|
Cold War Films Hit Theaters July 23 |
|
|
|
 The New York Times ran an article on Sunday, July 11, on a trifecta of Cold War films scheduled for release on July 23. They are Farewell, an "espionage drama" set in the end of the Cold War, Salt, which stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA officer accused of spying for the Soviet Union, and Countdown to Zero, a documentary on the nuclear peril we face today.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, film studios moved away from making movies about the Cold War and shifted their focus to the Balkans. Today, Hollywood's interest in the Cold War has been rekindled, and the recent arrest of 11 people accused of being Russian spies will make the release of these films particularly timely.
Thomas C. Reed, who spoke at the Atomic Heritage Foundation's "Revisiting
Reykjavik" symposium in March 2009, was a special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan and is an expert on Cold War history. Reed
authored At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. His
book provided the account for the Farewell case, which is the codename
of a KGB colonel who decided to "change the world" by passing classified
information on defense technology to French intelligence. He also
provided the French with a list of highly placed KGB agents who had
inflitrated the West. According to Reed, the film gets the espionage
aspect right, but presented a highly compressed version of the political
events that surrounded it.
Please click here to read the New York Times article on these movies.
Links to the official websites of the three movies described in the
article are provided below:
Farewell
[French]
Salt
Countdown to Zero
|
