Birthday Party

One year old last week, the Atomic Age was offered, as one of its birthday presents, Atomic Power!, the first moving picture to portray it not as cloak-&-Geiger-counter melodrama but as deadly serious historical fact. MARCH OF TIME, with the cooperation of 20-odd scientists, who appear in the picture, has retraced and re-enacted the main publishable stages in its cause and towards its possible cure. The motion in charts and animation makes newly graphic the basic principles of fission; shots heretofore unreleased to the screen suggest some of the effects, including, as one emblem or symbol more grim than any in Pompeii, the shadow of a human body, fire-stenciled into the pavement of Hiroshima.

To laymen who have tagged along as best they might in the wake of the first year's argument and information, the picture can offer little that is factually new; nor does it pretend to answer still unanswerable questions of control. What makes it impressive, today and as a historical record, is its terse, clear, visual summary, its image, even in re-enactment of the men who brought the Age to birth.

There is shy Albert Einstein, looking in his old age more & more like a long-suffering and highly sagacious old yak dictating a letter to President Roosevelt which sparked the Manhattan Project. There are the quick-eyed Lise Meitner, the steely Compton, the vivid Fermi, the deceptively rustic Bush, their faces subtly haggard in remembrance of the moments they are reenacting; and there are the faces of Oppenheimer and Rabi, a few minutes before all hell breaks loose in the New Mexican desert, with the shaky exchange--Oppenheimer: "This time, Rob the stakes are really high." Rabi:"It's going to work all right, Robert, and I'm sure we won't be sorry for it." There is Harvard's Conant, stating that the use of atomic power for planes and autos is scientifically out of the question for the present; and there are the reactions of Baruch and Gromyko to discussion of the Absolute Weapon.

The strongest and strangest drama arises as Conant and Bush sprawl once more in the sand to reproduce for cameras the suspense and release of that moment at Alamogordo when the Atomic Age cut loose its first appalling kick in history's womb. According to New York Timesman William L. Laurence, some witnesses at Alamogordo were moved by the actual event to perform a kind of primordial fire dance. But history--or rather the human ability to stare history straight in the eyes--is not yet tough enough to endure that sight. Instead of the dance, the movie shows Conant & Bush, still stretched on the ground, just solemnly shaking hands.

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