Talk about a box office bomb. As cinema, the 1947 MGM docudrama The Beginning or the End--a factually lax justification for the United States' use of the atomic bomb on Japan--is arguably unworthy of the celluloid it was filmed with. But in the first-rate The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--and America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Greg Mitchell sees the value in what can be gleaned from the money-losing, critically dispatched film's creation.
Although studio chief Louis B. Mayer thought The Beginning or the End would be "the most important story ever filmed," it was closer to the most difficult to make. The U.S. Army honchos and Manhattan Project scientists consulting on the film called for countless recasts, rewrites and reshoots, and even President Truman weighed in. As production dragged on, scientists watched as MGM bypassed their suggestions in favor of those of the military and the White House. Some prominent physicists, including Lise Meitner and Niels Bohr, refused to let themselves be depicted on-screen; J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein capitulated.
Throughout The Beginning or the End, Mitchell (The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill) remains devoted to examining the U.S.'s moral defense for its deadly actions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he never misses a chance to expose the comedy provided by his book's many theatrically outsize characters. Surely Mitchell's offering would make a much better movie than MGM's big-budget dud. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer