Fat Man and Little Boy (Lightmotive, Paramount, 1989)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 15) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie on YouTube, announced as “Free with Ads.” The bad part was that the ads came at about 10-minute intervals; the good part was that most (though not all) of the ads could be bypassed after five seconds. The film was Fat Man and Little Boy, a 1989 account of the Manhattan Project directed by Roland Joffé in the wake of his sensationally successful 1984 film The Killing Fields, about the mid-1970’s Cambodian genocide. I thought this would be interesting to watch after Charles and I had seen the film Oppenheimer, which covered much of the same history, though Roland Joffé and Christopher Nolan took such different approaches to the material the films have little in common other than a basis in the same real-life events. Joffé and his screenwriting collaborator, Bruce Robinson, essentially turned it into a star vehicle for Paul Newman, who played Col. – later General – Leslie Groves, whom the Army put in charge of the Manhattan Project after he successfully commanded the team that built the Pentagon. According to a “Trivia” post on imdb.com, co-screenwriter Robinson was not happy that Newman was cast as Groves because he wasn’t fat, like the real Groves was – though Matt Damon, who played Groves in Oppenheimer, wasn’t fat either, he was stockier and looked more like the surviving photos of the real Groves. Robinson also wanted a major star to play Oppenheimer and he asked for Al Pacino (who would have been interesting) instead of the actor they actually used, Dwight Schultz.

Fat Man and Little Boy at least mentions the political conflicts that were such a major part of Oppenheimer, including Oppenheimer’s own Left-wing sympathies that caused him to be denied a security clearance and thereby effectively fired from work on America’s nuclear arsenal in 1954. It depicts Oppenheimer leaving the Manhattan Project’s headquarters in New Mexico for a weekend to spend it with his former lover, Jean Tatlock (Natasha Richardson), even though by then he was already married to Kathleen “Kitty” Puening (Bonnie Bedelia) and had fathered two children with her. (Their son Peter is shown in the film, played by identical twins Wesley and Brent Harrison in a common casting dodge to avoid violating the laws on how long a child can work, but their daughter Katherine, called “Toni,” isn’t.) Later Jean Tatlock committed suicide but Oppenheimer wasn’t immediately told for fear the news might demoralize him and distract him from his work on the bomb. The main dramatic issue in Fat Man and Little Boy is the contrast between how the Army functions as a top-down organization in which orders from commanders are supposed to be followed without question, and the freer, looser scientific world in which scientists are accustomed to sharing information with each other and hopefully spurring each other on to greater creativity in their work. There’s also a sub-plot involving some fictional characters: a Manhattan Project engineer named Michael Merriman (John Cusack) and the nurse he falls in love with, Kathleen Robinson (Laura Dern). Merriman keeps a journal about his experiences which he intends to share with his father after the war, and we frequently hear excerpts from it as voice-overs.

In the end Merriman dies a horrible death from radiation poisoning when there’s an accident in the reactor room and he has to grab a core of plutonium with his bare hands (though the dangers of radiation were already known, no one in the movie is shown wearing protective gear of any kind) to keep the reactor from going super-critical and blowing up the whole facility. According to the film’s imdb.com “Trivia” page, Merriman’s death is actually a composite of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, two real people in the Manhattan Project who died of radiation exposure while manipulating a plutonium core (though Slotin’s accident didn’t happen until nine months after the end of the war). Overall, Fat Man and Little Boy is quite a good movie, nowhere nearly as thematically rich as Oppenheimer and ending rather anticlimactically with the “Trinity” test of the first atomic bomb (we get only a few closing credits about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 1954 security hearing that spelled the end of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s career as a nuclear weapons designer) but still an engaging tale of the building of a super-weapon, the moral qualms of some of the scientists working on it (when the Allied forces occupied the area of Germany that had headquartered their nuclear weapons program, the news that they didn’t find anything is carefully kept from the scientists at Los Alamos, many of whom had joined the project in the first place only out of fear of what Hitler could have done with the bomb if he’d got it first) and the contrast between military secrecy and scientific openness.