It’s a bit of a silly film, but I suppose Damnation Alley sort of counts here.
The Lives of Others is a fantastic cold war film. I’m sure you’ve seen it, but if not watch it at once.
I’ll throw out John Carpenter’s The Thing as a bit of a reach if you’re willing to play along. Great flick in any case.
Spies Like Us.
You gotta have one comedy in there.
East-West is pretty good.
Goddamn it, beaten to Spies Like Us!
More comedy cold war;
Jumpin Jack Flash
Top Secret (or is that WW2?)
And hey, for comedy nuclear holocaust, with a few commies thrown in to boot, you can’t beat
Whoops! Apocalypse.
Comedies- nice! How 'bout Stripes?
A Boy and His Dog
MacArthur’s Children
Akira
Gojira (Godzilla)
The original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
Just watch Sci-Fi Channel some marathon weekend. If it isn’t their countless versions of the same disaster script, it’s the giant-monster script or the alien-invasion script.
1990 was still arguably the Cold War…HBO did a great movie, By Dawn’s Early Light, which would have been scarier and more relevant 10 years earlier, but was still an excellent look at nuclear tensions.
The Fourth Protocol was a pretty good take on Fredrick’s Forsythe’s novel. Movie may not be particularly well-known, either.
Wargames
I would second, Failsafe, great movie, and a movie that really make s you think.
I’ve got a few, ranging from the overtly political/espionage/competitive aspects to more subtle explorations of life behind the Iron Curtain:
**Torn Curtain ** [1966] – Hitchcock-directed thriller with Paul Newman [of all people!] playing a brilliant American mathematician who, with Julie Andrews in tow, “defects” to the GDR… or does he? Nice depiction of East Germany’s secret police state, enforced by the likes of the thug, Gromek, with the heartbreaking subplot of a nonconformist woman desperate to emigrate to the West. Killer kitchen fight-to-the-death sequence, too.
**The Firemen’s Ball ** [1967] – Milos Forman’s ostensibly non-political satire of the chaos (and corruption) which erupts during big shindig marking the birthday of a retired fire chief. Read between the lines, though: this is a penetrating critique of communism, which corrupts and distorts all it seeks to control, and trying (but failing) to suppress the messy, passionate, and irrational aspects of the human psyche. Score this one as the Bohemian soul, 1; Communist Party conformity, 0. Forman, of course, would eventually emigrate and issue explicitly political excoriations of the communist authorities, in interviews, at least.
**The Unbearable Lightness of Being ** [1987] – erotic melodrama about a group of Czech friends and lovers who find it unexpectedly painful to leave their homeland behind, even though it was the Soviet tanks rolling in that spurred their flight.
Hey Babu Riba [1986] – gentle comedy/drama about four middle-aged Yugoslav men, at least a couple of whom had emigrated to the West, who return to Belgrade in 1985 to bury the girl they all loved thirty years earlier, whom they’d all helped row to Italy. Though not primarily a political story, the divide between East and West illuminates their coming-of-age years (when they were obsessed with the forbidden fruit of Western pop culture), as well as bifurcating their adult lives.
**Louder Than Bombs ** [2002] – another gentle comedy/drama about the tug of the West, this time to two young lovers stagnating in a provincial, dead-end town in 1980’s Poland. The guy is, as the title hints, enamored of Western pop culture (like The Smiths) and tells jokes about steroid-boosted East German Olympic women athletes, but is nonetheless devastated by his girlfriend’s impending departure to attend college in the U.S. – and the highly unlikely prospect of her ever returning.
Miracle [2003] – the 1980 U.S.A. Olympic Hockey Team’s “Miracle On Ice” game (and how they got there). Great fun, with none other than the coach Herb Brooks and network announcer Al Michaels downplaying the Cold War hype in favor of the sporting aspect, when most others felt otherwise.
Citizen X [HBO, 2000] – in Rostov-on-Dom during the waning years of the Soviet Union, a homicide detective, a police official, and a psychiatrist team up to catch a serial killer; based somewhat loosely on a true story. The Cold War aspect is part of the background, but it’s definitely there – in the CP officials’ defensiveness and disdain for American police procedures, and in the growing awareness and embrace of such methods by the “killer department” heroes, as the Party’s grip on power crumbles. Pointedly, it’s the interference of high-level CP apparatchiks (and the incompetence of a forensics lab worker) who enable the killer to be released early and continue his spree…
**The Lives of Others ** [2006] – a searing indictment of the secret-police state of East Germany, as it was in the early-mid '80’s. Granted, it’s only tangentially Cold War-ish, as it’s mostly concerned with what transpires within a small group of heavily-surveilled artists and intellectuals in East Berlin (the playwright protagonist risks everything to write an essay critical of his government, and with the assistance of some other intellectuals and journalists, the document is smuggled to West Berlin and published anonymously), but no film that I’m aware of is so devoted to exposing the activities of these secret police.
Good Bye Lenin! [2003] – a sardonic comedy about a young [formerly East] German man who, with the help of friends, tries to maintain the illusion of the persistence of the Cold War and the Eastern Bloc for the benefit of his communist hardliner mother, just awaken from a lengthy coma.
Now you’re talkin’.
This is Not a Test.
Panic in Year Zero.
Day the World Ended (1955).
And how about Six-String Samurai and its kickin’ soundtrack?
I’ll throw one more title out there, despite it’s being really only tangentially related to the cold war itself, and also in theaters now (so won’t make lissener’s vidstore list). If you get the chance, go see the documentary The Singing Revolution. Really quite moving.
Thanks, I’ve cut and pasted a list from your suggestions. Unfortunately I’m going to be away from the Net for a couple days, so don’t take my absence from this thread as a lack of gratitude. PLEASE keep listing stuff, and I’ll check back in in a couple of days and let you know which movies I’ve included in the display. (This is far more likely to be a matter of availability than of exclusion; these are all excellent suggestions. Though I still await OtakuLuki’s exegesis of The Birds with bated breath.)
I’d have thought it’d be fairly easy to reach a hundred.
My suggestion: Mann’s Strategic Air Command. Nicely, if unironically, captures a particularly important part of the period’s history. Jimmy Stewart, of all people, pretending to nuke midwestern cities as practice runs on the USSR is just deeply weird.
Comedy Film–The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
Well, I’ll admit I was going a bit freestyle, here.
What my thinking was that both The Birds and Them! seemed to me to mirror the paranoia that many other movies I think of as being more obviously Cold War related fed on. They were also interesting looks at American society of the time - especially showing how society would react to stresses.
I’m certainly not going to argue hard for those films. They were just two films that I think of as giving a feel of Cold War era tensions. At the risk of bringing literature in, I’d label those two as much Cold War stories as Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is a story about Occupied France in WWII. The subject is never actually part of the script - but it was on the minds of the audience all the same.
The freestyle aspect is one reason I tried so hard to distance them my first suggestion, which is Cold-War-in-your-face.
If they don’t fit your image of what you’d been going for, I wouldn’t want to have you display them in place of something that you feel fits better. I took your OP as an invite for even tenuous connections, and so, I went with it.
ETA: I really don’t think this was really worth the wait, though. Sorry.
As for the Cary Grants, they were simply taken from the time frame - and both seem more accurately depictions of Cold War culture than WWII culture.
Cool. I agree that Them! is about cold war paranoia, but I still think The Birds is about sexual fears. Still, I’ve never watched it with that theory in mind; I’ll keep it in mind for next time I watch it.
I think the distinguishing factor is that, as with many of the giant-creature movies of the 50s and 60s, Them! includes–if not explicitly, implicitly; I don’t remember exactly–the sense that the phenomenon is caused by nuclear, um, something. Testing? Fallout? I forget. While in The Birds, the birds’ strange behavior is never explained. And while I don’t think there are any even indirect references or suggestions of a nuclear subtext, the birds’ growing insanity does seem to parallel Hedren’s sexual attraction to Rod Taylor.