This could have been one of the most important post war movies about events leading up to the end of the war, but at great expense, most of this film turns out to be pretentious back patting propaganda, frequently dull and self congratulatory. This features an opening narration by Hume Cronyn as Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer, the subject of a well received 2023 historical drama, and informs the audience (and the recipients of a time capsule in 2446) of the intended plans for the film to be discovered 500 years later...if the world still exists.
I'm watching this 77 years after the first public showing, my second viewing (the first being a commercial interrupted presentation several years before it was on TCM), and it's one of those movies that some will wonder if it will ever end, like an interminable college class lecture. It's a well meaning film, but frequently hokey and filled with phony sincerity that it becomes tedious at times. But as this is a film about the desperate measures to end the war, there are also many moments of greatness and profound regret over what nations fighting for peace have to do in order to end the war even though thousands of people will be killed or maimed as a result.
While this is mainly meant to be an ensemble peace, the focus on the young men played by Robert Walker and Tom Drake and their involvement in the experimenting of the creation of the atom bomb and how it impacts their social life. The film includes many of the industry's greatest character actors in major parts, dramatized two presidents and gives major words of wisdom to FDR's secretary, Grace Tully, played by Nella Walker. Brian Donlevy is top billed as Major General Leslie R. Groves. Perhaps not the classic it believed it would become, but the interest in the topic after the release of "Oppenheimer" will definitely open up this film being analyzed in modern terms.
I'm watching this 77 years after the first public showing, my second viewing (the first being a commercial interrupted presentation several years before it was on TCM), and it's one of those movies that some will wonder if it will ever end, like an interminable college class lecture. It's a well meaning film, but frequently hokey and filled with phony sincerity that it becomes tedious at times. But as this is a film about the desperate measures to end the war, there are also many moments of greatness and profound regret over what nations fighting for peace have to do in order to end the war even though thousands of people will be killed or maimed as a result.
While this is mainly meant to be an ensemble peace, the focus on the young men played by Robert Walker and Tom Drake and their involvement in the experimenting of the creation of the atom bomb and how it impacts their social life. The film includes many of the industry's greatest character actors in major parts, dramatized two presidents and gives major words of wisdom to FDR's secretary, Grace Tully, played by Nella Walker. Brian Donlevy is top billed as Major General Leslie R. Groves. Perhaps not the classic it believed it would become, but the interest in the topic after the release of "Oppenheimer" will definitely open up this film being analyzed in modern terms.