Turner Classic Movies has been showing trailers from the 1952 movie “Above and Beyond.” Portrayed as “a love story with tenderness and heartbreak;” a story of a “brave man” and his loving wife, one could imagine this to be a film about the all-too-common experience of men being killed in war, leaving wives and other loved ones to grieve over relationships destroyed by the state. But, no, this is not the theme of the movie. It is, rather, the tribulations that took place in the real-life military career of Col. Paul Tibbets, as he was training for what was to become the highlight of his life: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Ah, the “tenderness and heartbreak” as this man soared “above and beyond” the hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children whose lives were to be destroyed in furtherance of Pres. Truman’s war crime.
Hollywood still cranks out movies designed to propagandize Americans on behalf of the state’s war-mongering appetites. It is somewhat encouraging, however, that some improvements in style have emerged over the years. I cannot imagine even the shabbiest Hollywood film producer making a movie about the “brave men” who bombarded Baghdad in that slaughter known as “shock and awe.” Such bilge would be laughed off the screen.
