Atomic Attack (Motorola Television Hour)

On May 18, 1954, The Motorola Television Hour presented Atomic Attack, a gripping portrayal of a suburban family struggling to survive after a nuclear bomb is dropped on U.S. soil. Fifty miles away from a decimated New York City, the Mitchell family are trapped inside their house, with looters and poisonous radioactive fallout right outside their door. As the hours drag on, their nerves are stretched to the breaking point...as they realize that not all of them will survive this holocaust.

Atomic Attack was produced in conjunction with the Office of Civil Defense, and opens with the disclaimer, "The happenings that will now follow on your screen might be taking place in a suburban community some 50 miles from New York...but are entirely fictitious, of course." It is directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Ralph Nelson (Requiem for a Heavyweight, Lilies of the Field, Charly) and features an all-star cast. Versatile actress Phyllis Thaxter had a long career, beginning opposite Spencer Tracy in the WWII picture Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and ending as Clark Kent's adopted mother in Superman: The Movie (1978). Patty McCormack is best known as the homicidal child in Mervyn LeRoy's The Bad Seed (1956). Character actor Robert Keith was in two of Marlon Brando's standout pictures, The Wild One (1953) and Guys and Dolls (1955), and had a memorable role in one of the most popular episodes of The Twilight Zone, "The Masks" (1964). A young Walter Matthau appears a year before his film debut in The Kentuckian (1955). A decade later, he would star in another film about a nuclear crisis, Fail Safe (1964).

PLUS BONUS SHORTS:

OPERATION DOORSTEP (1953): A haunting Civil Defense film in which two houses in Yucca Flats, NV (populated entirely by frighteningly lifelike mannequins from J.C. Penny) are subjected to an open-air atomic blast. The parts of the houses most affected are emphasized in order to get viewers to avoid those rooms in the event of an attack – but the complete disregard for the dangers of radioactive fallout meant the government declared this film obsolete in 1959, recalling all copies from schools.

THE ATOM AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE (1953): An Encyclopedia Britannica film on the (seemingly benign) effects that radioactivity has on plants and animals. A rat is fed radioactive table sugar, and doesn't seem to mind. You might want to avoid that nuclear-saturated corn, however.