Hey Newton,
I was a fairly young lad when I first saw this film 64 years ago, and I just finished watching it again a few minutes ago. There is a lot of buzz in the media about how we were practically paralyzed by the cold war, but I do not remember things that way. We never did any "duck and cover" stuff at my schools, and my hometown was host to a very large Olmstead Air Force Base. I never seemed to feel the cold war as is so often depicted by media today.
Having said that, however, I clearly remember seeing this film in 1952, and it certainly did have an impact on me. Washington, DC and Boulder Dam were very iconic to me then even though I had no idea what the word "icon" meant at the time. Seeing the capitol invaded was shocking to me, and "seeing" Boulder Dam demolished and the family drowned has remained in my memory banks all this time. I also remember seeing the bar patrons wake up from their hypnotic trance at the end, and I remember feeling relieved to find out it was all a dream.
While this film will never make my top 500 films, it did have an impact on me that I have remembered all my life. Was I frightened? I would not say I was traumatized, but I was "bothered" at least until the end of the film when the whole trance thing was revealed. Was it hokey? Absolutely, given my watching it through my now very old eyes. The whole jingoistic nature of the film never meant a thing to me in 1952, and seems just silly to me now, but the film did have an impact on me way back then.
It was good to see it again for the second time, but I am pretty sure I would not watch it again even if I lived another decade.
Best wishes,
Dave Wile
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NewtonFigg
8 years ago
The scariest Cold War drama was on the TV show Medic, an episode called Flash of Darkness which depicts the aftermath of an atomic bomb attack on America. I can remember lying awake at night listening anxiously to planes I could hear. One plane, which I eventually identified as a Constellation, used to scare the bizness out of me because it sounded so heavy and sinister. The scariness matched the daytime air raid drills we had at school, but they were only academically scary, like fire drills. We went through them and they gave us a break from dull studies, but there was no apparent clear and present danger.
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hobnob53
8 years ago
I went through the same sort of stuff in the very late 50s and 60s, but nothing alarmed me as a kid more than some movies with unsettling (more than "scary") scenes, such as the ones davidwile talked about. I first saw this movie on late-night TV in the mid-60s and the parts he spoke of (bombing Hoover Dam, invading the Capitol, the atomic-bombing of New York, where I lived) were very worrying to me, even though I thought the film was fake, stagey and with way too much stock footage. Obviously it was made for adult audiences but I don't think the filmmakers took its potential impact on young kids into account when making it.
Hedda Hopper, a reactionary right-winger, gave the film one of its few positive reviews, summed up by her widely-publicized line, "It will scare the pants off of you!" She wished. But from the way I and my friends reacted to it over half a century ago, it did alarm young minds. Good work, Al Zugsmith: scaring -- or is it scarring -- children!
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