The bomb

Seven Days to Noon (1950)

This British thriller won an academy award for best story and stars Barry Jones. A professor that is part of Britain's nuclear weapons program has a nervous break down and threatens to blow up London.

Five years after the end of World War Two the world is still trying to come to terms with the idea of atomic weapons and what they say about the nations that build them. What is interesting is that this film pre-dates Britain testing it's first nuclear weapon by a couple of years. The plot deals with this issue in a fairly balanced way and has a good level of tension as the police try to hunt down the rogue professor in an evacuated London. The characters and some of their language is slightly dated but for the most part the issues raised in the film are equally applicable to the modern world, especially the idea of terrorism to achieve political change.

4/5 a thoughtful post war effort.