teachers take their long, dread-laden stroll through country roads and farm fields........with the children indulging in all the accumulated myths, half-truths and fractured facts they've absorbed about what nuclear war's like.......

                    One girl offers her classmates sanctuary in her family's bomb shelter......and once inside, promptly declares herself a ruthless mini-dictator over the group, rationing out food and water and denying entrance to another girl she doesn't much care for.......

                     The outcast child, terrified beyond reason, desperately takes shelter in an abandoned, junked refrigerator.......and suffocates.

                      And the oncoming nuclear war?  Nothing more than a short circuit in the school's Civil  Defense alarm bell.

                      Quiet and modestly done, this film stays with you as subdued, yet powerful treatise  on an unthinkable war and its effect on children.......falling somewhere between 'Lord Of The Flies' and a typical Twilight Zone episode

                      It was the second film, after "David and Lisa" of director Frank Perry, who had an up and down, shaky career as an independent creator of small personal dramas.  Perry was never much of a skilled filmmaker, but he did bring out the best in his actors.......(Spineless in dealing with Hollywood executives, Perry's studio-backed films almost always ended up in editing room butchery.)

                     Perry would have been well-advised  to stick to ultra low budget efforts like 'Ladybug Ladybug'......flying so low on the cultural radar, no exec would ever think it was worth tampering with.......

                   It remains, now as it did then, a gut-punch that slowly but surely sneaks up on you......a understated but sharp reminder, in today's world overtaken by a buffoon and his simpering toadies,, that there's nothing winnable about 'Nooclear Combat'............4 stars (****)