Ladybug Ladybug

Back when I was at my old place and had a physical DVR, I recorded a TCM showing of a movie that at the time was new to me, Ladybug Ladybug. I didn't do a post on it since I thought it hadn't been released on DVD, but am wrong since Kino Lorber put it out on Blu-ray back in 2020. Anyhow, I recently noticed that it was also on one of the streaming services, so I decided to watch it.

The movie is supposedly based on a real incident that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and was released a little over a year later, at the very end of 1963. A school in a semi-rural area has a civil defense alarm that theoretically warns them of pending disasters, like a version of the present-day Emergency Alert System. (If you've ever come across 1950s radios with little triangles at 640 and 1240 AM, those were for the old system.) As we know, there was never a real-life national alert, and this old system wasn't designed for local alerts like tornado warnings or other severe weather that the current system is used for, so it mostly got used for preparedness alerts, making the teachers and students practice on a regular basis.

Anyhow, one day one of the teachers hears a buzzer and sees a light go on and stay on, which is different from the normal routine. The teacher asks the principal, Calkins (William Daniels) what to do, and he determines that this would be the signal that would be sent if there was an imminent nuclear strike. Is it a real nuclear war, or is this a false alarm. Calkins tries to call around, but gets a busy signal from the rest of the school district and the people who would or should know.

So Calkins starts a "go-home" drill, in which the teachers group students by where they live, and walk the students home. Nobody knows what's really going on, so of course everybody begins to fear the worst, with teachers trying to keep students calm and students trying to figure out what they'll do if a bomb actually comes.

Now, this is where I felt the movie had a substantial plot hole. I mentioned those radios above, and you'd think that one of the staff members at the school would have think to use the car radio or else have a transistor radio in the principal's office or somesuch. Even if the "official" civil defense frequencies weren't being used, in the case of a real emergency all of the other radio stations would be broadcasting important information. Indeed, this plot hole is sort of addressed when one of the students gets home. Her mom (a young Estelle Parsons) is a housewife who is doing the ironing and listens to the radio, informing the girl that there's no news on the radio, and would they be playing such peppy music in a real emergency?

Having said that, the movie is pretty good even in spite of the serious plot hole. The rest of the character motivations seem mostly realistic, and some of the responses are mildly uncomfortable. And with a cast that has a lot of children, none of them are obnoxious beyond how far any of them panic over the threat of nuclear war.

Ladybug Ladybug is a little movie that doesn't have a whole lot going on, and is in some ways pretty dated, but it's still absolutely worth a watch.