Prattling before the Pratfall

Did you see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? MGM’s dramatization of the Manhattan Project, with Hume Cronyn as J. Robert, was released only 18 months after the end of WWII. It opens with a whopper of a fib.

Fact check:

• https://thereveal.substack.com/p/the-beginning-or-the-end-oppenheimer
• https://theappendix.net/issues/2012/12/box-office-bomb-the-beginning-or-the-end-1947
• https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/at-the-bradbury/2023-july/movie-history

If you’re a fan of the movie Fury, with Brad Pitt as a tank commander in WWII, The American Heritage Museum in Hudson, MA is the place to visit.

https://www.americanheritagemuseum.org/

The museum’s impressive collection is about the wars that America has fought, and the weapons of those wars. The question that must be asked about every war is, “what are we fighting for?” There is no doubt whatsoever that America was forced by Japan to join the fight in WWII.

The decision to end the war by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan will always be controversial. It wasn’t for my late father, a Navy sailor who was in the first wave of American forces to occupy Japan.

I once visited a museum that presented an overview of WWII that was smaller in physical scale, yet much more comprehensive in scope. The defunct International Museum of World War II, in Natick, MA, had an extensive collection that was bought up by a rich guy who reneged on his promise to make it available for public viewing.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/02/stuff-of-world-war-2

Wartime life for civilians, both here and abroad, was a feature of the museum. I later posted this item about the British TV series Home Fires.

That Was Their Finest Hour

Movies made during the war are especially interesting, because everything was still happening. Without a rearview mirror, nothing could be seen in hindsight.

The Human Comedy was made during wartime, with a bittersweet tone about the American home front. It stars Mickey Rooney, whose fame faded quickly after the war. Having not seen it in decades, I’ll make a point of catching it on TCM, the next time it’s on the schedule.

Another wartime home front movie, with a less sentimental tone, is Since You Went Away with Shirley Temple. She grew up to have the looks of a pinup girl, but the public couldn’t shake their image of her as a child star.^*

Since You Went Away is a long, and at times downbeat, movie. Guy Madison’s brief appearance earned him a starring role in 1946’s Till the End of Time, the same year as the better-known post-war movie The Best Years of Our Lives.

^* As a young woman, Petula Clark had a similar problem in England. In the Fifties, the public had no trouble seeing former child stars Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood as sex symbols.