Certainly not the middle

A movie that I wasn't certain whether or not I'd seen before showed up on TCM some time back, so I recorded it: The Beginning or the End. Eventually I got around to watching it, and as far as I could tell I hadn't seen it before. A search of the blog claims that I certainly hadn't blogged about it anyway, so now that it's coming up again on TCM. it's time to rectify that oversight with this post. That airing is early tomorrow, April 4, at 4:00 AM.

The movie starts off with one of the more unique framing scenes I can think of. A time capsule is being prepared, only to be opened in the year 2446 which would from the point of the movie be 500 years in the future. A spokesman on the film in the time capsule talks about the development of the atomic bomb, and that the movie the people of 2446 would be about to watch is the documentation of that effort, how it ended that war in the distant past, and the hope that the atom could be used for peaceful purposes....

Back in the late 1930s, Matt Cochran (Tom Drake playing one of the fictional characters in the movie) is a graduate student who with some professors is working on the idea of nuclear fission. This of course results in energy being released, along with the realization that the energy could be used to make a bomb. Several of the professors of the day, like Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn) and Enrico Fermi (Joseph Calleia) feel that President Roosevelt should be informed of this. After all, war was coming to Europe, and it was pretty obvious that if scientists in America could figure all this out, certainly scientists in Nazi Germany would figure it out too.

Research continues on a small scale until December 1941, which is of course when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, sending the Americans into the war. President Roosevelt authorizes a covert spending of some billions of dollars for Oppenheim and the other scientists to figure out a way to weaponize the splitting of the atom, which of course has to be a controlled reaction since, if it can't be stopped during development, it's the places where the research is being done that will get blown up.

The military point man for all this is Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves (Brian Donlevy), with his second in command being Lt. Col. Jeff Nixon (Robert Walker; and again as far as I'm aware another of the fictional characters). Sites are set up in Illinois where Fermi was based; in Oak Ridge, TN; and in out-of-the way Alamagordo, NM. With a war being on, Americans are portrayed as happy to move out to help the government's war effort, although they have no knowledge of what the government is trying to do.

Now, since this is all based on history, we know that that first controlled nuclear bomb is detonated at Trinity in July, 1945. Harry Truman is at the Potsdam Conference, and it's his job to make the decision to actually use the bomb against Japan in Hiroshima and then Nagaski. Cochran is one of the civilians sent out to make certain the US bombers who have been running the mission will know how to deal with this special new kind of bomb.

The Beginning or the End is of course based on real historical events. However, liberties had to be taken with the story for a bunch of reasons. One is of course security; the movie was made only about a year after the end of World War II, and there was still a large amount that was classified and couldn't be revealed. There's also the fact that apparently, real people still alive had veto power over their portrayal in movies at the time. Several of the real scientists, notably Niels Bohr, didn't want to be used, necessitating more changes. The biggest reason, however, was the dramatic one for the perceived benefit of the audience. That's why the love story between Cochran and his wife (Beverly Tyler), as well as a secondary romance between Nixon and his girlfriend (Audrey Totter), are shoehorned into the movie.

It's these sops to the moviegoing public that make the movie one that's not so well remembered today, due to their lessening the dramatic power of the movie. It was only a few years later that Above and Beyond about the Enola Gay was released, with more realistic stuff coming out as the Cold War was winding down and culminating with the movie Oppenheimer a few years back. The Beginning or the End is competently enough made, but it does have the marks of MGM and the Hollywood studio system all over it, both for good and bad.