The Atomic City (1952)

Such a frustrating disappointment

How sad is this?

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

I had it on tape from a tv showing. The DVD by Olive Films is missing a portion of a scene. The wife Mrs. Addison talks to Tommy on the phone to prove he is alive. However it was a tape recording she heard. They told her it might be a tape. Then later on around min. 57 police break into an apartment where the kidnappers held the boy. they find a tape recorder with the boys voice on it. this scene is cut. police go into the next room and find a blackboard with nuclear info on it.

A gang of Soviet hoods kidnap the young son of a nuclear physicist with the intention of blackmailing the father into handing over the nuclear farm. They do not succeed.There is some nice location shooting at a reasonably well-preserved Indian community. Aside from that, the film's virtues are negligible. The direction by Jerry Hopper is clumsy and overstated, the performances routine, the musical score out of the suspense-movie library.It isn't that the movie is insulting or offensive in any way. It's just that there's not much of substance there. Even the title, "Atomic City," is misleading. The city is Los Alamos, which was not much of a city, and it happens to be where the scientist, Gene Barry, and his indistinctive family live. The nuclear secrets are hardly touched upon, serving mostly as the engine behind the thriller plot. The MacGuffin could just as easily have been money or the world's largest diamond, except that the Soviet Union was the generic enemy during this period -- Korea being in full bloom at the time.Gene Barry seems fatigued throughout. Millburn Stone as the FBI's chief mahoff is clipped and definitive. Bert Fried as one of the goons rolls around being bad. He does have a good scene, in which he sits in a dark Indian kiva with the kidnapped boy and chats with him, not unkindly. The various FBI agents and all of the women are only blurry characters.One can see the influence, though, of the docudramas of the late 1940s and early 1950s. These were generally narrated by the stentorian Reed Hadley. Here, there is no narration but the movie does illustrate the care taken by the FBI in keeping its secrets carefully hidden. There is also a curious scene in which a Soviet agent is being interrogated. He knows where the boy is hidden but refuses to tell. Gene Barry wants to beat the guy up until he squeals but the FBI prevent him, telling him that physical punishment of a prisoner is forbidden by the rules. It sounds rather quaint in today's interrogation climate.I was kind of looking forward to seeing this. The plot synopsis was attractive. But, alas, there isn't anything that lifts this generic film out of its cradle of mediocrity.

I have just watched The Atomic City for the first time and was very impressed by it.A nuclear scientist's son is kidnapped when he goes out of the confines of Los Almos on a school trip. The kidnappers want to know the secrets of the H bomb, but it isn't long before the FBI are on the case and the kidnappers eventually track down the boy and the kidnappers in some old cliff dwellings. The boy is rescued at the end, but not before he nearly falls from a cliff trying to escape the kidnappers.This movie was filmed on location in Los Almos and San Francisco and good use is made of these locations. It gives you an idea on what life was like in this period.The movie's cast includes Gene Barry (War Of The Worlds), Nancy Gates (World Without End) and the boy is played well by Lee Aaker (The Challenge of Rin Tin Tin).I enjoyed this movie and is worth watching if you get the chance.Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

Just watched this movie and it's not bad; there are a few tense moments and not a lot of long dialog strings. Comes off as fairly intelligent; fastpaced almost like 'documentary style'. This movie will evoke some nostalgia and a bit of cold war paranoia with cars,street scenes,and life in the 50's. The acting is fairly solid and at 85 minutes run time it goes by at a good pace. An atomic era film buff shouldn't miss this one.