Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen TEMPS PERDU THE FABULOUS FIFTIES THE ATOMIC CAFE gets its title from a real cafe out West that has a mushroom-shaped cloud painted on its sign. The sign only appears in the film briefly,...
...On the other hand, when another little town, St...
...The domination of national politics by family wealth and corporate Political Action Committees fostered by the Federal Elections Act now threatens the open politics of Minnesota...
...The time limit he faces and the certainty of his doom give a convincing desperation to his search for answers...
...Like the kids in Diner, which I will discuss in the next issue, they seem to have been spared by their own ignorance and naivete, by sheer, dumb luck...
...It glows in the dark...
...As Sen...
...This is another of those times when the right candidate and the real issues come together...
...Barry Levinson's Diner is set in Baltimore in 1959 and portrays a group of young friends who congregate at the local greasy spoon to which the title refers...
...They try to make the mentality of the fifties blatant enough to be shocking...
...Instead, it's so blatant, it's amusing, almost endearing...
...Then we'll go upstairs and look around, see if it's all right to clean up...
...Yet his faith in the Rosenbergs'guilt remained as unshakable as the faith that the goverment had to build bombs to keep America strong...
...All I did was notarize one little paper...
...A movie I remembered that ushered in the decade in more ways than one, for instance, was a 1949 thriller called D.O.A...
...In it Edmond O'Brien is a man who's been poisoned and has only twenty-four hours to find out who did it, and why, before he dies...
...It's about how the bomb fit in with the general state of mind...
...Loader is a nostalgic look back at the period, a regretful memory of an innocence now lost...
...Mark it 'Dead on Arrival,' " the captain replies...
...GIs literally faced the blast during "Troop Test Smoky" in Nevada...
...George, Utah, was threatened by fall-out from a nuclear test, everyone took it in stride...
...He did say that the heritage of America is one of greatness...
...A little later the same man appears in a living room that looks only mildly ransacked...
...In between this opening and closing, the film shows us again and again how optimistic, how downright cheerful, Americans were in the face of nuclear annihilation...
...An unidentified witness tells how Ethel Rosenberg had to be strapped into the electric chair a second time when doctors realized she wasn't dead yet, and after her body was again jolted with a current a plume of smoke arose from her head to hang under the skylight of the chamber...
...McCarthy helped shape the proud history of the Minnesota DFL in American politics during his five terms in the House of Representatives and two terms in the United States Senate...
...The filmmakers spin a number of hit platters from the fifties with lyrics about the bomb...
...He did not even say he was destined for it...
...Reminders of it were everywhere...
...He moved their minds and stirred their hearts...
...A pop tune from the Korean War says, "There'll be fire, dirt, and metal flyin' all around...
...The Atomic Cafe is not just about fifties' attitudes toward the bomb, but about the whole state of the nation then...
...He not only served every proper interest of Minnesota citizens, but earned a national and international reputation as a leader of uncommon courage and prophetic insight...
...Like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some Japanese fishermen who were accidentally caught in a rain of radioactive soot from a test became invisible men to Americans...
...People not only took for granted the necessity of tests like those which obliterated Bikini Atoll or the Castle-Dravo experiment with the H-bomb in 1954, they virtually ignored evidence of the human devastation nuclear blasts caused...
...A fellow interviewed as he emerges from his shelter tries to look on the bright side...
...How else could they have survived...
...The authorities will tell us what to do now...
...Playing down the danger of the latter complemented nicely the exaggeration of the former...
...He did not say he possessed it...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.Minnesota can make it happen Return Eugene McCarthy to the Senate We are happy that Eugene McCarthy has accepted the challenge that must be made in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party primary in 1982...
...The man reporting this was clearly shaken by the sight...
...We don't believe we have sheer, dumb luck any more...
...Can you also remember how the town got reduced to these abnormal proportions...
...Only Minnesota voters can return Gene McCarthy to the Senate, but we need your help in the weeks ahead...
...He said that this is a time for greatness...
...If General MacArthur drops the a-tomic bomb...
...We've been lucky," he says...
...then they ran toward "ground zero" as soon as the shock waves passed...
...It creeps into his last chapter despite his desire to inspire us to action...
...If ninety percent of the population dies in an attack, he reasons, there'll be plenty of food and water for the survivors to divide up...
...His absence has been manifest...
...The Atomic Cafe is not quite the companion piece it seems to Jonathan Schell's The Fate of Earth...
...We believe these words apply to Gene McCarthy in 1982 when he calls for absolute political confrontation of the kind which finally denied moral and political support to the Presidents conducting war in Vietnam...
...Please help us return politics to the people and return Gene McCarthy to the Senate...
...We'll wait a minute after it's all over," the father instructs the kids...
...The spooky aspect of the murder is the poison that O'Brien's anonymous, finally unreachable killers have used on him...
...You see, not everybody in the fifties believed the officer in The Atomic Cafe who tells soldiers participating in"Troop Test Smoky" that radiation is nothing to worry about...
...Remember "Thirteen Women and Only One Man in Town...
...An uncomprehending cop asks his superior, "How shall I mark the report...
...The Atomic Cafe begins with Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the "Enola Gay," talking about how routine the mission to Hiroshima was...
...At the end of the movie, a Civil Defense film shows a family crouching in their shelter during a Conelrad alert...
...His return will be most welcome...
...These were the same Americans who waited in fascinated horror for every detail of the execution of the Rosenbergs...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan says: "Gene McCarthy has been missed in the Senate...
...And radioactivity will burn them to the ground...
...Maybe the makers of The Atomic Cafe expect us to sense the anxiety behind the propaganda, to hear in the insistent confidence they show us a shrill and panicky note...
...I don't think their material works that way, though...
...All he learns is that he's accidentally involved in some kind of international intrigue over a rare metal known as "uridium...
...In and out of Congress, McCarthy has been in the front rank of political leaders willing to face the hard issues of peace and justice - nuclear proliferation and militarization of foreign policy, corporate feudalism and bureaucratic power, human rights and civil liberties, economic opportunities and welfare rights, and control of the IRS, the FBI, and the CIA...
...Like Levinson's film, that made by the Rafferties and Ms...
...Anything with which a culture is thus pre-occupied has to have its darker side, though, and I think The Atomic Cafe would be more effective had it acknowledged the fifties' paranoia that was just as ubiquitous, if not as obvious, as bravado about the bomb...
...he pleads with his last breath...
...That era is the fifties, and I point out the peculiarity of the title only because of the coincidence that another current release dealing with the same era has a similar title...
...As of March 1, McCarthy's DFL opponent, Mark Dayton, reported personal funds of more than $1.8 million out of a total of $1.9 million...
...Republican David Durenberger reported contributions of $1.3 million...
...But with his wisdom comes a certain doubtfulness about whether we can save ourselves...
...The sign only appears in the film briefly, but for some reason the notion of a diner must have seemed to Jayne Loader and Kevin and Pierce Rafferty, the makers of the film, symbolic of the whole era their documentary depicts...
...In our present, knowing despair, it's hard not to envy the innocence of the people in The Atomic Cafe...
...The songs are included for the same reason that the sign advertising "The Atomic Cafe" is: to indicate how thoroughly the bomb penetrated the popular imagination of the fifties...
...When a concerned mother hears on the radio that the children at school will be kept inside during recess, she breaths a sigh of relief and goes back to her knitting...
...A cartoon turtle shows kids how to "Duck and Cover" as soon as they see the flash...
...Essentially Loader and the Rafferties see the hysteria about Communism and the calmness with which people contemplated a nuclear holocaust as two sides of the same social coin...
...We remember the eloquent words spoken by Eugene McCarthy in behalf of another great Democrat, Adlai Stevenson: "There was one man who said: Let's talk sense to the American people...
...On the one hand, a little town in the Midwest became so obsessed with the Red menace that the people put on a kind of medieval morality play about what it would be like if the Commies took over...
...Schell's book possesses an honesty and an unexaggerated realism that is unparalleled in the literature on nuclear war...
...A shift in the wind brought the cloud toward the town, but authorities assured the locals that all they had to do was stay inside for an hour...
...God must have been on the side of a people as simple-minded as these Americans...
...You're helping yourself...
Vol. 109 • July 1982 • No. 13
