Movie Review

This brief, thirty-five-minute video traces the Cold War and the accompanying red scare from 1945 to 1962. Apparently intended for high school and middle school students, it tries to achieve far too much and ends by accomplishing all too little.

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The film crudely telescopes Cold War chronology with confusing and often misleading results. For example, in the opening sequence, shots of early United States atomic tests are accompanied by the narrator, William Baldwin, declaring that Americans now faced the "threat of ultimate annihilation in just 30 minutes," a characterization that may have been true in the 1960s but was certainly not true in the 1940s. A clip from Edward R. Murrow's famous March 9, 1954, "See It Now" documentary on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy is followed immediately by a shot of a newspaper announcing McCarthy's censure by the Senate the following December. No mention is made of the Army-McCarthy hearings, also in 1954, or, for that matter, the 1954 elections, in which the Democrats retook control of Congress. The viewer is left with the erroneous impression that it was Murrow who brought about McCarthy's downfall. The film ends with a puzzling sequence, jumping abruptly from the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956 to an interview with the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that could only have occurred in 1953 or 1954. The film then abruptly shifts to the 1957 Yates decision, in which the Supreme Court concluded that membership in the Communist party was not by itself sufficient grounds for conviction under the 1940 Smith Act, and then to a 1962 shot of the Berlin Wall, before returning to the 1954 Murrow program and to Murrow's perhaps ambiguous conclusion that "Cassius was right. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'"

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