[Spooks] Shortwave at the movies

[Utility World (Hugh Stegman)]

> I don't see the movie "The Bedford Incident" below?

Oh right, that one.  I remember that as a suspenseful movie.  I suppose the
radio has to have figured in the climax, but mostly I remember them hunched
over the sonar and hydrophones for hours.

Here's a couple others I'd forgotten:

Broken Arrow:  The title comes from the US brevity code for a damaged
nuclear weapon with mandatory safety perimeter, though they kind of mess up
on the concept.   At one point the "BROKEN ARROW" message comes over
the radio and someone says, "I don't know what's worse, that this had to
happen, or that they already have a code for it."

Red Planet Mars:  I don't know how I forgot this one.  It's gotta be one of
the silliest 50s paranoia flicks made, in a genre where there's a lot of
competition for this honor.  A very, very young Peter Graves is this
brain-damaged scientist who's trying to contact Mars on some kind of
hydrogen-powered radio.  No joy until his kid decides to trade digits of pi
with the Martians, then the ultimate DX, at which point western civilization
comes unstuck.  Next thing we know the Martians are delivering Christian
sermons straight from the Bible.  This definitely gives Russia a very bad
day.  But things do not end well.

There's one really depressing post-nuke TV movie, might be The Day After,
where a surviving town uses a ham radio to try and contact anyone else left
alive.  Never is the phrase "no joy" so appropriate.


-hugh