How We Built the Bomb

There have been a number of feature films and documentaries about the building and the delivery of what was called in 1945 "the atomic bomb." Each is different from the others in its focus.

It's interesting to witness the evolution of the character of Leslie Groves, the army engineer in charge of security and discipline at Los Alamos. Here, he's an unimaginative, somewhat ambitious pragmatist. In "Day One," Brian Dennehy gave us a proud army officer faced with a challenging task. In "Oppenheimer", Groves was a jealous, suspicious, man trying with some success to control the impudent egg heads under his command. In "Fat Man and Little Boy," Paul Newman project a gruff and practical man of action.

The character of Oppy usually remains about the same, brilliant, a good organizer, whose career was torpedoed during congress's post-war hunt for Soviet sympathizers who might be spies. Oppy, who wrangled the whole untethered mess together and brought about the quick victory in the Pacific, lost his security clearance and was sent into exile, if you can convince yourself that a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton is "exile." Well, maybe it is. Princeton only had one decent French restaurant.

It's an arty kind of flick, consisting of interviews with actors playing the parts of the real characters while being interviewed by an off-camera reporter. There is some interpolated footage of the goings on at the Los Alamos base.

There is some new material too. Claus Fuchs, one of three Soviet spies, gets to make a brief statement. The late Richard Feyman, rarely if ever mentioned in the other treatments, is as close to a central figure as w get -- an engaging graduate student at the time who was later able to explain in plain English to an astonished public, why the Challenger had exploded in flight.

"Oppenheimr" is probably the most nuanced and thorough of the lot, but this isn't bad.