16
Popular Culture Review
Rambo II (1986), and Rambo III (1988). In the last of the 1980s Cold War films,
Hollywood returned to Los Alamos where the last blast of World War II and
first flames of the Cold War were concocted. In Fat Man and Little Boy (1989),
director Roland Joffe laments how the military in the person of General Leslie
Groves (Paul Newman) was able to gain control of the atomic bomb from the
scientific community represented by Robert Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz).21
While the film played loose with many of the facts surrounding the development
of the bomb, the conclusion of Fat Man and Little Boy with the Alamogordo
testing of the atomic bomb suggests that, unfortunately, the weapon is here to
stay. There is a note of reluctant acceptance and resignation.
With