Fat Man and Little Boy, Old Man and Blind Woman
I was lured to THE DAY AFTER TRINITY, a documentary on the Manhattan Project and its results, not just by a desire to do my homework before seeing OPPENHEIMER, but because it’s co-written by David & Janet Peoples, authors of TWELVE MONKEYS and UNFORGIVEN. They collaborated on the script with director Jon Else, and the result is sold structure and an intelligent voice-over spoken by default narrator Paul Frees.
But the unique interest of documentaries often lies elsewhere, in the capturing of moments of actuality. So for me the strongest moments are in the interviews with scientists and other interested parties.
Robert Server was one of Oppenheimer’s graduate students. He tells a story about going to Japan to investigate the effects of the bomb. He’s brought back a piece of the wall of a schoolhouse, and he explains how the shadow of the window frame has been burned into it, thereby evidencing that the bomb had gone off at the correct height. He’s so caught up in this interesting fact that he smiles.
Then there’s a pause, wisely included by the filmmakers, where Server seems to realise that this is something more than or other than a fun science fact. And his smile goes away. My first impression was off a string being cut and his face falling, but on rewatching it feels more like an active retraction: the smile is pulled back into his head like a welcome mat being withdrawn.
The other jaw-dropper is an interview with a civilian witness to the first atomic test, who recounts driving nearby (but not TOO nearby, thankfully) when her detonation occurred. “And my sister, she said ‘What happened? …and she got to see the light…” Since this lady isn’t a professional storyteller she’s kind of omitted the lede here, but fortunately the filmmaker knows the story and prompts her: “Was there anything odd about your sister asking about the light?”
“Yes, because she was blind.”
shadowplay 
July 18, 2023 at 4:09 pm
The discourse of the bomb in America is one of those weird third rails where there’s such a divergence between government and the public view. I know a lot of people make the argument that the bombings were justified to expedite the end of a war without a Japanese Invasion (Paul Fussell famously articulated it, and even Samuel Fuller admitted in A Third Face that he felt that way in 1945 though he hints that’s not the case afterwards which Shock Corridor bears out).
But there’s virtually nothing in popular culture that bears that out. I found out today that Norman Taurog in 1947 made a government sanction propaganda movie about the Manhattan Project called “The Beginning or the Ending” and it’s the earliest film about Oppenheimer. It was full of lies justifying the bombing (including the claim that they sent leaflets over Hiroshima warning them which isn’t true at all, and kind of the opposite intent which was total surprise) and the public rejected it. Earlier this year I visited the National Air and Space Museum Annexe in Virginia next to Dulles Airport and it’s this huge hangar with a display of famous planes. Tucked in a corner is Enola Gay which has had difficulty in any public exhibition and now just hangs in a corner on the side.
It’s one of those ‘glad you have it, not happy about how you got it’ things. America likes to comemorate World War II and the victory but awkwardly shuffles anytime the bombing comes up.
July 18, 2023 at 11:24 pm
Brian Donlevy as General Groves is very amusing casting, somehow. Casting Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer is to neglect the man’s sex appeal, which Nolan seems to grasp.
In the documentary above, various scientists say they hoped the bomb might be dropped on an unpopulated area to convince Japan to surrender. It probably wouldn’t have done the job, but they had at least two more bombs up their sleeves. The fact that they went immediately to destroying a city is unpardonable (a city they’d left undamaged, the better to show off their new weapon’s devastating effect).