Comedian Rich Hall presents an alternative history of the Cold War, from nuclear near misses and fallout shelters to the CIA wiring a cat to spy on the Russian ambassador.Comedian Rich Hall presents an alternative history of the Cold War, from nuclear near misses and fallout shelters to the CIA wiring a cat to spy on the Russian ambassador.Comedian Rich Hall presents an alternative history of the Cold War, from nuclear near misses and fallout shelters to the CIA wiring a cat to spy on the Russian ambassador.
Photos
William Darden
- Self - Volunteer Firefighter
- (archive footage)
Cynthia Kelly
- Self - President, Atomic Heritage Foundation
- (as Cynthia C. Kelly)
Peter Bull
- Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Bobby Fischer
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Larry Gates
- Dr. Dan 'Danny' Kauffman
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Mikhail Gorbachev
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Sterling Hayden
- Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Adolf Hitler
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
John F. Kennedy
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Nikita Khrushchev
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
Joseph McCarthy
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (uncredited)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- GoofsRich Hall argues "that McCarthyism was actually a tiny step forward for race relations," as all Americans, whatever their background, were equal citizens if not Communists. The evidence is that Jewish-Americans and Protestants were targeted much more than Irish-American Catholics like Joseph McCarthy himself.
- ConnectionsFeatures Longines Chronoscope (1951)
Featured review
The Cold War, A Satirical Abstraction
Rich Hall, the perennial grumbly and gravel-voiced comedian who has been about fifty-odd for what seems like a billion years, is supremely adept at opening sarcastic windows for BBC4 viewers to gaze wryly at modern American culture through. He's done quite a few of these documentaries now and they are always at the very least supremely fascinating - his gaze is a particularly idiosyncratic one and when looking at something as serious as postwar US-Soviet tensions it's deeply refreshing to see it so bafflingly stared at.
What's nice here is the strangely reassuring human foolishness of both sides which is plucked at - details I'd never really heard or properly considered like the many occasions where human error alone nearly pushed both countries over the brink - how bombs more powerful than those that annihilated Hiroshima accidentally dropped from a plane onto a rural community in South Carolina and how the churches in the area benefitted from the fallout (or lack thereof).
Hall's patented world-weary Southern drawl is as strangely familiar to me as the sound of the six o'clock pips on the news every night - and I hope he continues to open these windows for us silly Brits for many more decades to come.
What's nice here is the strangely reassuring human foolishness of both sides which is plucked at - details I'd never really heard or properly considered like the many occasions where human error alone nearly pushed both countries over the brink - how bombs more powerful than those that annihilated Hiroshima accidentally dropped from a plane onto a rural community in South Carolina and how the churches in the area benefitted from the fallout (or lack thereof).
Hall's patented world-weary Southern drawl is as strangely familiar to me as the sound of the six o'clock pips on the news every night - and I hope he continues to open these windows for us silly Brits for many more decades to come.
helpful•10
- owen-watts
- Sep 8, 2020
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- Filming locations
- Bloomsbury, London, England, UK(Hall stands on the corner of Russell Square and Southampton Row during his opening monologue.)
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Top Gap
By what name was Rich Hall's Red Menace (2019) officially released in Canada in English?
Answer