Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this weeks listening to America with Clay Jenkins and I am Clay Jenkins and you're getting a lot of the film Oppenheimer these days very little on Barbie although I am going to see it my daughter has shamed me for not seeing them both on the same day and she tells me that the Barbie film is significant we'll see right I'm not afraid of it but to put Oppenheimer a tragic character who built a weapon of mass destruction in the same equation as a plastic

doll with oversized breasts seems a little perverse to me but I get that we're living in a postmodern age right anyway I hope you agreed that Oppenheimer is worth all this fuss I've interviewed John Gowen's twice now he's the actor who plays Dr. Ward Evans one of the three

members of the panel that's had an end judgment of Oppenheimer in the spring of 1954 after which his security clearance was withdrawn I've interviewed the course of the great David Necandry

we saw it on the same day and we both texted each other we must have a conversation and of course then we did and now I've interviewed Niles Schwartz Niles has been a friend of mine now for a few years at the pandemic he was one of the people who joined several of my online courses and in every course he discussed cinema you know there are three words here like movies film and then cinema

and Niles knows a great deal about the history of film and he's an expert at it I learned a great deal from him I frequently write him a letter asking for lists lists of apocalyptic film list of the greatest sci-fi films list of the greatest romantic comedies list of the greatest ancient epics about Rome and Israel

and now exam to the great and so on and in this case he's also provided me with a list of the great atomic films of course at the top of which his doctor strange loves Stanley Kubrick's

enormous

satire

amazing satire for its time in the 1960s

and one of my favorite films and by the way in Oppenheimer there is a tribute

after a fashion at least two doctor strange love Edward Teller at the atomic test on July 16 1945 is seen

slathering his face with suntan lotion this is true by the way

and then he puts on goggles and when the bomb goes off he says something close to wow

I mean it's clearly not just impressed and stunned but thrilled in a way

so he's clearly the Darth Vader of the story and so Edward Teller is clearly the dark star the Darth

Vader of the atomic era and it's clear that Christopher Nolan the director is referring

a wonderful little illusion to Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove in the film of that name

Niles is really an amazing person he has a kind of a completely different

public job in Minneapolis, Minnesota but you know there are very few people that I know who

really know film who study film who are film historians who who know the vocabulary of film can't

wait to get to Minneapolis one of these days to have dinner with him and go to the Guthrie

theater you know the famous Guthrie theater of Minneapolis I said I hope it will be a Shakespeare

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