Long before the wave of nuclear attack television films that terrified an entire generation in the early 1980s (The Day After (1983), Threads (1984), Testament (1983)), David Davidson adapted Judith Merril’s 1950 debut novel Shadow on the Hearth as the penultimate episode of the short lived drama series sponsored by electronics giant Motorola. Directed by Ralph Nelson, later director of the likes of Charly (1968), Soldier Blue (1970) and Embryo (1976), it tells the story of Gladys Mitchell (Phyllis Thaxter), a middle class wife and mother living in Westchester, New York when a never-named enemy (though it’s the mid-50s so we all know who they were talking about…) launches a massive nuclear attack on the United States. With her husband missing having left that morning to work in the now-devastated New York City, Gladys is left with her daughters (Patty McCormack and Patsy Bruder) to cope with the aftermath. Various other characters end up at her home, including a local school teacher who once worked on the US nuclear weapons programme (Robert Keith), a local civil defence block warden (Bill Kemp) and a doctor (a young Walter Matthau) as it becomes clear that fallout has reached Westchester and starts to affect the survivors.
Hampered by a typically impoverished 50s television budget – the play is entirely studio bound, mainly on one large studio set and the attack is represented by a power cut, a loud noise, some sirens and the camera shaking – Atomic Attack was still probably a terrifying 50 minutes for viewers at the time who wouldn’t have been used to seeing the effects of nuclear war being treated this seriously on television. Today it looks naive and overly-optimistic – neither the public nor anyone in the television industry would really have understood the full ramifications of a nuclear attack at this stage – which blunts its impact considerably. But for its time, this was likely very powerful stuff.
Thaxter is left rather stranded in the early stages by having no-one to react with (the girls are still at school when the initial attack happens), forcing her to emote wildly, unconvincingly talking to herself as Gladys verbalises her inner panic or describing to no-one in particular what she’s seeing outside her window. McCormack, a couple of years away from being so good in The Bad Seed (1956), is shrill and annoying here, constantly on the verge of a hysteria throughout – understandable given the circumstances perhaps but irritating nonetheless. Keith gets to spout a clumsy and naive diatribe on pacifism as the guilt-ridden former scientist turned school-teacher while Matthau romps home with the entire show in the small role as the doctor who realises that one of the daughters has succumbed to radiation poisoning.
Atomic Attack (first broadcast on ABC on 18 May 1954) comes across as more of a public service announcement than a drama and offers a far too optimistic look at how a nuclear war will play out. Radio announcements triumphantly detail America’s successful counter-attack while the climax suggests that radiation poisoning can be treated just like any other illness. The aftermath of the attack looks no different to life before the bombs dropped and the true horrors that a nuclear war would unleash – best imagined in the still traumatising Threads – are conveniently glossed over. It anticipates Lynne Littman’s brilliant Testament but lacks that film’s realism.
Seen today, the bluntly titled Atomic Attack is a fascinating curio, a snapshot of the confused and ill-informed perception of what a nuclear war would look like that was common in the mid-1950s (remember that this was still less than decade after the real nuclear attacks on Hiroshma and Nagasaki). It’s heart is definitely in the right place but it glosses over the full horror of what would happen if the events depicted really happened and the drama verges on the hysterical, making it seem almost comical to modern eyes. But it was a creditable attempt to think the unthinkable and as a historical artefact it’s not without some interest.
Judith Merril was hardly a prolific writer. Shadow on the Hearth was one of only two novels published under her own name – the other was The Tomorrow People (1960), nothing to do with the later British television series. Outpost Mars (1952) and Gunner Cade (1952) were co-written with C.M. Kornbluth and published under the joint pseudonym Cyril Judd. But as an editor she was one of the key players in the development of American science fiction – her Year’s Greatest/Best SF series of anthologies was hugely popular and promoted science fiction as a literary genre, seeking to lift it out of the pulp ghetto into which it had settled – she regularly tracked down short stories that were in genre but which had been published outside the small world of the American science fiction magazines of the time. She was a particular champion of the largely British “New Wave” of science fiction that surfaced in the mid-1960s, editing the first US compilation of “New Wave” material, England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction (aka The Space-Time Journal) in 1968. Atomic Attack remains the only media adaptation of her work.
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