The DAY AFTER

   Made-for-tv film (1983). ABC. Dir Nicholas Meyer, starring Jason Robards, Jo-Beth Williams, Steven Guttenberg, John Lithgow, Lori Lethin, William Allen Young and a dozen others. Screenplay Edward Hume. 121 mins. Colour.

   Set in Lawrence, Kansas, the film tells of a massive nuclear exchange between the USA and USSR. Many of the missiles hit Kansas and Missouri, targeted because of their numerous Minuteman silos. TDA opens a week before nuclear war begins, and ends around six weeks later. The film instantly became a media event, and was hugely publicized and discussed. It was widely - justly but irrelevantly - criticized, especially abroad, for its soap-opera treatment. Meyer's purpose was to bring home a propaganda message to ordinary people, which is precisely what soap-opera characters are perceived to be by most viewers. The film, as the final titles tell us, does give a remarkably mild account of the consequences of atomic war, gruelling though it is. Nevertheless, it was an act of courage for ABC to make this expensive film at all, since nuclear issues at that time were barely touched on by US tv, being unattractive to advertisers, and the nuclear debate was probably quite foreign to many viewers. Also, TDA could hardly be seen as apolitical (despite disclaimers by ABC executives): Meyer himself said "the movie tells you that civil defence is useless", and observed that ABC gave him "millions of dollars to go on prime-time tv and call Ronald Reagan a liar". Much of the film is routine in treatment if not subject matter, but it contains several outstanding sequences: the housewife who won't go into the cellar until she finishes cleaning the house; the lecture to increasingly furious farmers about implausible methods of "decontaminating soil"; a street packed with radiation victims on makeshift mattresses as far as the eye can see.

   PN

   See also: CINEMA.