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| CATEGORY: | Video |
| DIRECTOR: | Joseph McCarthy (II) |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 1982 |
| MANUFACTURER: | First Run Features |
| MPAA RATING: | NR (Not Rated) |
| FEATURES: | Black & White, Color, Original recording reissued, NTSC |
| TYPE: | Documentary, Feature Film Comedy, Feature Film-comedy, Movie |
| MEDIA: | VHS Tape |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
| UPC: | 720229907170 |
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Customer Reviews of The Atomic Cafe
Atomic Cafe A great documentary (with a dark, ironic, humorous side) of American culture as shaped by the Cold War (paricularly 1950s and 1960s). I use parts of this in a class I teach, and the students love it. How can you go wrong with the Duck and Cover turtle song and the kid riding his bike in an oven mitt to protect against an unexpected blast?!
Not funny
Yeah, those folks in the 50's sure were paranoid and gullible. Ha ha. How anyone could possibly think that the subject of nuclear holocaust and the fear thereof could be milked for a few laughs is pathetic. But even if this film was entirely based on a fictional threat the vast majority of its fitful stabs at humor require a deeper state of inebriation than I would care to endure.
Frightenly funny
I saw "Atomic Cafe" when it first came out in 1982, and the film has lost none of its zip in the intervening years. The film is a montage of military and civilian footage of Americans attempting to deal with the destructive enormity of atomic power, overlain with the cheesiest A-bomb related period music. Starting with an interview with an unapologetic Paul Tibbetts (who flew the Enola Gay on its bombing run over Hiroshima) through the Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debates" of the 1950s, the film takes us on a wild and irreverent ride through an America terrified by the prospect of instant annihilation.
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>What's neat is that the movie is not narrated except by the voices of the times. President Eisenhower urges America (in its consumer greatness) not to panic. Bert the Turtle teaches a generation of children to duck and cover when they see the atomic flash. Government films urge the country into fallout shelters where they can wait a few minutes before coming up to take a look around and start the arduous job of straightening the picture frames knocked askew by the blast. Catholic clergy are filmed dispensing the government to build the bomb and permitting homeowners to stock "protective devices" in their shelters against those poor souls trying to get in.
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>The torrent of disinformation and misinformation is fascinating, and would be funnier if the possibility of nuclear war were not so real. Ironic too is the population's level of trust in a government clearly unwilling to level with it about the level of destruction that the bomb would perpetrate.
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>The film mis-stepped only once, in allowing for sympathy to the Rosenbergs. Subsequent years have shown that they most probably did give nuclear secrets to the Soviets. I can feel pity for their children and abhor their executions without excusing their wickedness.
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>"Atomic Cafe" does have an agenda. By juxtaposing pictures of children hiding under beds and school desks with images of the obliteration of bombed test homes, it makes clear the fact that nuclear war is not the mostly-survivable thing that might lead some to complacency about atomic attack. The film does not stint on showing the horrors of nuclear attack and fallout. As such, it has done a great service by laying out the true cost of atomic warfare as well as of blindly trusting those who control the detonation of those awful weapons.
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>The DVD extras are nothing special -- little more than trailers and credits.