Released a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis and supposedly based on a true story that happened in California, Frank Perry’s subdued nuclear war warning is perhaps one of the less well known of the Cold War era nuke dramas, though it certainly made an impact on those who saw it at the time. Low key and all the more effective for it, it’s probably the only film that examines the effects that the very real threat of nuclear annihilation was having on the children of 60s America.

Taking its title from the opening line of the Americanised version of the English folk song Ladybird Ladybird (the second line is the chillingly appropriate “Your house is on fire and your children are gone”), it opens in a small countryside elementary school where one morning a nuclear attack warning starts to sound. Principal John Calkins (William Daniels in his feature film debut) and his staff, chiefly dietician Mrs Maxton (Jane Connell), Mrs Hayworth (Jane Hoffman) the art teacher and secretary Betty Forbes (Kathryn Hays) are unsure of what to do, not wanting to believe that the warning is for real. Calkins eventually decides to send the children home, accompanied by their teachers and as they walk through the countryside, they become increasingly concerned about what may be about to happen to them.

As the crisis – which may not actually be happening at all which puts it in similar territory to the later BBC Play for Today The Remainder Man (1982) and Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988) – unfolds, the children are forced into new and unfamiliar roles. Luke (Alan Howard) has to care for his aged, Alzheimer’s stricken and non-comprehending grandmother (“they’re gonna burn everything up!” he tells her), while other older kids have to become surrogate parents to the scared and confused younger kids. One group make it to a backyard bomb shelter but refuse to allow a fellow pupil, Sarah (Marilyn Rogers) to join them as there isn’t enough room. She hides in an abandoned refrigerator, after wandering through what already looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape, and her friend Steve (Christopher Howard) sets out to find her. The film ends with Steve, having failed to find Sarah, cowering from what could either be aircraft or missiles flying overhead, futilely screaming at them to “stop!”

The ending is ambiguous but chilling. We never find out what happens to Sarah and the film simply fades to black from Steve’s terrified, screaming face, leaving us unsure as to what he saw in the sky and if the attack is actually happening or not. If it has been a false alarm, the children will be so traumatised that they’d be scarred for life anyway. What makes it worse is that for much of the film, we’re happy to accept that it’s a false alarm and get to know the children and their fears as they make their way home on foot. But there’s a growing sense of unease throughout the film and it all turns rather Lord of the Flies when they get to the bunker. The children’s mounting panic is both touching and distressing – adults have long found the spectre of nuclear war absurd, horrifying and unfathomable, so how would a child feel? That’s the gist of Perry’s film and it’s a painful but pertinent question that was so rarely even asked anywhere else.

Sending the children home was, in retrospect, a terrible idea but one of the other questions that the film forces its viewers to confront is “what would you do in these circumstances?” Calkins clearly believed that sending them home was the right thing to do, bit it condemns some to spend what could be their final moments alone, confused and terrified as their parents either don’t believe them or are at work and not around to comfort them.

The performances by the young cast are mostly very good. Perry doesn’t sentimentalise them or their fears and the young cast rise to the occasion admirably. Most of the young actors didn’t go on to do much else of note but among those who did are Miles Chapin (The Funhouse (1981), Howard the Duck (1986)), Donnie Melvin (who had a spell on US soap opera The Doctors in 1967 and 1968), Alice Playden who enjoyed a decent career on the small screen. They’re all very good, very natural with none of the precociousness that all too often spoils a child actor’s performance.

Perry and his wife Eleanor, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, were an interesting couple who had scored an arthouse hit with the teen mental health drama David and Lisa (1962) and would go on to make The Swimmer in 1968, an odd little film about Burt Lancaster trying to get home by swimming through as many pools as he can in an affluent part of suburban America. They cook up some memorable moments that don’t go overboard on the emotion, but which are nevertheless achingly poignant – see for example a quietly heart-breaking scene of a teacher pointlessly tidying up an empty classroom, not knowing if the children will ever return, symbolically burying a toy Howitzer in a sand pit. They wear their influences on their sleeves – watch for a scene of the possibly doomed children dancing across the brow of a hill recalling the “dance of death” in Ingmar Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet/The Seventh Seal (1957) and it’s possible that the Perry’s had seen and remembered the Twilight Zone episode The Shelter (1961) – but for the most part it’s a film unlike any other made at the time, having an almost docudrama feel to it at times. It’s quieter and more minimalist than Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) or The War Game (1965) but is no less powerful.

Ladybug Ladybug has been released in the States on DVD and blu-ray by Kino Lorber, reviving interest in the film. Tragically, it’s a film whose relevance keeps coming horribly coming round again – every time we think these films have been consigned to the history books, outdated warnings of a fading threat, the spectre of nuclear war rears its toxic head again and suddenly they start to look terrifyingly pertinent again. The more things change, the more they remain the same…