Reviews of Atomic Cafe
These are not meant as the definitive last word on the movie, but they will provide you with some background prior to viewing.

“A comic horror film. Everyone should visit THE ATOMIC CAFÉ.”
– The Village Voice

The Atomic Cafe
Directed by Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, & Pierce Rafferty
On its 20-year anniversary, and not a moment too soon, THE ATOMIC CAFE is back to provide us with a much-needed release of comic energy. A dark comedy in the truest sense, this timeless classic took the nation by storm when it first debuted in 1982. The film recounts a defining period of 20th century history and serves as a chilling and often hilarious reminder of cold-war era paranoia in the United States--artfully presented through a collage of newsreel footage, government archives, military training films, and fifties music. Profoundly shocking and perversely topical, THE ATOMIC CAFE craftily captures a panicked nation, offering a fascinating and witty account of life during the atomic age and resulting cold war, when fall-out shelters, duck-and-cover drills, and government propaganda were all a part of our social consciousness. Regarded by critics as “a nuclear Reefer Madness” and likened to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, this profoundly shocking and highly amusing film is a stunner, a gripping account of an unforgettable era and an indisputable “must-see” for all Americans.

The Atomic Cafe
1982 - Video/DVD
Directed by Kim Rafferty, Jayne Loader & Pierce Rafferty
Reviewed by Christopher Varney

The fine documentary "The Atomic Café" covers a brief, but potent history of America's nuclear infancy. Recently, I watched the film—now celebrating its 20th anniversary on DVD-- for the first time expecting a pure nostalgic laugher, but what I got instead in “Café” was more disturbing than goofy.

The chronology of “The Atomic Café” roughly spans 15 years, from 1945 (the Trinity Test and Hiroshima) to just short of 1960 (the peak of Cold War propaganda). Yet the incidents shown between these boundaries in "Café" hardly paints anyone in a flattering light, as burgeoning super-powers fought for identity in a post-war world, bucking the U.S. and Soviet Union from their positions as former WWII allies against Nazism into notorious Cold War foes.

For a while, I struggled to define this uneasy period in history with few words. Frankly, it didn't go well. But thankfully, a newsreel comment from "Café" crystallized this brand-new Atomic Age perhaps far better with: "Never have so many known so little about something so important."

It's a near-perfect description of America's fall out of the nuclear cradle.

Elsewhere, "The Atomic Café" covers America's newfound bomb culture on two fronts: at home and abroad. The latter’s tone is far more serious, featuring images of human shadows scorched into concrete at Hiroshima, and examples of the U.S. Army's cavalier attitude toward their creation. All hindsight aside, you'll marvel at what they were thinking, be it by testing bombs dangerously near American G.I.’s, or arrogantly transplanting native Bikini islanders in order to irradiate their home for decades. The domestic side of Cold War hysteria reflected in "Café" is even more bewildering, featuring interviews with "ordinary" Americans who compare a nuclear holocaust to a tornado that rages for a bit and then quickly subsides. Most bizarre here is a California man who brags that after most his neighbors are dead from coming nuclear storm with the Soviets, that extra food will remain for prepared families like his own.

Fortunately, however, aside from this craziness "The Atomic Café" isn't without moments of comic relief, including the Civil Defense classic short "Duck & Cover,” footage of a resourceful dad showing off his kid's radiation suit, and anti-Red shorts depicting Small Town U.S.A. conquered by Stalinism a la “Invasion of The Body Snatchers.” We’re not sure whether to laugh or cry during these bizarre moments in “Cafe,” but their inclusion in the film takes an edge off its otherwise dark content.

Unlike many documentaries, the unnarrated "Atomic Café" does well at remaining neutral toward its subject matter. What is seen is factual, taken from period newsreels and other archives, and as viewers we must form our own opinions on the value of the material. Yet curiously, "Café's" timeline stops just short of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an event many consider the most dangerous nuclear incident (so far) in all history. Perhaps this was a historical line the film's producers were unwilling to cross. Who can say? But "The Atomic Café" does not suffer without the omission; it's a strong-enough product to stand on it's own merits.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

A popular hit in 1982, as a new wave of anti-nuclear sentiment greeted the Ronald Reagan administration, The Atomic Cafe brilliantly uses old propaganda films to highlight their own lies. To the tune of songs like 'Atomic Cocktail', we see America being taught that its prosperity is threatened and that preparation for massive retaliation is essential. A time capsule of kitschy music and embarassingly naive visual mementoes, the compilation of film clips builds to create a vision that sees through the surface of the p.r., to a nation gripped by fear and denial.

Synopsis:

Using declassified government and military training films, newsreels, civil defense and educational films, and pop songs, cold war attitudes toward the nuclear dilemma and the arms race are examined. Official statements are contrasted with the often condescending stance of public 'information' designed to assure the viewer that nuclear war is survivable and nothing to worry about. As Bert the Turtle demonstrates in an animated film for children, all you must do to walk away from an atomic attack, is 'duck and cover'.

In the 1950s, our government saw the nuclear threat as simply another public relations problem. The Atomic Energy Commission had been given a free hand, with all the authority and secrecy of a top military project, and public dissent was addressed with a blitz of officially-sanctioned information. The fun of The Atomic Cafe, of course, is seeing all the out-of-control propaganda methods used to 'sell' nuclear complacency as if it were dish soap: misleading semantics ("85% of the fear comes from 15% of the threat"), dramatic animation (heroic USAF bombers wipe out scores of 'hostile enemy cities' in a single strike) and insulting reasoning (the risk of humorous household accidents is equated with the threat of nuclear bombs). The clips are nonsensical and we laugh at them, but it's a nervous laughter that contains the realization that they were made by a self-satisfied Authority convinced of its mandate to mislead the public. The films seem to be laughing at their susceptable 'target' audience, like smug Madison Avenue execs enjoying the effectiveness of their cheap hard-sell tactics.

Liberals with an agenda to promote will mistakenly label all of the original content of The Atomic Cafe as government propaganda, which it definitely was not. Once the ball of public sentiment gets rolling in a free society, the flag is soon taken up by all sources of public information and popular entertainment. The ingredients of The Atomic Cafe don't all come from some central Ministry of Propaganda.

The source films:

Actual military training and debriefing films. This declassified material, such as the film used to prep soldiers for live nuclear bomb combat drills, tends to be straightforward and informational. There's no ironic manipulation used there; the awful truth is that the people exposed to the test were clearly misinformed about the dangers of radiation. We see soldiers told that all will be fine, and then the blast effect blows a pressure wave of contaminated dust into every pore in their bodies. Other films clinically document tests with shop mannikins and live pigs. We see the pigs suffering direct blast effects, with some being loaded onto trucks, still alive and suffering traumatic burns and injuries. After some brief photos of Hiroshima victims, this is the most graphic material. Yet an 'amusing' title labeling the pig pen as 'Pork City', makes the soldiers on screen look like callous torturers. Other film excerpts play as if they were commissioned as damage control for AEC goofs, as when entire populations of docile and agreeable Polynesians had to be moved from their accidentally irradiated island homes. The lack of guile on the part of the filmmakers, is evident in the fact that they were unaware of their own incredibly condescending attitude toward the 'primitive' and thus irrelevant natives - one moment even suggests that a smiling local woman will enjoy the 'company' of her handsome soldier protectors. Like WW2 Nazis filming their own war crimes without concern for their possible later use as evidence, a hidden factor in these films is that their subjects sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.

Newsreels. Accompanied by loaded headlines that presume the unimpeachable rightness of our side, and the abject Evil of our enemies, these dramatic 'news' features were made by the newsreel departments of movie studios that already functioned as message-carriers for the government. The no-holds-barred techniques of the Frank Capra Why We Fight series of WW2 propaganda films are used to sell the concept of separate 'free' and 'slave' worlds, and to impress with fearful-looking animations of nuclear strikes. Publicity stunts, like one town's pretending to be overthrown by Communists, are seized upon as spontaneous demonstrations by a right-thinking public.

Educational and Public Service Informational films. Often funded by uncredited government agencies, these independent film productions by companies large and small naturally competed to find effective ways to present a predetermined message. Technically, this is real propaganda, because sophisticated media techniques are specifically employed to indoctrinate the presumed passive and suggestable viewer. Madison Avenue cleverness meets ex-Signal Corps resourcefulness, as Andy Hardy-like families withstand direct attack with little distress. Atomic attack is repeatedly portrayed by flashes of white light, that warn people of impending danger, instead of being deadly in themselves. Pulling a picnic blanket over one's head or climbing under a desk enable people to escape blast effects that level buildings. These are the real Big Lie films, that audiences believed because they wanted to believe, or because they had no other sources of information.

This kind of paternal dishonesty is easily recognized by kids, and Savant believes it promoted disaffection and alienation among the youth of the fifties, whose yardstick for truth was the liberal satire of Mad Magazine. The snickering Junior High creeps ruining the screenings with their jeers knew when they were being lied to, and quietly rejected all the lessons of society, good and bad. If these propaganda pictures were seen in a fair context, they'd have been rejected in the '50s in the same way we laugh at them now. But then they were shown to captive audiences - schoolchildren, people in work gatherings - where it was implied that one's teachers or employers expect passive acceptance of their content. So it didn't matter if the shows were insultingly fake, or if they starred familiar actors like Hugh Beaumont pretending to be Army Generals.

TV and Radio Entertainment. The Atomic Cafe doesn't employ any Hollywood film clips, no doubt due to high licensing costs. But there are a number of talk show clips that demonstrate that spokesmen willing to expound extreme ideas were always welcome on the air. Congressmen and 'experts' are all too eager to exterminate millions in an atom war. A clergyman practically foams at the mouth while anticipating the 'regrettable' need to use deadly force to defend one's fallout shelter against one's own neighbors. The dozen or so amusing 'atomic' novelty songs used as a soundtrack, are about romance heightened by atomic lust, or promises of desire in the fallout bunker. A bunch of these mostly painful pop tunes are country or rockabilly regional efforts. Since arcane tunes exist for almost every subject under the sun, it's not known whether a song urging MacArthur to nuke Korea, or a rockin' tune riffing off the lyric, 'Fire, heat & lighting', was heard by millions, or never even released.

The Editorial Reorganization of Found Footage:

The makers of The Atomic Cafe clearly have a message to get across, and they use the inherent absurdity of their source material in creative ways to achieve their goals. But they're careful to make sure they leave them essentially untransformed. When we see Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover posing with a strip of microfilm, we know we're watching a newsreel. The content isn't cheated. Except in wrapup montages, narration from one source isn't used over another. When raw footage is available, candid moments are seen of speechmakers (including President Truman) when they don't know the cameras are rolling. Caught laughing incongruously before a solemn report on an atom threat, Truman comes off not as callous, but human - a far cry from Ronald Reagan's cheap jokes about nuking Russians accidentally broadcast in the 1980s. 1

The basic tool is to juxtapose contradictory information. Soldiers admitting they got mouthfuls of (irradiated) atomic dirt are intercut with clinical footage explaining that any entrance of nuclear contaminants into the body can be deadly. Inane examples of people using conventional civil defense techniques to survive atomic attack are countered by docu footage of Hiroshima and real bomb tests. Government spokesmen are caught in outright lies about supposedly insignificant atom mishaps in the South Seas, and we're confronted with evidence of massive human suffering. The atomic disaster in Japan, after irradiated fish were distributed from a tuna boat clearly very near a nuclear test, are answered with yet another government spokesman claiming that the boat was far away from danger.

The film has an attitude of fairness. Richard Nixon comes off as patiently civilized next to a blustering, bullying Nikita Khruschev. 5 Dukakis' running mate Lloyd Bentsen, urging voters to petition congress to nuke Northern Korea, is just as bomb-crazy as any Republican. Hiroshima pilot Paul Tibbets is allowed to make his full speech and express his contradictory emotions, in footage usually shown much more selectively.

Finally, besides its sense of humor, the film has a great sense of poetry. In one deeply affecting passage, President Eisenhower talks about our rich society, and the vague, troubling unease it is experiencing. We hear an excerpt of emotional, disturbing Miklos Rosza music from the Film Noir classic The Killers, as a lonely car moves down a dark highway in America. Eisenhower goes on to verbally distill the concept that mankind is too primitive to comprehend its own technological terrors. It's a great speech, from a President not remembered for great speeches, and The Atomic Cafe uses it to merge philosophical reflection with the Noir despair.

The joke's on us: the bigger truth of The Atomic Cafe.

Thanks to the ludicrous footage provided by the 'wacky' atom films of the fifties, The Atomic Cafe is very funny, in the "Is this for real?" genre of subversive humor. Its satiric content is practically built-in. Unfortunately, there's a liberal tendency while watching satire to feel falsely impowered with a truth the only you, the hip viewer, share with the clever satirists. Satire is supposed to be a way to air those truths polite society doesn't want to hear, but the mechanics of comedy in our culture have developed to a point where the content is irrelevant, and the irreverent attitude is everything. Couple that with the fact that telling the truth loud and clear means less than nothing in a culture engulfed by so many lies big and small, from every media outlet and every source of entertainment. 4

The Atomic Cafe is a good example of entertaining 'irreverence' used to bring home a political message, but defeatists can easily argue that it preaches only to the choir of the converted. Looking at the show, it's far too easy to conclude that, "Gee, people sure were dumb back then. We'd never fall for such ridiculous nonsense now." Comparing the wisdom and truth of The Atomic Cafe to present-day reality, evokes a feeling of despair ... Today, terms like Terror and Evil are used as media weapons to stifle the truth. People don't want Truth or justice, they want to drive new cars, win the ball game, and be assured that God belongs to them alone.