The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
‘The Atomic Cafe’ (1982)
In “Oppenheimer,” which arrived in theaters this time last year, Christopher Nolan asked what kind of world J. Robert Oppenheimer had created. (“I think it’s very easy to make the case for Oppenheimer as the most important person who ever lived,” he told The New York Times.) This all-archival documentary from Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader and Pierce Rafferty explores the collective madness of the atomic age from a different angle. Compiling footage from newsreels, army training and information films, civilian education tools and other sources that downplayed the horrors of nuclear annihilation, “The Atomic Cafe” presents a grimly comic view of how, to paraphrase Stanley Kubrick, America learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
“Duck and Cover” is just one of the more famous pieces of retroactive camp that the directors unearth here. One clip advertises model homes that have built-in fallout shelters with 8-inch-thick, reinforced concrete walls. (“It may prove to be just what the harried housewife is looking for when life with the kids gets too hectic.”) An officer preparing troops for what appears to be a 1957 nuclear weapons test warns them that atomic bomb explosions pose three basic hazards: blast, heat and radiation. But don’t worry, he suggests: “If you receive enough gamma radiation to cause sterility or severe sickness, you’ll be killed by blast, flying debris or heat anyway.” Bill Haley & His Comets are heard singing of the Strangelovian fantasy in which a hydrogen bomb leaves “13 women and only one man in town.”
More disturbingly, we see authorities inured to danger, disease and even to basic humanity. The Enola Gay pilot Paul W. Tibbets Jr. speaks with alarming casualness of how what remained of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be used as sort of “a classroom experiment” for bomb blast studies. In one propagandistic excerpt, natives of Bikini Atoll are portrayed as welcoming the Americans who planned to render the area uninhabitable. Maybe the sickest joke in all of “The Atomic Cafe” is that most of the officials shown are, presumably, presenting themselves as they want to be seen.
‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ (2017)
Alexandra Dean’s documentary is another World War II story, in multiple senses. In Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr was seen as a stunning MGM star who could turn the heads of every man and woman in a room. There was an air of scandal about her — she was known to have appeared nude in Gustav Machaty’s film “Ecstasy,” first shown in 1933 — but she also, the documentary argues, set the standard for movie glamour in the 1940s: Joan Bennett and Myrna Loy, among others, began to style their hair in seeming imitation.
And incidentally, Lamarr sought to aid the war effort, not through cinema but through science, a field that was much closer to her temperament. She devised a radio “frequency hopping” system that could enable American naval vessels to guide torpedoes without being jammed by the Nazis. According to the documentary, the technology provided the eventual basis for secure Wi-Fi and global positioning systems — and yet Lamarr, whose achievements have been recognized since at least the 1990s, never received money from her patent. In another era, Dean’s film suggests, the woman born Hedy Kiesler would have had a distinguished career as an engineer or a chemist. Her great fortune — and her curse — was that although her beauty brought her fame, much of the world couldn’t see past it.
“Bombshell” is filled with accounts of Lamarr’s ingenuity. One of her sons says that as a child in Vienna at age 5, she reassembled a complicated music box. We are told that in her early 20s, she fled an oppressive first marriage — to the fascist munitions magnate Fritz Mandl — by drugging a maid, putting on the maid’s outfit and bicycling off. In an audio recording, Lamarr is heard explaining how she helped Howard Hughes design a speedier airplane by researching the fastest fish and birds, then making a drawing that combined the best elements of each.
The film covers complicated aspects of her life, too. She had a habit of hiding elements of her past — her Jewish heritage; an adopted son whom she let live with others — and she got hooked on Dr. Feelgood’s injections. But while Lamarr’s later-life behavior was often treated as a joke (Mel Brooks’s gentle ribbing in “Blazing Saddles” gets a pass), “Bombshell” salutes her legacy with the seriousness it deserves.
‘A Still Small Voice’ (2023)
Shot in 2020 and 2021, Luke Lorentzen’s documentary follows Margaret Engel, who sometimes goes by Mati, as she completes a residency in spiritual care at Mount Sinai Hospital. Early in the film, her supervisor, the Rev. David Fleenor, is heard in voice-over describing the work of a hospital chaplain. “There’s an old adage: Don’t just stand there; do something,” he says. “And we flip that. We say, don’t just do something; stand there, or be there.”
As it observes Mati’s long conversations with patients, “A Still Small Voice” demands that viewers do just that: be present, watching Mati as she counsels others through some of the most difficult moments of their lives. She is still learning, and there is often some question as to whether she is saying the most appropriate thing. We listen in on a lengthy phone call in which she offers condolences to a woman who has just experienced a loss; Mati, after a moment of speculating aloud as to whether sharing personal details is appropriate, begins to talk about her own father’s death. Is she rising to the occasion? In the film’s most wrenching and beautiful scene, she appears to: Engel must perform a baptism — a ritual she knows relatively little about — on a newborn who died, and whose twin sister has survived, while consoling the mother (still in a hospital bed) and the father (standing nearby).
But whether Mati is up to the work is left open. “What is the price that you will pay in terms of exhaustion?” Fleenor asks her early on. Later, Fleenor — who has a supervisor-counselor and fortitude issues of his own — warns her that she isn’t properly setting boundaries: If it’s her day off, she shouldn’t be answering her phone. That all of this is unfolding during the early years of Covid only adds to the stress and the difficulty.
A note at the end indicates all patients in the film consented to appear, and that they had the option to withdraw until the picture was locked. Like Mati and David, they have helped shed light on noble work.
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