Films about the Cold War and Wars of Decolonization
This collection provides information on selected movies, TV productions and documentaries on the themes of gender, military and war in the period covered by the Oxford Handbook.
The most important wars for this period include:
- Cold War (1946–91)
- Arab-Israeli Conflicts (1947ff)
- War of Indonesian Independence (1945–49)
- Korean War (1950–53)
- African Wars for Independence (1952ff)
- Algerian War (1954–62)
- Indochina Wars (1946–79)
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In this Cold War B-movie, styled as a film noir, a disgruntled veteran becomes aware of the dangers of communism. Bill Jones joins the Communist Party USA after a real estate scam, but he soon realizes his mistake. After witnessing party leaders...
Based on a book by John le Carré published in 1989, this spy thriller explores shifting alliances in the late Cold War. After receiving an unsolicited manuscript documenting the weakness of Soviet nuclear capabilities, a British book publisher,...
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming is a 1966 American comedy film based on the 1961 Nathaniel Benchley novel The Off-Islanders. When a Soviet submarine gets stuck on a sandbar off the coast of a New England island...
After spending decades in a Siberian Gulag labor camp, Roman Catholic priest Kiril Lakota (Anthony Quinn) is set free by Russian leader Piotr Ilyich Kamenev (Sir Laurence Olivier) at the height of the Cold War, when Russia and China are locked in...
An Irish infantry company operating under the United Nations attempts to keep the peace following the outbreak of the Congolese Civil War, which threatened to escalate the Cold War. Sent to the mineral rich state of Katanga, which had seceded...
In this award-winning Cold War thriller based on a 1963 novel of the same title by John le Carré, a British spy goes to great lengths to uncover intelligence. At the height of the Cold War, British spy Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) is nearly ready...
The Thing from Another World, sometimes referred to as just The Thing, is a 1951 American black-and-white science fiction horror film. When scientist Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) reports a UFO near his North Pole research...
Unpopular with audiences and critics alike when it was released in 1963, The Ugly American offered a warning to the Cold-War obsessed United States as it headed toward full-scale intervention in Vietnam. The film is set in a fictional...
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part TV series, The Vietnam War, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and...
Based on the 1984 novel of the same title by John Hale, The Whistle Blower is a British spy thriller film. Robert Jones (Nigel Havers), a Russian linguist working for a British intelligence agency, is found dead, apparently...
Produced at the start of the Cold War and in the wake of the Hollywood Ten, this film tackles American communism in the labor movement and its manifestations. The leader of the local cell of communists in San Francisco blackmails Brad Collins,...
For thirteen days in October 1962, the United States risked war with the Soviet Union when a U-2 spy plane discovered nuclear missiles in Cuba. This film dramatizes those events, focusing on the efforts of President Kennedy and his military and...
This Is Not a Test is a 1962 American low-budget science fiction film directed by Fredric Gadette. Produced at the height of the Cold War, the film was one of a number of productions of the late 1950s and early 1960s based upon the...
A man returns to Palestine after living in America. Archival footage of his childhood offers a contrast to his current journey.
Filmed during the heightened Cold War tensions in the 1980s, Threads offers a devastating account of rebuilding society in Sheffield, England, after a fictional nuclear holocaust. The plot centres on two families as a confrontation...
This film asks large questions about resistance, oppression, and pan-Arabism within the context of the global War on Terror. A journalist travels to Beirut to uncover the forgotten history of the Zanj revolution in the 9th century Abbasid...
Based on a James le Carré novel, this thriller deals with the internal cold wars in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in the early 1970s. Forced into retirement after a botched mission in Hungary, George Smiley (Gary Oldman) returns to track...
A prime example of militarism in late Cold War America, Top Gun glamorizes the lives, service, and sacrifice of U.S. Naval Aviators. Lt. Pete Mitchell (a.k.a. Maverick) and his friend Lt. Nick Bradshaw (a.k.a. Goose) attend the Navy's...
One of Hitchcock's less esteemed efforts, Torn Curtain finds movie stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in a Cold War thriller. American physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) shocks his friends and family by defecting to East Germany...
Trinity and Beyond documents American nuclear testing from 1945 to 1963, when the United States., United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Interviews with those involved recount these previously classified...