Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Cold War
possible prequel to all those ‘‘life-in-the-radioactiveruins’’
quickies of the 1950s (Five, 1951; The Day the
World Ended, 1956; The World, the Flesh and the Devil,
1959). Here, the world is not imperiled by aggressive
ideologies but by neuroses—a US Air Force general
(Sterling Hayden), driven by impotence to rail against
the Communist threat to his ‘‘precious bodily fluids,’’
and a Soviet regime that invests in a cheap Doomsday
Machine because the people are clamoring for washing
machines. In a way, Kubrick’s film—a satire adapted
from a dead-straight novel, Red Alert (1958) by Peter
George (1924–1966)—is a sigh of relief that the world
has come through Korea and Cuba without self-annihilation,
but it is also an awful warning and a declaration
that a third world war cannot be won. Invasion USA
(1952) is the only American atomic war film to suggest
that after nuclear attack, the Communist enemy would
attempt to occupy the United States like stereotypical
conquerors. Later films (including the Yugoslav Rat,
1960) blame both sides equally, with war as likely to
result from accident or a failure of diplomacy. The ultimate
message of The War Game (1967) by Peter Watkins
(b. 1935) is that governments should not be trusted with
nuclear weapons, while Ladybug Ladybug (Frank Perry,
1963)—echoing an outstanding Twilight Zone episode,
‘‘The Shelter’’—goes so far as to suggest that civil preparedness
contributes to a breakdown of society, as shelter-owners
arm themselves not against the military enemy
but their own neighbors.
The 1960s saw many fantastical Bondian superspies
(the Flint and Matt Helm adventures), Strangelovian
satires (The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are
Coming!, Norman Jewison, 1966; The President’s
Analyst, Theodore J. Flicker, 1967), and ‘‘realistic’’
espionage dramas (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,
Martin Ritt, 1965; The Ipcress File, Sidney J. Furie, 1965)
riffing on the Cold War. Taking their cue from The
Manchurian Candidate, all these films tend to suggest
that ‘‘our side’’ is as bad (or, less often, good) as ‘‘their
side’’—the mission of the Spy Who Came In from the
Cold is to discredit a clever and idealistic Jewish East
German counterintelligence agent to save a former Nazi
working as a double agent for the West—and, eventually,
that the power elites of both sides are so dependent on
the Cold War to retain their positions that they have
become interchangeable.
As in so much later twentieth-century history, events
suggest George Orwell’s (1903–1950) novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), in which a permanent state of hostilities
is an excuse for the real war, waged by rulers
against the populace. From the mid-1960s, popular culture
shifted from worrying about the Communists to that
other deadly prong of the 1950s, rock and roll (representing
youth, rebellion, and even unrestrained capitalist
consumerism)—but was unsure whether to worry or
celebrate. With Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967),
Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), and Night of the Living
Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) offering counterarguments
to increasingly uncomfortable Americanist crusades
like John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), battle lines
were drawn for new wars, between young and old, powerful
and powerless, black and white, hip and square.
Old-style patriotism would resurge in the Reagan years
(1980–1988), but even the red-bashing Rambo is by no
means simplistic, as he grapples with masculinity, the
legacy of Vietnam, and America’s self-image. When the
Berlin Wall came down in 1989, few victory parades were
held in America. The movies were not there—round-theclock
news footage had told the story so quickly that it was
stale by the time a film (e.g., Frankenheimer’s The Fourth
War, 1990) could be made.
SEE ALSO Censorship; Ideology; War Films; World War II
FURTHER READING
Belfrage, Cedric. The American Inquisition, 1945–1960: A Profile
of the ‘‘McCarthy Era.’’ New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989.
Bernstein, Walter. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. New
York: Knopf, 1996.
Biskind, Peter. Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to
Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and
Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon,
1985.
Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in
Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Cole, Lester. Hollywood Red. Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1981.
Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and
Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997.
Kahn, Gordon. Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the Ten Who
Were Indicted. New York: Boni and Gaer, 1948.
Kazan, Elia. Elia Kazan: A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988.
McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle, eds. Tender Comrades: A
Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1997.
Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987.
Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking Press, 1980.
Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York:
Scribners, 1975.
Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction
Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 1, 1950–1957. Jefferson, NC, and
London: McFarland, 1982.
———. Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies
of the Fifties, Vol. 2, 1958–1962. Jefferson, NC, and London:
McFarland, 1986.
Kim Newman
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