THE BEGINNING OR THE END?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 425, 15 August 1947, Page 30

THE BEGINNING OR THE END?

(M-G-M)

INCE 55 nations have so far failed to find a way of handling the atom bomb, it was perhaps scarcely to be expected that M-G-M would

succeed. But even from Hollywood one didn’t look for anything quite like this. Considering the tragic scope of the subject and its moral and philosophical implications for all mankind, this account of the manufacture and use of the atomic weapon at Hiroshima is just about the equivalent of Oedipus Rex played by a fifth-rate vaudeville company. Though it doesn’t, because it obviously wasn’t allowed, tell us anything that isn’t common knowledge, the film certainly manages to convey the impression that the harnessing of atomic fission for war purposes was a long, difficult, expensive, and often tedious business. The object seems to be to baffle the onlooker with science; and those scenes of flashing lights, sizzling generators, leaping sparks, and tense-faced researchworkers, though a bit too reminiscent of Frankenstein and Co., are impressive enough, as also are the sequences showing the test at Alamagordo andthe wip-ing-out of Hiroshima. I don’t want to damn the film unreservedly: it may have some salutary effects, if only because it appears to support Professor Oliphant, who’ says that no nation going to war in the future, however well. armed, can avoid ‘the consequences, as against General Clay, who seems to want the U.S. Air Force to rule the world with atom bombs. But if a movie studio felt itself capable of tackling this subject-and I doubt if any is, yet-it would have done much better to secure the rights to John Hersey’s Hiroshima and put that on the screen. For this story needs.to, be told, as Hersey’s was, in terms of human teings; and these need to be the persons who suffered the terror. and agony of the bomb and not, as here;.a couple of simpering young women (Beverley Tyler and Audrey Trotter), an objectionably, cocksure and iffantile major (Robert Walker), and a depressed young scientist (Tom Drake). Other figures come and go in the story, some of them Tepresentations of such real people as Einstein, Roosevelt, and Truman-but all are unreal. . : Only in Tom Drake’s characterisation of the scientist who dies from his handling of uranium is there the faintest recognition of the moral issues raised by the use of the bomb: the othe? difficult but all-important aspects of the subject are either totally avoided or else emerge as a peculiarly fatuous and rather impious attempt by M-G-M to justify man’s ways to God. In the final scene, against a background of angelic choir, Lincoln statue, and ghostly presence, one of the girls reads a letter from her dead husband which contains such sentiments as "All ages before the discovery of atomic energy were the Dark Ages,"

and "Atomic energy is a hand "God has extended." Thus, with its customary mixture of high-pressure sales talk and crass sentimentality, does Hollywood weaken, cheapen, and vulgarise the supreme tragedy and dilemma of our age. The Beginning or the End? begins with an alleged newsreel shot of the film being sealed, up and deposited in a "time capsule" for the benefit of posterity, and ends"with a message to those who, presumably, will dig it up 500 years hence.gIf there are any human beings still around when that day dawns, the contents of the capsule may help them to understand a little better why 20th Century civilisation finally blew itself to bits-and perhaps why it was deserving of that fate. For, to borrow Time’s phrase, the "cheery imbecility" of this film would suggest that the men who made it, like some of those who have discovered the secret of atomic energy, were just not big enough for the "job.