Trouble brewing...
Previously, I wrote about The Day After, the nuclear war movie partially set in my hometown. The movie often mentioned in comparison is Threads. The British-made movie similarly examines life after a nuclear attack, but on a much longer time scale.
Threads begins in March 1983. It generally follows the activities of three groups of people, the Kemp family, the Beckett family, and Sheffield's city executive. A text slide notes that Sheffield is Britain's fourth-largest city, and a hub of steel and chemical production. An Air Force base sits 20 miles down the road. In March 1983, Jimmy Kemp and Ruth Beckett are dating. Jimmy enjoys keeping birds and wants to hear the soccer scores. Ruth is concerned about the ongoing recession. Both live with their parents and neither appear to have steady employment. In background noise, quite similar to The Day After, radio, television and newspapers chronicle deteriorating conditions between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In May 1983, The U.S. and U.S.S.R. have each invaded sections of Iran. Sheffield residents carry on as emergency planning gradually becomes visible. We meet the rest of the Kemps and the Becketts. The Kemp family is working class, living in a crowded row house. Jimmy has a younger sister (Allison) and younger brother (Michael). The Becketts are older, and more well-off, perhaps retired. They live in a quiet, more spacious home. Ruth is now pregnant. She and Jimmy plan to get married and buy a flat in a grim-looking tower. We also meet the chief executive of Sheffield as he waters the flowers. A military-looking official delivers a letter, instructing the executive to access a war plan book. He begins meetings with local leaders will make up an emergency council of food officers, health officers and so on. Jimmy and his friend Bob meet at the pub and pick up a couple of women. As Jimmy cheats on Ruth, a massive military convoy drives by their car.
By May 21, war-time planning has strangled British life. Protests are common. As Sheffield stocks supplies, and panic-buying sets in, food and fuel shortages are apparent. Bank transfers grind to a halt. The government has effectively ended civilian travel and seized telephone communications. After a brief American-Soviet exchange in Iran, television and radio stations broadcast bomb shelter instructions. Sheffield's chief executive and at least some of his wartime council relocate to the basement of a building, with the narrator stating that many of them don't have training for their emergency jobs, or even a precise list of duties. The Kemp's neighbors try to drive to rural Lincolnshire, but encounter massive traffic. Sheffield clears its hospitals, and the Becketts take Ruth's grandmother back to their home.
On the day of attack, a text slide notes that the time is 3:30 a.m. in Washington, when American readiness will be at its weakest. A bomb over the North Sea generates an electro-magnetic pulse to knock out the power. A second bomb, presumably over the RAF base, is visible in Sheffield. Jimmy and Bob, working in a sawmill that day, take shelter from the shockwave under a truck initially. Jimmy is last seen running down the sidewalk. The Becketts move into their cellar. The Kemps have a lean-to constructed of mattresses and a door. A third bomb targets Sheffield itself, causing massive fires and infrastructure loss.
Up until now, Threads had largely followed the script of The Day After, tracking families trying to live normally as emergency operations gradually intruded. The Day After chose its blasts to be massive mushroom clouds and people turned into brief x-rays before their deaths. Threads uses close-ups of flames, cutaways of melting objects, and dying humans and animals interspersed with text slides of bomb megatons and numbers of dead. Whereas The Day After only takes us a few days beyond the bombs, Threads spends more than half of the movie depicting desperation, collapse of dignity and order, and a slide into animalistic behavior.
Many of The Day After's main characters appear post-bomb. No matter how well-prepared, most of our main characters in Threads die quickly. Even the Sheffield emergency council is trapped in its town hall basement; a cave-in has already killed one of them. They bicker about calorie counts and radioactive fallout from the railway hub of Crewe while awaiting an impossible rescue under the circumstances. A month afterward, soldiers break through the debris and find them dead at their desks, having either starved or suffocated. Only Ruth and the Kemp patriarch leave their homes, and Mr. Kemp is last seen around a fire, swapping cigarettes for a belt of scotch that he cannot keep down.
The movie transitions into the primary focus for the survivors of the bombs: food production. Now summer, the radioactive dust has blocked the sun, halting the growth and ripening of the plants in the ground, and dropping the temperature dramatically. A new reality emerges. Those with guns are in charge. Anyone able to work, will eat. Those unable to work, will starve. Survivors scavenge the stunted crops by hand. In her last moments of actual dialogue, Ruth debates eating a dead sheep, noting that sheep don't die of the cold. The next actual winter kills most of the remaining vulnerable population. Ruth delivers her baby alone in a stable, with a barking dog tied up outside.
In year ten, little has changed. Cutaway slides suggest that coal mining and limited steam power have returned. But survivors till basic farms by hand. Most people don't speak. The first generation of children born after the bomb, can only express themselves with grunts, and, at best, two-word phrases. Ruth, severely aged from malnutrition, radioactivity and ultra-violet light, collapses while farming. In a fleeting moment of dignity, Ruth dies in a bed, with her daughter watching, though the daughter prods her to work. The final thread to the pre-war world is snipped.
In another difference with its contemporaries, The Day After ends with a depiction of human empathy, two men embracing among the ruins of a home. Threads ends 13 years after the attack, with Ruth's daughter being raped, and a shocking frame of the teen's silent scream after she gives birth, suggesting that the second generation of children after the nuclear bombs might be the last.
A couple of interesting footnotes: The text slides have a teletype sound effect at the start of the picture. After the final bomb, the slides are silent. After the narrator mentions that the first calendar winter post-attack kills most of the U.K.'s older population, he is not heard again.