The Beginning or the End (1947) on Netflix
Passed19471h 52mBiographyDramaHistory
Scientists split the atom, beating the Germans to it. Albert Einstein helps them bring word to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and General Leslie Groves must turn their work into a weapon.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.5/10877 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer welcomes atomic energy while warning of the dangers it carries. In the United States, Matt Cochran and other scientists working under Dr. Enrico Fermi and Dr. Marré split the atom and pull ahead of the Germans in the race for a weapon. With help from Albert Einstein, they carry the news to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1941, with the country at war, commits up to two billion dollars to the Manhattan Project. In December 1942, beneath a stadium at the University of Chicago, Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Nixon and international experts watch scientists produce the first chain reaction. Nixon is then assigned to General Leslie Groves, put in charge of the project, who must draw the scientific, industrial and defense communities together to build a working bomb.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Beginning or the End (1947)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producer Samuel Marx and Donna Reed's husband Tony Owen met President Harry S. Truman to get his approval, and Truman told them: "Gentlemen, make a motion picture. Tell the people of this nation that for them it is the beginning or the end", his last four words giving the film its title.
- The film began as an idea hatched in October 1945 by actress Donna Reed and her high school science teacher, Edward R. Tompkins, a chemist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
- Scientists advising the film were alarmed that MGM leading man Clark Gable was being considered to play General Leslie Groves, and were relieved when Brian Donlevy was cast in the part instead.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer raised no objection to the sequence in which he informs Brigadier General Thomas Farrell that the odds of a runaway explosion destroying the planet were less than one in a million, though he told MGM he never said it.
- Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr and Sir James Chadwick all refused to let their names be used; the loss of Bohr forced the deletion of a sequence in which Bohr, rescued from the Germans in Denmark, tells a shocked Oppenheimer that the German nuclear project was supplying expertise to Japan.
- Eleanor Roosevelt objected to Lionel Barrymore playing her late husband because of political remarks he had made about the president in 1944; MGM delayed his scenes while she considered his letter of explanation, then replaced him with Godfrey Tearle.
SPOILER
The scene in which the scientist Cochran receives a fatal dose of radiation while assembling the Hiroshima bomb was a fictionalized reference to two Manhattan Project members, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, who died after contact with radioactive material on 21 August 1945 and 21 May 1946.
