Strangelove, Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, or even Franklin J. filmmakers and studios have thus felt much more comfortable dealing with the less concrete Cold War fears of global annihilation – e.g., Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Certainly not when you’re dealing with radioactive mushroom clouds, the incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, and the potential obliteration of the human race. Evilīut when it comes to America’s use of nuclear weapons, you can’t have a clear-cut separation between Good and Evil.
After all, in the last 75 years Hollywood’s World War II movies, from John Farrow’s Wake Island (1942) and Mervyn LeRoy’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001), almost invariably have presented a clear-cut vision of us (good guys) and them (vile villains). Human deaths in this other city totaled anywhere between 40,000-80,000.įor obvious reasons, the evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been a quasi-taboo in American films. Three days later, America dropped a second atomic bomb, this time over Nagasaki. Ultimately, anywhere between 70,000 and 140,000 people died – in addition to dogs, cats, horses, chickens, and most other living beings in that part of the world. 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima.
