One of the best films i have seen

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Best movie ever!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The actual development of the atomic bomb was documented in films like The Beginning or the End and in Fat Man and Little Boy. Above and Beyond concentrates on the pilot of the B-29 that actually did the deed.Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker play Colonel and Mrs. Paul Tibbetts who's marriage was put under an incredible strain due to the security surrounding his assignment. Taylor was between his marriages to Barbara Stanwyck and Ursula Thiess and was involved with Parker at the time Above and Beyond was being filmed. Probably that helped a lot during the romantic interludes in the film.Because this film sticks to the personal story of the Tibbetts marriage and avoids all the debate about the use of the atomic bomb, it still holds up well for today's audience. In the supporting cast I would have to single out James Whitmore who plays the security head at Wendover field where Tibbetts is training the potential crew for the mission as the most outstanding. He's virtually the only one Taylor can bare his stoic soul to with the assignment he has.Even with the debate over Hiroshima still raging I would still recommend viewing this film.

According to this film's take on the dawning of the atomic age, Col. Paul Tibbetts rushed the bomb to the skies of Hiroshima to save his marriage. The premise of this simplistic look at a complex and critical event in human history is every bit as pernicious as it sounds. The top secrecy surrounding the preparations to drop the bomb put an intolerable strain on the commander of the operation's marriage. To reassure his wife required the deaths of 80,000 Japanese, but hey, Tibbett's family life was saved.Given what they had to work with, Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker as Mr. and Mrs. Tibbetts do manage to create some mild emotional interest. Given the film was made only seven years after the event, multidimensional analysis or a nuanced reassessment of this watershed event in history could hardly be expected. Taylor's character merely reiterates the self-justifications that the real Paul Tibbetts always offered for his actions in interviews. It was an awful thing thing to have to do, but it was his job, and it shortened the war, saving lives. In the sixty years' since, history has built a far more complex explanation of the forces that led to this ghastly conclusion to the war. The film shows no such hesitations about the morality of the project, and in several scenes characters confidently and without irony pray for God's blessing on the enterprise.The film is of some scientific and historical interest in its depiction of the technology that went into the Enola Gay's mission. The sequence of the bombing itself is compelling. The remorse Taylor displays in these scenes was probably his finest acting moment in a lengthy career that earned him little distinction for acting ability. However, the simplified technological explanations at times have the quality of a scientist in a b&w grade B sci fi movie of the 50's explaining where the giant ants or octopus came from. The viewer must remind him or herself that fantastic as it sounds, this was real, which only reinforces the horror of atomic weapons.In short, this attempt to stuff the life of Paul Tibbetts and the outcome of the Manhattan Project into the standard formulas of Louis B. Mayer's post-war Hollywood is inappropriate, unwieldly, and in the end, offensive to today's post-Cold War sensibilities.

I wouldn't have bought this movie for myself, but got it for my Dad's 75th birthday. Dad had fond memories of it from seeing it on the big screen in 1952.It seems to me that the movie was designed (maybe inadvertently) to appeal to men AND women. The primary emphasis is how Tibbetts' job of getting a squadron ready to drop the first atomic bombs affected his marriage. That looks pretty dumb in print, but it's true. Much is made of how long the Tibbetts were separated during the war and how the stress of Paul's job and the need for secrecy (even where his wife was concerned) almost caused their marriage to fail.The acting is typical for the era: melodramatic. This aspect of old movies probably turns off more people than black and white does. The characters don't seem real. I don't think anyone talked that way even in World War II. The only actor who seemed the least bit natural was the infant playing the Tibbetts youngest son.This last bit is minor compared to my major gripes, but no other reviewer mentioned it so here goes:After the bomb has exploded the crew of the Enola Gay use binoculars in the cockpit to see fires burning on the ground in Hiroshima. This would have been impossible as the bomber was speeding AWAY from the city.

The youth of today must never forget what dropping this bomb did. It saved hundred of thousands of American AND Japanese lives. The United States never started the war. Remember that. Coventry England and Dresden Germany were obliterated by many planes and many bombs. Is there a difference if one plane and one bomb could do the job? Stopping wars is the only way to solve all of this.