This was grainy, black-and-white footage, but few Americans had seen anything like it before. The film made use of newsreel footage that had been shot by Japanese cameramen in 1945, then seized by the American military and declared top secret until the late 1960s. Then, in 1970, Erik Barnouw completed his landmark documentary “Hiroshima/Nagasaki, August 1945.” For a quarter-century, visual images of Hiroshima on television-whether in movies or news coverage-had been restricted to shots of rubble, not people. The most important Hiroshima program to appear during this period was not a drama at all but a 16-minute documentary. Yet these Serling scenarios examined only the result of using the bomb-not the controversy over Truman’s decision to deploy it in 1945. The Scrooge figure is a nuclear hawk one of the ghosts that visit on Christmas Eve takes him to a barren Hiroshima to remind him of what the other end of the bomb looks like.
The following year, Serling wrote the script for an ABC holiday special, “Carol for Another Christmas,” directed by Joseph L. It might be said, in fact, that America remains haunted by the atomic bombings-all the more so because they remain obscure, distant and mysterious. They sensed that they were not being told everything about alternatives that President Harry S. This reflected the overall American response to the atomic bombing, which was generally one of affirmation or denial.īut below the surface, many Americans felt pain, confusion or anger about the atomic bombings. The Television Age coincides with the Nuclear Age, but the creators of network dramas, like their counterparts in the feature film business, pretty much avoided Hiroshima for many years. How accurately and fairly they depict the decision to use the bomb, and its consequences, is another matter entirely. What we call the “Hiroshima raw nerve” remains as sensitive as ever, and filmmakers-as well as television executives-are increasingly willing to address it. This is the third original movie about Hiroshima to appear on television in the past six years, an extraordinary number considering the grimness of the subject. Next Sunday evening, exactly 50 years after an American plane dropped an atomic bomb over Japan, Showtime will premiere a three-hour movie called “Hiroshima.”