Gotham Calling

Overall, this is one of the most coherent installments of Gotham Calling’s canon of Cold War cinema. For one thing, most of the entries below are political dramas (a genre I adore) in one way or another… At a time when Marvel was translating Cold War politics into jingoistic entertainment for youngsters, Hollywood increasingly churned out ‘grown-up’ speculative fictions about where the world might be heading in the near or far future (clearly, we were in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when shit just got real). To be fair, there was already quite a long lineage of films dramatizing the workings of government (going at least as far back as 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House, a jaw-dropping fantasy where the US president becomes a socialist dictator who solves the world’s problems), but the 1960s were a particularly high point for this type of movies, both within and outside the United States (I didn’t add it to the list because it isn’t as directly related to the Cold War, but Francesco Rosi’s Hands Over the City is also phenomenal). That said, for contrast, I’ve also included a couple of a entries focused on a new generation which grew up in the Cold War but didn’t necessarily identify with it in the same way as their parents.

61. The Best Man (USA, 1964)

The bitter political melodrama The Best Man portrays the race for a presidential nomination with notable authenticity (for the most part, at least). Needlessly to say, among the differences between the leading candidates (including Henry Fonda, playing, as usual, the face of liberal politics) are their views on the threat of communism and the ‘missile gap.’

62. Divided Heaven, aka The Divided Sky (East Germany, 1964)

East German cinema produced a number of fiction and non-fiction films about the Berlin Wall, usually validating the reinforced division (like in For Eyes Only, which I brough up last time). By the mid-60s, however, the focus had begun shift, with filmmakers emphasizing the painful personal toll of separation. Adapting a best-seller by Christa Wolf (who co-wrote the screenplay), Divided Heaven is a devastatingly beautiful drama about a doomed romance, told through a complex flashback structure and startling stream-of-consciousness editing, which manages to criticize some aspects of the GDR driving its citizens away (including the intolerant hardliners and a lack of opportunities) while being much more candid, nuanced, and even-handed than any western movie about this subject. Much of the story takes place shortly before the Berlin Crisis, but the Wall looms implicitly over the entire picture and is powerfully evoked through various visual motifs splitting up the screen.

63. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (UK/USA, 1964)

Deterrence based on mutually assured destruction rests on the assumption that everyone will act logically, but what happens when irrational, stupid, and fanatical people get into positions of power? That’s right, we’ve finally arrived at what is commonly – and deservedly – considered the greatest Cold War film classic… In this dark satire of the balance of terror, a deranged Air Force general manages to order an attack on the USSR (by exploiting a logical loophole in the system), so it’s up to the US President, an RAF captain, and a mad scientist (all of them played by Peter Sellers) to figure out how to prevent WWIII. Like other Stanley Kubrick pictures, Dr. Strangelove is about the dehumanizing logic of war, but on a larger scale and much funnier than usual. That said, rather than approaching the possibility of nuclear annihilation through all-around absurdist humor (like The Bed Sitting Room a few years later), the movie begins with a very deliberate deadpan tone before methodically ramping up the grotesquerie and silliness.

64. Fail Safe (USA, 1964)

Like in Dr. Strangelove, we get to be a fly-on-the-wall witness to top-level decision-making during a nuclear crisis, leading to an equally unforgettable ending. Despite the obvious links, however, Fail Safe stands apart from Kubrick’s masterpiece – and not just because of the very different tone (earnest drama instead of farce). Rather than human irrationality overriding the system, Fail Safe exposes a flawed system to begin with, one where we’re a mere technical glitch away from large-scale tragedy. Its polemic about human agency vs overreliance on impersonal computers, therefore, seems enduringly relevant today. (This also completes a trilogy of smart political thrillers starring Henry Fonda, whom we have seen trying to become Secretary of State in Advise & Consent and presidential candidate in The Best Man.)

65. Seven Days in May (USA, 1964)

Then again, when the US government tries to pursue nuclear disarmament, it has to face the hawks’ staunch opposition at home. Set in the near future, this gripping web of political intrigue showcases how the global conflict corrodes domestic democracy. Note that, while Seven Days in May is Rod Serling’s first script on this list, by then he had already written some of the most iconic pieces of Cold War fiction for The Twilight Zone (not to mention the UN-commissioned TV special Carol for Another Christmas, a comically heavy-handed update of Dickens’ novella where the ghosts convert a right-wing isolationist to the cause of global cooperation!).

66. Walking the Streets of Moscow (USSR, 1964)

Light as a feather, Walking the Streets of Moscow offers a lyrical, quasi-utopian depiction of everyday life in the Soviet capital. Bodies flow through urban space as if in a dance amidst young love and artistic dreams, the competition with the West largely implicit in the inconvenient military service and in the annoying neighbor who keeps playing records in English… This may not be what life was like – but it shows you what it allegedly aspired to be.

67. The 10^th Victim (Italy/France, 1965)

Indeed, not everyone imagined the future as one of grey totalitarian takeover or nuclear conflict. Best remembered for Ursula Andress’ gun bra, The 10^th Victim envisages doing away with wars by letting humanity vent out its violent instincts in the form of a global game where selected people hunt and kill each other. In a liberating contrast to Cold War grimness, we thus get the usual motifs of suspicion and deception displaced onto a psychedelic world where social and aesthetic values have evolved in ostensibly weird ways (including a bourgeois appreciation of comic books!). Beautifully shot, this is a cool, swingy mix of humor, sex, and fashion show, offering quite a prescient satire of reality TV. (1969’s The Gladiators and 1975’s Rollerball developed a similar premise, but through a realistic, downbeat tone that does not feel as fresh.)

68. The Bedford Incident (UK/USA, 1965)

The Bedford Incident reimagines Moby Dick off the coast of Greenland – only, instead of a white whale, the captain here is obsessed with hunting a Soviet submarine. An underappreciated gem.

69. The Ipcress File (UK, 1965)

The first (Western) anti-Bond thriller on this list, The Ipcress File takes what could’ve been the premise of a 007 mission – involving a missing scientist and mind control – and amusingly assigns it to Harry Palmer, a low-level anti-hero dispassionately working for a dreary, underfunded, bureaucracy-laden intelligence service. I’m sure Mick Herron is familiar with this one.

70. Loves of a Blonde (Czechoslovakia, 1965)

Concerned with the many frustrated young women working in his factory, in a village in the middle of Czechoslovakia, a supervisor convinces the People’s Army to change its military manoeuvres so that the soldiers can join the local girls for a big dance. Arguably the most delightful film of the Czech New Wave, Loves of a Blonde is a charming low-key dramedy with naturalistic performances, semi-improvised dialogue, and a delicate, organic pace. You can find in it a bittersweet depiction of life under socialism or a more universal tale about the perennial theme of young people looking for love (and sex).

We’re halfway through Gotham Calling’s tour of Cold War cinema. By this stage, it isn’t just the world situation that is rapidly changing, but filmic language itself. Apart from addressing the conflict from multiple national and ideological perspectives, most of the films below impress for the way they challenged the whole medium.

51. La Jetée (France, 1962)

Let us begin on a particularly high note… Although just 28-minutes long, the massively influential La Jetée has it all: World War III, post-apocalyptic dystopia, utopia, nostalgia, romance, telepathy, time-traveling paradoxes, and an experimental approach to visuals that still stands out today.

52. The Manchurian Candidate (USA, 1962)

A hallucinatory conspiracy yarn about soldiers brainwashed in the Korean War (one of whom is the stepson of a McCarthy-like senator). Way more bonkers than British cinema’s own quasi-simultaneous take on the brainwashing panic (the soap operatic The Mind Benders), this darkly comedic psychological thriller – which left a lasting mark in popular imagination – both caricatures the hysteria of the previous decade and disturbingly anticipates the paranoid mindset that would follow the JFK assassination. My use of pathologizing expressions is deliberate, as The Manchurian Candidate audaciously projects the protagonists’ (and presumably society’s) mental instability through disconcerting camera angles, bizarre line readings, jarring transitions, surreal imagery, and somewhat cryptic choices likely to prompt alternative readings of the story, especially regarding Eugenie’s character (2004’s remake gives this character a clearer role, but I much prefer her ambiguity here). Plus, Frank Sinatra does martial arts.

53. Nine Days of One Year (USSR, 1962)

Set in a nuclear research institute in Siberia, this remarkable drama focuses on the love triangle of a dedicated experimental physicist (who carries on despite having received deadly doses of radiation), a lively theoretical physicist (his cynical counterpart), and a frustrated wife (whose inner monologues we get to hear). As promised by the title, the film zooms in on a few selected days in their lives, grappling with dilemmas over science (from fusion power to space exploration), the political and ethical dimension of their work (should researchers be grateful for the war that funds their studies?), interpersonal relations, and, of course, mortality. Yes, it’s thematically heavy, but the cinematography and characterization make Nine Days of One Year aesthetically and emotionally rich as well.

54. A Prize of Arms (UK, 1962)

Besides delivering a nail-biting heist at a British army barracks, A Prize of Arms gains an extra layer of interest because the whole thing is set against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis, so this one also works as a microcosmic illustration of the UK’s threatened – and declining – military power.

55. The Damned, aka These Are the Damned (UK, 1963 [1961])

The title evokes Village of the Damned and some of that film’s imagery does echo here, loosely, but this is a much more offbeat concoction. An eerie and unsettling sci-fi piece (with a touch of incest psychodrama) set on the English coast, The Damned somehow brings together a youth gang, an extravagant sculptor, an unlikely pair on the run, and a secret military programme to prepare children to survive the upcoming nuclear holocaust.

56. For Eyes Only (East Germany, 1963)

I’m not gonna lie: as a spy thriller, this is a taut yet low-key affair (loosely based on actual espionage operations) that pulls off many of the usual tropes with average competence and some groovy music. What makes For Eyes Only stand out is that, because it’s an East German production, the film fully reverses the genre’s typical geopolitical perspective: the hero is a Stasi agent who infiltrates Western secret services to prevent an attack against the East (thus implicitly validating the defensive construction of a protective Berlin Wall…). It even finishes with a chase scene in which, for once, the protagonist is desperately trying to cross the border *into* the GDR! (Recently, the show Deutschland 83 started off with a similar premise, but it had such a cynical depiction of the East that it ended up falling for the usual Western stereotypes…  whereas For Eyes Only is the real deal, without any retroactive sense of irony or self-reflection.)

57. From Russia with Love (UK/USA, 1963)

James Bond goes to Istanbul to help a sexy Russian cipher clerk defect to the West, even though he knows damn well the whole thing is bound to be a trap. Like in most 007 pictures, the main villain is not the USSR itself, but a third party exploiting the Cold War (although the Soviets are nonetheless generally coded as evil).Besides being an obvious counterpart to the likes of For Eyes Only, this is also a spiritual opposite of A Prize of Arms: here, everyone acts as if Britain is still a major geopolitical player in the new world order, Suez and decolonization be damned. The formula and themes apply to practically all of the Bond film series, so this entry stands as representative of the entire franchise. (From Russia with Love was always my favorite… at least until 2006’s Casino Royale came along!)

58. Ikarie XB 1 (Czechoslovakia, 1963)

Interested both in outer space travel and in the evolution of earthly society, this sci-fi masterpiece about a ship searching for life in Alpha Centauri, in 2163, visualizes a utopia where the Cold War is ancient history and mechanization has freed workers from most physical labor (to the point that the astronauts actually seem bored in the first stretch of the film, before the adventure kicks in), even if there is still lingering gender, racial, and generational inequality. Ikarie XB-1 probably feels even more fantastic now than it did at the time… In just a few years, the Soviets had launched into orbit the first satellite, the first dog, and the first cosmonaut, to which JFK responded by promising – accurately, as it turned out – to put a(n American) man on the moon before the end of the decade. At the time, therefore, Czechoslovakian imagination could credibly accommodate these future paths of both technology and socialism. (Stay the fuck away from the botched US version, titled Voyage to the End of the Universe!)

59. Ladybug Ladybug (USA, 1963)

Reverberations of the Cuban Missile Crisis start to hit the screen. Set in a countryside elementary school where the nuclear attack warning suddenly goes off, Ladybug Ladybug follows the varied reactions of teachers and students, from disbelief and growing terror to Lord of the Flies shenanigans and a melancholic acceptance of mortality. Sure, with the focus on children comes some blatantly manipulative sentimentalism, but for the most part the movie gets a lot of mileage out of the naturalistic acting, the understated direction, the characters’ believable behavior, and a chilling ending (all of this makes for a stark contrast with the similarly themed – yet hysterically reactionary – Panic in Year Zero!).

60. The Little Soldier (France, 1963 [1960])

While the Algerian War gave us the greatest war movie ever made (The Battle of Algiers) and arguably the greatest musical (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), they fully disregard the Cold War dimension. In turn, The Little Soldier follows a French agent caught between his own secret service and communists fighting for the independence of Algeria. This description makes it sound too linear, though… That’s in the film, for sure, but also everything else that Jean-Luc Godard felt like shooting at the time. The result is often baffling, but provocative enough for it to have gotten banned in France until the end of the war.