I’m looking for books, movies, poems, cartoons or anything else which were made in the 1970s, and have to do with the Cold War. It’s also OK if they are not directly about the Cold War, but are thematically linked in some way.
So far I have:
Apocalypse Now
Day of the Jackal
Gravity’s Rainbow
MAS*H
Spy vs Spy (Mad Magazine)
Telefon
The Deer Hunter
The Dispossessed
The Gulag Archipelago
The Spy Who Loved Me
Three Days of the Condor
Z for Zachariah
There must be lots.
Coming Home
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Len Deighton Game/Set/Match, Hook/Line/Sinker, Faith/Hope/Charity and Winter Bernard Sampson novels are really fun.
The first and fourth of Martin Caiden’s Cyborg novels (the first of which was adapted into television’s The Six Million Dollar Man) have at least a partial Cold War theme, what with killing Russians and such.
Lots of John LeCarre’s novels were written in the 70s, although he has been writing for many decades. I believe the entire Karla series was published in the 70s.
Also, Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.”
The Francis Powers TV movie with Lee Majors
Also Firefox was written in 1977
Down To A Sunless Sea, by David Graham.
I’m going to go ahead and contribute Charlie M and its various sequels about Charlie Muffin, Brian Freemantle’s ill-used British agent who simply refuses to die, for all that British Intelligence tries to dispose of him.
While clearly a quintessential Cold War novel, The Quiet American was actually first published way back in 1955. Even the first film version also dates from the Fifties.
Six Days of the Condor.
The Marathon Man.
It seems like there are a bunch of classics from the 50s and 60s, but much less from the 70s. Maybe it no longer intrigued people by then. Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.
Twilight’s Last Gleaming, 1977. Renegade general takes over missile silo, attempts to blackmail US government.
This movie, based on a true story:
The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) was published in 1980, but I think fits the bill of a 70s Cold War thriller. Some of his other novels fit the category, too, I think.
Colin Forbes
Frederick Forsyth (although The Fourth Protocol is an 80s Cold War thriller)
Craig Thomas
Another series of excellent Cold War spy stories are the David Audley/Jack Butler books by Anthony Price. The first one, The Labyrinth Makers, was published in 1970 and the 20 odd books went right through the 70’s and 80’s with the last one in 1989 in the era of Glasnost and the end of the Cold War.
On a different tack, Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer (recently discussed here) was published in 1977 and is very much of that time.
Finally there is The Third World War: August 1985 by General Sir John Hackett. Written in 1978 it portrays a Warsaw Pack invasion of Western Europe. In the light of what we know now the scenario and the course of the conflict are pretty dubious but an interesting read that tells you a lot about how the NATO military commanders saw things in the late 70’s.
How is Spy vs. Spy about, or linked to, the Cold War? The two spies were completely generic. The cloak and dagger stuff they were doing could have gone on between any two rival countries, regardless of their ideologies. Maybe you were thinking of Prohias’s earlier comic, Tovarich, though that was more a satire of Soviet Union in general than its icy relations with the West in particular.
Do movies about “McCarthyism” count as Cold War-related?
If so, there’s ***The Way We Were ***and Woody Allen’s The Front (actually, this was a rare movie in which Woody was just an actor, not the writer or director).
Damn those Warsaw Packs! They’re worse than Hell’s Angels! :mad:
Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series ran from 1960 through 1993.
Published during the 1970s:
#13 The Poisoners (1971)
#14 The Intriguers (1972)
#15 The Intimidators (1974)
#16 The Terminators (1975)
#17 The Retaliators (1976)
#18 The Terrorizers (1977)