The Atomic Cafe

The Atomic Cafe

I was the same age as they were when this old news film footage was shot. I went to elementary school between 1948 and 1956, during America’s years of living anxiously with the bomb. My life magazine weekly reader ran construction blueprints for backyard fallout shelters, and Estes Kefauver barnstormed the nation with his campaign against strontium 90 in the milk supply.

Did we really sing “Duck and Cover,” or do I only think we did? It hardly matters. “The Atomic Cafe” is a chilling memory of life under mushroom clouds. There was a brief national euphoria after Hiroshima (I can barely remember my father telling me that since America had The Bomb there could never be another war), but then Russia got it too, and since they were godless communists it was obvious that war would break out sooner or later.

Fallout shelters were touted as the answer; as late as Kennedy’s presidency, in the early ’60s, it was seriously proposed that a shelter program would act as a deterrent to war because “they” would see “we” could survive an attack. Probably still is official theory; a story recently reported that foodstuffs in most federal buildings’ shelters have long since decayed, spoiled or been gnawed by rats.

The makers of “The Atomic Cafe” pored through thousands of feet of Army films, newsreels, government propaganda films and old TV broadcasts to come up with the material in their movie which has no narration but simply presents itself as a record of some ways in which the bomb entered American folklore.

There are songs and speeches by politicians; one tells us nothing about nuclear weapons except that they’re lots of fun: ‘When you see a flash/ When you hear a buzz/ Take cover yourself/ Because there’s what it does!’ And there is scary documentary footage: guinea-pig American troops shielding themselves from atomic blasts and then standing around as the mushroom clouds waft through, waving away Geiger counters.

My memory of those times is that nuclear destruction was plenty frightful enough as a possibility. But in “The Atomic Cafe” you can see the government trying to trivialize it: Why should 85 percent of the population worry about something that would kill only 15 percent? It’s reassuring to learn from one film that if you can get your house directly beneath an A-bomb blast, there will be no damage unless “unusual causes” are present.

Another shows us how to build a basement radio receiver that will continue functioning after an attack. (The diagram helpfully advises us to place lead sheeting beneath our shoe soles before marching on top of radioactive rubble.)

The most heartbreaking scenes in “The Atomic Cafe,” which opens today at the Nuart, show schoolchildren participating in civil defense programs. Girls in home etc. classes display their canned goods designed for nuclear survival, and it’s clear from their faces that they have no more idea than I did about how they could survive nuclear war or what good canned peas would do them once radiation had killed off all the neighborhood cats.

Kids are lectured by authority figures: shots from educational films tell them what happens when a flash blinding’s you first you see everything white and then black; one film somberly calculates American casualties according to range from ground zero: your chances are good if you live within six miles; fair if you live between six and 25 miles; poor if you live between 25 and 50 miles.

If this movie has any message beyond its obvious one (that nuclear war will be devastating and our civil defenses pathetic), it is a rather more subtle one. It acts as a reminder that in the ’50s the government at least spent some money on addressing itself to this awful subject; now, it maintains a discreet silence. When was the last time you heard anything at all about fallout shelters or civil defense?

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