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Example research essay topic: 1960 And 1970 War In Vietnam - 2,076 words

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... Korean War films raised questions about the willingness and the ability of Americans to live up to those ideals (See: The Korean War); and the Cold War films showed how those ideals can be called on to prevent war while at the same time containing the Soviet Union. They also favored subjects that featured those weapons most closely associated the nuclear war they were designed to prevent: the long-range bomber and the nuclear submarine. The first and most successful of the Air Force films, Strategic Air Command (1955), was directed by Anthony Mann at the urging of the film's star, ex-bomber pilot Jimmy Stewart, who wanted to make a film honoring the Air Force's cold warriors. He is cast as "Dutch" Holland, a professional baseball player who is recalled to active duty, during which he realizes that serving with the Strategic Air Command is more important than returning to the baseball diamond. The narrative is divided between Holland's duties as an aircraft commander, and the effect on his marriage of his decision to stay in the service.

His wife (June Allyson) wants him to return to civilian life, but she understands the importance of defending America and remains steadfastly loyal. The same choice between the successful civilian career desired by his family and the more Spartan demands of the Strategic Air Command faces the central characters of Gordon Douglas's Bombers B- 52 (1957) and Delbert Mann's A Gathering of Eagles (1963). All of these films depict a tight-knit, patriarchal family as an ideal to be emulated. Such families, Elaine Tyler May has explained in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (1988), were considered essential to a strong America. By the late 1950 s, the Cold War had begun to thaw somewhat. In 1959 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States; Vice President Richard Nixon attended the Moscow Trade Fair; and the nuclear standoff between America and the Soviet Union came to be regarded less as a frightening possibility than as an unnecessary threat to human survival.

The first of the submarine films, Stanley Kramer's On the Beach (1959), recounts the final months of the human race after an exchange of hydrogen bombs between the United States and the Soviet Union. The crew of an American submarine has taken refuge in Australia to await the arrival of a deadly atomic cloud moving south from the northern hemisphere. Despite its sensational subject and its all-star cast (Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire), On the Beach reduces the narrative to a rather flat moral fable. It is perhaps more significant as a film which marks an ideological shift in Hollywood's depiction of Cold War politics. James Harris' The Bedford Incident (1964) and John Sturges' Ice Station Zebra (1968) use the confined world of a polaris submarine to explore a pair of themes which would characterize the majority of Cold War films in general during the 1960 s and 1970 s. In the former, the submarine captain's (Richard Widmark) furious pursuit of a Soviet sub leads to a standoff which threatens to plunge the world into nuclear war, while in the latter competition for the data aboard a Soviet spy satellite downed in the arctic stops just short of armed conflict when another submarine commander (Rock Hudson) destroys the data and persuades the Soviets to publicize the incident as a joint search for the lost satellite.

Both films imply that neither the Americans nor the Soviets can claim the moral high ground and that the threat of dangers of nuclear war outweighs the claims of any ideology. The anxieties aroused by the ubiquitous presence of the Bomb had been appearing in films for nearly a decade, but they were largely displaced onto the horror film. The effects of radiation spawned a variety of gigantic sea creatures (The Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms, 1953), ants (Them, 1954), and even grasshoppers (The Beginning of the End, 1957). But films which depicted life after a nuclear holocaust either ignored the political implications (Roger Corman's Day the World Ended, 1956) or attributed the devastation to an accident (The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, 1959). The Cold War intensified again in 1961 with the building of the wall dividing East and West Berlin), and in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. These events only sharpened the criticism of Cold War policies and elicited two responses that were embodied in two of the most memorable of Cold War films: Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe (1964) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr.

Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). In both films American bombers attack the Soviet Union, and the American President and his military advisors try to prevent the attack from escalating into a thermonuclear war. Events in Lumet's film unfold with a grim solemnity and end with the President (Henry Fonda) ordering a nuclear attack on New York City to compensate the earlier (and unintended) attack on Moscow. Kubrick had also planned a serious adaptation of Peter George's novel Red Alert, but as he developed his screenplay, he decided that the very idea of nuclear warfare was suicidal and absurd, a subject best-suited to a satiric black comedy. Consequently, from the moment a demented right-wing SAC general (Sterling Hayden) orders an attack on the Soviet Union, the film mounts a comic attack on Cold War ideologues, ineffectual politicians, doomsday planners, and military brass.

Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), the wheelchair-bound scientific advisor, combines the intellectual arrogance and the urge to destroy that Kubrick suggests is at the heart of nuclear policy making. The desperate attempts to recall or destroy the attacking fails when a single aircraft gets to its target, triggering a Soviet "doomsday machine" capable of destroying all human life. Thrillers in which the Cold War adversaries met in the labyrinthine world of espionage rather than on the battlefield saw a similar ideological transformation. In 1954 Nunnally Johnson's Night People used post-war Berlin as the setting for a battle of wits between an officer in the U. S.

Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (Gregory Peck) and his Russian counterparts who behave as badly as the Nazis they defeated (and with whom they are linked in the film). Peck prevails because he can be as ruthless as the communists, but, as the film makes clear, he does it in the service of democratic ideals. By 1961 Billy Wilder could use Berlin to satirize the Cold War culture in both East and West. In One, Two, Three America is not represented by a tough professional military officer but by the head of Coca-Cola's Berlin office (James Cagney), who employs the skills of a spy to distribute Coke in East Germany and to transform a communist student (Horst Buchholz) into a suitable husband for the boss's daughter by converting him to capitalism. Wilder's witty dialogue is so dependent on highly topical allusions to the Cold War rhetoric of the period that his film may seem dated, but it remains far superior to the numerous parodies of the genre which proliferated during the 1960 s and 1970 s. Martin Right's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), adapted from the John Le Carre novel, paints a far darker picture of intelligence operations in the city that had become the epicenter of Cold War.

A disillusioned British agent, Alec Lemeas (Richard Burton), is sent on a final mission into East Berlin, where he discovers that he has been set up by his superiors to preserve the cover of a "mole" (Peter Van Eyck) they have planted in East German intelligence. When the one person he still has faith in (Claire Bloom) is treacherously gunned down at the Berlin Wall, Lemeas refuses to escape alone and is shot dead. The same themes of betrayal, double-dealing, and entrapment are played out in another film adaptation of a Le Carre novel, Sidney Lumet's A Deadly Affair (1966), an underrated example of the genre. Alfred Hitchcock addresses East-West espionage activities in two of his less successful films: Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969). During the later 1960 s, the war in Vietnam escalated, destroying the Cold War political consensus and left the United States politically divided into supporters and opponents of the American presence in Southeast Asia.

Furthermore, the detente between East and West secured by the Nixon Administration in the early 1970 s lowered tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. As a result, filmmakers lost interest in both the Cold War and the hot war in Vietnam (See Vietnam War). Neither promised to be good box office. As the decade came to a close, however, political conflicts in client nations and plans by the United States and the Soviet Union to implement new intercontinental ballistic missile technology led to renewal of Cold War hostilities and prompted the long-time cold warrior Ronald Reagan, who was elected President in 1980, to declare the Soviet Union and her allies an "evil empire. " His Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, saw the country returning to what he nostalgically described as "the good old days of the Cold War. " Despite the accelerating arms race, the renewed East-West tensions never revived the fears of communist expansion and imminent nuclear war that had defined America's Cold War culture during the 1950 s and 1960 s. Invoking the specter of the "evil empire" did more to recall an era when America was more prosperous, more unified, and more capable of heroic action than the nation that had endured defeat in Vietnam and a general disillusionment with national institutions.

The sense of the Cold War as theater or as an exercise in nostalgia informs many films dealing with Cold war subjects. Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend (1983) and Richard Benjamin's Little Nikita (1988) are tales of espionage which echo films of an earlier generation without either the ideological agendas or the narrative skill of their predecessors. Peckinpah's last feature focuses on the adventures of a talk-show host (Rutger Hauer), whom the CIA recruits to spy on friends suspected of being Soviet undercover agents, while Benjamin's thriller dramatizes a young man's (River Phoenix) discovery that his parents are Soviet agents in deep cover. He is persuaded by a fatherly F. B. I.

agent (Sidney Poitier) to aid in foiling a communist plot. The best examples of Cold War nostalgia may be found in the films of Clint Eastwood, who directed and / or starred in several films which express a longing for the period when, as the hero (Eastwood) of In the Line of Fire (1993) announces, "the country was different [ and better] then. " In Heartbreak Ridge (1986), which is based on a film from the early years of the Cold War (Alan Day's The Sands of Iwo Jima, 1949), Sgt. Tom Highway, an anachronistic survivor of the old Marine Corps, manages to instill in an insolent, undisciplined, and very 1980 s group of young Marines the virtues exemplified by John Wayne and his men in the earlier film. Their training serves them well during the invasion of Grenada, where victory, Highway makes clear, has redeemed the defeat in Vietnam. While a number of the Cold War films of the 1980 s may share a longing for the good old days, they remain ideologically diverse, ranging from the right-wing jingoism of John Miles' Red Dawn (1984) to the revisionism of John Schlesinger's The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), in which the CIA proves more villainous than the Soviet agents who betray their country. In other, perhaps more prophetic films, Russians and American become partners in hunting down criminals or preserving world peace (Michael After's Gorky Park, 1983; Walter Hill's Red Heat, 1988; and John Mc Tiernan's The Hunt for Red October, 1990).

Mc Tiernan's adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel about a Soviet naval officer's decision to defect with his country's newest and most powerful nuclear submarine was the last of Hollywood's Cold War films. Selected Films: Big Jim McLain (1952) Big Lift, the (1950) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) Fail-Safe (1964) Falcon and the Snowman, the (1985) Guilty of Treason (1949) Heartbreak Ridge (1986) High Noon (1952) Hunt for Red October, the (1990). Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the (1956) Iron Curtain (a. k.

a. Behind the Iron Curtain) (1948) [No video available. ] Kiss Me Deadly (1955) My Son John (1952) [No video available. ]


Free research essays on topics related to: 1960 and 1970, war in vietnam, states and the soviet union, united states and the soviet, east and west

Research essay sample on 1960 And 1970 War In Vietnam

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