ATOMIC OPERAS

...Whatever nostalgia this may evoke for ante-television times of newspaper prestige and influence must eventually provoke a measure of doubt concerning the educational value of this kind of journalism—and, by reasonable projection, this kind of cinema...

...Lines of empty, silent streets repeat a now familiar pictograph of an ascendant language for describing the world following atomic war—as articulated, for example, in Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959) and Ranald Mac-Dougall's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959...

...The people purchasing this or that apocalypse know what they are buying, the ceaseless drumming of advertising having called them most carefully...

...The former attitude may well trouble the moralist or statesman, at any time of peril...

...Similarly, the reactions of his model family follow careful lines of vicarious precedent—even to playing an antique space-age joke straight in retreating to a cave in a remote part of a favorite hunting ground...

...From the moment the vacationing family, led by Milland himself as the father, notices the terrible illumination of the sky, and the tell-tale cloud over where Los Angeles had been, there unfolds a cold prediction of the behavior of neighbors and strangers in first panic and extended chaos...

...The grimy newsroom detail and gritty dialogue contribute to a certain old-fashioned aura about the film, despite the topical urgency of what is being said, and the futuristic imagery of what is being shown...

...From a screenplay by Jay Simms and John Morton, and directed by Ray Milland, the film is a straightforward rendering, carefully realistic in detail, of a now constant daydream of the struggle of a family to stay alive after the bombs have fallen...

...After all, it is an hallowed preachment of the movies that the decent folk should do their dirtiest reluctantly—albeit with quick-draw, iron-fisted proficiency— while Mom or the girl friend looks on, tentatively horrified...

...It comes as no surprise that Milland immediately comprehends the almost total breakdown of order, in which every encounter with others is a possible and even probable battle for life...

...For all their precise forebodings, and despite any occasional serious intentions, the films are likely to have as much value off-screen in affecting the omnipresent event as have detective stories in deterring actual murder...

...And insofar as they truly reflect the world of our times, in their coeval fictions and inevitably familiar prophecies, the movies may be showing us much more of our future than is being made visible on screen, and than we could bear seeing, if only we would look...

...This point is firmly made by Mil-land to his nineteen-year-old son, played without singing by singer Frankie Avalon, when it appears that the youth is beginning to enjoy the thrills of righteous violence a bit too plainly...

...or, when the imagined disasters are savored as creations of imagination, and judged primarily as works of art...

...But it is the latter that is more dangerous, as cynics and theologians have always recognized, in marking the seductive salvations of art...

...But making him a science desk man somehow adds to the period romanticism, amid all the newsroom realism...

...There have been so many bustling newsrooms in the movies, so many stop-the-press exposes and cries of noble journalistic outrage in the name of humanity and truth, so many hard-bitten reporters and hard-biting desk men...

...And, as has been remarked, it may be as much the fault of audiences as of the film itself that, finally, it only entertains, or instructs in such a way as to corroborate the vagrant certainties of popular newsprint about science—as, for example, that the order of weather, as well as of all nature, surely has been unbalanced by the scientists and all their learned madness...

...ATOMIC OPERAS by MARTIN S. DWORKIN TpHERE is a moment when prophe-cies of doom no longer terrify, when the horripilant repetitions themselves give reassurances, in the way of delicious bedtime tales...

...And it is in considering what the films are asking us to do, beyond joining uncommitted crowds in theaters, that we may judge any effectiveness in changing, rather than reinforcing, the attitudes of audiences—to any end of relaxing the fingers on the buttons now, or encouraging the survival of some decency later...

...Again, the realism asserts not only the plausibility, but the essential familiarity of the fantasy—in the classic "What would you do if . . ." form that offers incantations of dreadful imaginings to turn fear to wishful play...

...The intentions of Panic in Year Zero, however, point to other, more personal fears, and to present conceptions of future alternatives that may be even more corrosive and terrifying...

...The effect is to associate the two forms of sensationalism—by reason not of their power to shock, but their familiarity, built up of decades of mutual confirmation...

...The moment carries nice didactic irony, although the unqualifiable outrage is made to seem somehow deserved—or, at the least, inevitable...

...For all the reality of the shock in the theaters, its administration, following forms of so many familiar entertainments, carries its own catharses, providing conventional substitutes for thought and action...

...It's such a bore...

...As signs of worldly concern over any imminent disaster to the world, however, these atomic operas generally indicate more fascination than aversion...

...And it may reassure the former as much as the latter to have them said, not by conscience-stricken physicists or other plainly psychotic Faustians, but by knowing newspapermen—those traditional spokesmen, in didactic fiction, for the sovereign but inarticulate public...

...The more enjoyable the film, the less likely its therapeutic disturbance of complacencies, apathies, surfeits of senseless comfort, and witless peace of mind...

...And, it is no more than a reassertion of ancient moral values of the movies that sex and violence should be eventually conjoined, and with tasty rectitude, as father and son blast the vicious punks who have raped the family virgin, Mary Mit-chel...

...Played with discerning warmth by Leo McKern, he displays his awesome expertise with more wit than do the movies' usual academic know-it-alls...

...These are not too unlike the embittered, disillusioned, all-but-disinterested fellow in this film, played by Edward Judd, who finds himself again in his awakening feelings for a fresh new love, Janet Mun-ro, and in his professional observation of the disaster that is so much bigger than his personal defeat...

...The vivid images of the dying earth and its resigned or frenzied people inevitably recall countless newsprint sermons heralding world's end and judgment day, usually tinted to attractive shades of suspicious disparagement of scientists, for suitable Sunday services along with the comics and sports pages...

...These sad doubts might be relented, if only for once, if it were only possible for so superior an example as The Day the Earth Caught Fire to be seen without pleasure—if not altogether in fear and trembling...

...Some trouble has been taken to insist on realism in depicting these archetypal prophets, placing them in the office of an actual London newspaper (the Daily Express), complete with a living, fire-breathing editor (the flamboyant Arthur Christiansen, who drove the Daily Express for twenty-five years) playing himself and any editor with more than minimal competence...

...In their perilous anabasis, it is not unexpected that the mother, Jean Hagen, will stand four-square for the preservation of culture as well as civilization, passionately presenting the conscientious objections to all the suspicions, fortifications, and outright violences that Milland maintains—and demonstrates —are necessary for survival...

...And the matter may be less one of the artistic values of these films, than of the commitmerit of audiences...

...The realism in presenting the newspaper as the daily arbiter of reality is intended to emphasize the effect of the fantasy—of what happens to the world after it has been jarred out of its normal orbit by thermonuclear test explosions, unwittingly set off simultaneously by the Russians and the Americans...

...These post-atomic kids and noods, however, are pitiable or terrifying in their familiarity...

...The film, it should be said, is more than fair to the punks in having made the girl an exemplar, a sweet-sixteenager who protests bitterly that "This whole thing . . ." of struggling for survival—without cokes, telephones, and all the sacraments of adolescent American life— ". . . is a drag...

...The dramatization of atomic holocaust, for example, is by now an established genre, especially on screen, and has its devoted connoisseurs as well as its day-to-day consumers...

...For even as the people who may set off the bombs are our contemporaries, so are all the others we choose to fear or admire, for what they might be to live with after the worst has been said and done...

...Writer Wolf Man-kowitz, and his collaborator Val Guest, who also produced and directed the film, can claim full marks for earnest pro-survivalism...

...or, for so credible a foreboding as the more modest Panic in Year Zero to be taken more as warning, and less as morbid wishing...

...The newspaper milieu, however, puts a roto tinge of Suhday-supplement sensationalism upon the fiery explanations of how the earth is being roasted...

...When dooms become a genre of any art, prophecy is put up for sale...

...Another set of symbols denoting as many fearsome wishes as reasonable fears, presents the ultimate liberation of adolescent behavior in the aftermath of disaster and the certainty of doom...

...But in judging both the lesson and the entertainment in this film, as in The Day the Earth Caught Fire and others of what is a growing genre, it does make a difference whether we are being led not only to envision, but to enjoy the worst or the best we are capable of imagining about our possible future...

...So much horror and terror is sold so often in the theaters, to so little effect in exercising the endless horror and terror in the world, and to some dread measure of mirroring a perpetual destiny...

...The scenes of advancing desiccation, such as a grim postcard view of London Bridge gauntly spanning a parched-out Thames, may be compared with the special effects of the finest vintage science fiction—implying the recognitions intended in comparison...

...The Day the Earth Caught Fire, to be sure, has sincere purposes beyond those of traditional science fiction moralities...

...There even has been a sufficiency of once-promising writers trying to eschew the booze and pick up their careers after disastrous divorces or love affairs...

...A goodly number of the right things about saving humanity are said, and in well-aimed shards of dialogue jagged and brittle enough to keep sophisticated sentimentalists from becoming self-conscious, and clever enough not to offend the fanaticos of astounding stories...

...The carousing and vandalism of the kids of The Day the Earth Caught Fire are at once more forlorn and innocent than the rapine, pillage, and murder of the hoods of Panic in Year Zero...

...Such an outlook is surely comforting to many in the film's immediate audiences in Britain and the Commonwealth—although it may puzzle some to see the Daily Express playing at being neutral about anything...

...This time, the scientist-explainer making everything clear to the others in the cast—and to the audience—is not the familiar professor or highdomed researcher of innumerable space-age fantasies...

...The ominous recognitions draw both frank escapists and those yearning to promote the atomic operas as anti-atom audio-visual aids...

...The retaliation, of course, is obligatory in the canon of movie melodrama, once again raising the question of the kind of catharsis that is appropriate in dramatic works having purposes beyond escapist entertainment...

...Imputing journalistic objectivity also allows for some nice neutralism in placing blame...

...Such purposes, if it needs saying, may hardly be denied in considering something so explicit as is Panic in Year Zero about how we are likely to behave, and even how we ought to behave, in the situation that is so universally feared...

...While both The Day the Earth Caught Fire and Panic in Year Zero are fictions about what has followed atomic disaster, the former is plainly intended to say something about prevention: specifically, to cry halt to the testing of bombs and to all thinking that preparations for total warfare can be carried on endlessly without total judgment and penalty...

...By the time they may be telling themselves how shocking are the revelations of an impending future they have seen, the relevance of the work of imagination, that happens to be a movie, to any real present has been transformed...