"The Atomic Cafe captures the Atomic Age and the resulting Cold War better than any documentary out there—it splices together an incredible array of military training films, civil defense films, archive footage, newsreel material, interviews, slices of pop culture, and fifties music. Many sequences are edited to show the most ridiculous side of the duck-and-cover drills and how naïve the military brass was (including how transparent their propaganda efforts were). The military training films are so amateurishly acted that it’s no wonder the U.S. would love to see these films disappear forever. Especially bad is one where a chaplain reads a dialogue about the beauty of the H-bomb with a comical sounding monotone, and another film designed to show how the Communists are subversively working among the U.S. citizens who campaign for peace. "
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