(dramatic music) ♪ (majestic music) (narrator) The Cold War seemed tailor-made for cinema.

The daring feats of espionage and the never-ending sense of paranoia, secret rendezvous in dark alleys, and worldwide fear of nuclear attack.

The Space Race captured imaginations while proxy wars raged over the decades.

From the moment World War II ended, the Iron Curtain descended.

♪ The West and the East were now facing off in a battle of conflicting visions.

From thrillers to comedies to romantic dramas, it was the perfect subject for visionary directors.

♪ (Churchill) "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.

Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

(Simon) When Churchill goes to Fulton, Missouri, at Harry Truman's invitation, and talks about the Iron Curtain that has come down from Stettin and the Baltic down to the Black Sea, separating of Russian-controlled, or Soviet-controlled Europe from the free world.

And, in fact, it got a bit worse after Churchill spoke because the Russians managed to rig elections in places like Poland.

People still, in the mid-1940s in the year or two after the war, thought of the Russians as being allies of the West and being allies of Britain and America.

And it soon became clear that Russia had a system that it was determined, first of all, would survive, would survive any threat posed to it by the West, and possibly would empire build and try and undermine the West, not necessarily by invading Britain or invading America or launching a nuclear strike on either of them, but in getting spheres of interest that conflicted with the West.

(Ian) In historical terms, the Cold War emerged out of the rubble of Nazi Germany when the powers that had defeated Germany had literally divided up Europe.

So it was France, Britain, America, and Soviet Russia who occupied what was Germany and what was Austria and all the kind of cities therein.

And they literally subdivided those places and each held their own zones, they called them.

So this created a very strange world in post-war Europe.

(narrator) One of the first films to emerge from the new political landscape was 1949's The Third Man.

(somber music) (film narrator) I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour, and easy charm.

Constantinople suited me better.

I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market.

We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay.

Of course, a situation like that does tempt amateurs, but, well, you know, they can't stay the course like a professional.

Now the city, it's divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian, and the French.

But the center of the city, that's international policed by an international patrol.

One member of each of the four powers.

Wonderful!

What a hope they had!

All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language.

Except a sort of a smattering of German.

Good fellows on the whole, did their best, you know.

Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities.

Bombed about a bit.

Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American.

Came all the way here to visit a friend of his.

The name was Lime, Harry Lime.

Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don't know, some sort of job.

Anyway, there he was, poor chap.

Happy as a lark and without a cent.

(lively music) Carol Reed's The Third Man is probably one of the best British films ever made, in my opinion, because it got an extraordinary amount of the collapse of Europe after the war absolutely right.

Of course, that was due to the cinematographer, Robert Krasker.

The story is about an American, Joseph Cotten, who goes to Vienna and gets mixed up with this terrible criminal played by Orson Welles and also with a beautiful Italian lady called Alida Valli.

I think the strength of the film is not just Orson Welles' extraordinary performance as this horrible man, but also the whole atmosphere of the film is absolutely right from beginning to end.

You felt these old buildings, slightly demolished, slightly shabby.

The whole thing, I thought of The Third Man, was it put me back in the time of the '50s when everything was upside down, nobody knew what was really going to happen, and Vienna was not itself at all.

And that whole atmosphere was so brilliantly portrayed throughout the film, it became a kind of a-- a noir thriller which you remember not only because of the actors but because of the atmosphere throughout.

♪ (narrator) Another picture that captured the early developments of the Cold War was 1948's The Iron Curtain.

It was based on the real life story of Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk who defected to the West.

♪ (Col. Ilya Ranov) Our rules and aims are quite different.

We have no place for bourgeois sentimentalism, only relentless realism.

The class struggle will continue, until this decadent, plutocratic democracy is as completely destroyed as National Socialism.

Therefore, you, the representatives of the Soviet Union in Canada, will as always remain vigilant, suspicious, and aloof.

That will be all.

The Iron Curtain is a 1948 film which was set in Ottawa, Canada.

A Soviet citizen and his family, or his wife, go to Ottawa to work for the Soviet Embassy.

Now, obviously, this was happening all the time, this was how diplomatic relations worked.

But when he went to Canada, his wife became pregnant, and she, and then he, were gradually seduced by the freedoms that they found and that they saw in Canada.

And, of course, there was a subtext in that there was a honey trap which the Soviets set for him in order to test his loyalty.

Now, he resisted the honey trap, but, of course, the subtext of the film is that these communists don't care about family life and that they will do anything to undermine Western family life.

And his wife became pregnant and she suggested that they defect.

And eventually they did.

(Ian) What I think is so remarkable about this film is it's made in 1948.

And the terminology, you know, of the Iron Curtain, the very title of the film, was already effectively in use.

And this is so early on in what we considered the Cold War.

In some ways, this is one of the very first Cold War films.

You're only three years after the end of World War II, and now the Soviets are the enemy.

And there's this idea of the two halves, the divide, and this idea of spies at work within foreign countries from foreign embassies.

And that sort of also speaks of an era where the game wasn't quite afoot.

It was sort of beginning to build up, but the different forces weren't quite aware what the opposite one was doing.

So exactly what a Cold War spy movie, you know, exactly was hasn't yet fully been defined.

By the end of the film, it's as you might expect.

The Soviets are starting to track him down to assassinate him.

Finally, the authorities in the Western side realize what he's offering, and these are secrets about the atomic bomb and these are things about what the Soviets are up to in terms of listening in to the Canadians.

At the end of it, you realize it's actually-- this is a true story.

So this story kind of is really one of the very first sort of spy events in the Cold War.

So I think it's quite a significant film in that respect.

(grim music) ♪ (man) The party comes first.

♪ (Leitz) What about Igor Gouzenko?

♪ (man) If he goes unpunished, others might do the same.

♪ Don't be too unhappy, Leitz.

We'll name a city after you when we take over.

♪ (bright traditional Chinese music) ♪ (announcer) The Communists were advancing on a 600-mile front and meeting little resistance from the demoralized nationalist troops.

By the end of April, they had crossed the Yangtze River, and on April 24th, took the city of Nanjing, population: one million.

Then the great city of Shanghai fell, population: over four million.

Escape was on the lips and in the hearts of civilians as well as soldiers.

Finally, the great province of Guangdong was invaded, and the third-largest city in China, Canton, was surrendered.

The bitter struggle was all but over.

The nationalists took what they could and fled across the Formosa Strait to protect what was left of their government.

On September 21st, 1949, the People's Republic was proclaimed in the city of Peking.

The reds had swallowed China.

(dramatic music) ♪ So while the battle lines are being drawn and walls are being raised between America and Soviet Russia, there was the other great nation that had embodied communism in its own particular way.

That was China.

China had been through a traumatic World War II, had been invaded by Japan, had been turned inside out.

Its old feudal order had been thrown out for this communist regime that itself went through another upheaval with the Cultural Revolution.

It's a very complicated picture of China.

It wasn't viewed, necessarily, as directly the enemy in the way that Soviet Russia was, but it was viewed with a certain suspicion, and, perhaps even more than Russia, a certain sense of the unknown of what was going on with this kind of vast place.

(narrator) One of the first Western films to delve into China's new regime was 1955's Soldier of Fortune, which saw Clark Gable venturing from Hong Kong into newly communist China to rescue an American suspected of being a spy.

♪ (mellow music) (Hank) I need some information.

I have to find a man in China, an American.

-Oh?

-Hm.

-He may be dead.

-Then he should be easy to find -because he will not move.

-No, no, not so easy.

-He's being held a prisoner.

-He is your friend?

(Hank) No, she... (sighs) -He's a husband of a woman.

-You sound like a fool.

(Hank) She's a wonderful woman.

(giggles) (Dak Lai) You have needed a woman too long.

(Hank) I want you to send inquiries to your temples on the mainland.

Your priest and nuns seem to know everything.

Find out where the American is.

(Dak Lai) If the British find out, I will have much trouble.

(Hank) Yes, I know, so be careful.

Soldier of Fortune is an Edward Dmytryk film that loosely tackles the idea of revolutionary China and how the world had changed.

It stars Clark Gable.

He just freed himself up from MGM.

He was quite eager to make films, you know, which he would have an influence over.

And Clark Gable had very particular anti-communist leanings as an individual, so I think he was very influential in making the film, in taking the starring role in it, because he wanted to portray the threat held by this transformation of China.

I mean, there was a great worry, certainly in America, that countries would fall one by one into this kind of communist trap.

It was known as the domino effect.

All of these kind of prevalent global kind of concerns were being raised over the Cold War.

(narrator) China's tumultuous history during this period would be captured nearly 40 years later in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic The Last Emperor.

(traditional Chinese music) (footsteps) (train whistle, indistinct speaking) (grim music) (man) The war criminals will proceed in orderly fashion to the main waiting room and await instructions.

♪ No talking.

Obey the guards.

♪ War criminals must proceed to the main waiting room.

♪ The Last Emperor, the Oscar-winning epic directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, offers another insight.

It's about this last emperor, this boy who grows up to a man really hidden away from the world.

He lives in the Forbidden City.

But at the beginning of the film, he's been captured and he's been taken to a camp.

And this is communist China now.

And they want to put him on a program to re-educate him into the ways of communism.

And through this program, he realizes the devastation that Japan wrought in the country.

He has a kind of enlightening experience about how he got it wrong, you know, how he was misguided over the previous years.

But also, we begin the flashbacks of his life.

It reminds you what an ancient world China was, and still was before the war, that it was almost a feudal country before World War II transformed it.

So there is a big contrast between its present day within the film and its flashbacks.

So we're at two worlds.

A country that has been, you know, torn apart and put back together again, all seen through the eyes of this no longer emperor.

He's a fascinating character, Pu Yi, 'cause he's enigmatic, played by John Lone, he doesn't give much away.

He's rather emotionless.

But he becomes almost a cipher for the audience.

Let's observe this kind of incredible pace of change and cultural change going on, certainly, in China, the China of which he somewhere in his head, he might still be the emperor of, but in the world in general, the pace in which politics and ideology were taking over nations was incredibly fast and kind of unstoppable and terrifying as well.

That kind of sense of a tide moving out.

(majestic music) ♪ (John) The Korean War was another facet of the Cold War, but it was also a legacy of World War II in that Korea was split into two competing countries.

And the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea.

This, of course, caused all sorts of problems, and the Americans went to the United Nations, and unusually, possibly for the first time, the United Nations authorized force to repel the North Koreans, to get them out of South Korea.

(journalist) Have you been wounded yet?

(Maj. Frank Burns) Uh... (indistinct chatter) A little, uh, a slight, uh... (journalist) Would you like to say hello to your mother?

(Maj. Frank Burns) Well, my mother's dead, actually, she's deceased.

(journalist) Oh.

Well, I'm sorry.

(Maj. Frank Burns) I'd like to say hello to my father if I could.

(journalist) Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine, fine.

(Maj. Frank Burns) Hi, Dad.

MASH was directed by Robert Altman, and it appeared in 1970.

And although it's set in the Korean War, it actually brings the values of the counterculture, the anti-Vietnam War movement to film.

And it's very, very cheeky, because it does it to the Korean War, which almost puts it at one remove.

And, naturally, as a film which would eventually be a television series, it was quite an episodic film.

Things happened, things were dealt with, and then they went out.

It was seen as what it was, a very sharp satire.

But the values it brought were contemporary at that time.

(narrator) During the Korean War itself, Hollywood took on the conflict with films such as One Minute to Zero and Fixed Bayonets.

Then, in 1954, not long after a ceasefire was called, The Bridges at Toko-Ri was released, starring William Holden and Grace Kelly.

(soft music) A lot of the American forces who were still very present on bases in Japan, rather than go home, they went back into war, back into Korea.

And there was a very small gap between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War.

For some soldiers, it must feel like it hadn't ended at all.

And I think that made it surreptitious in political terms.

It made it something that wasn't going to be celebrated too loudly.

And that may have been a reason why Hollywood kind of kept a distance from the Korean War.

Certainly, this idea of weariness is one of the themes of The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

It was a big Paramount production, CinemaScope, the full whack.

And it tells the story of a hotshot pilot, played by William Holden, who wants nothing more now than just to return to his wife and family.

Of course, this is grand Hollywood melodrama.

So you get the brilliant special effects, the kind of shooting of jet fighters blowing up these bridges, pivotal bridges, as the forces of the North threaten invasion into the South.

So it's kind of a way of breaking off the invasion.

And, of course, it all goes horribly wrong because he crash lands after one final part in the mission and is left stranded.

So it becomes about noble sacrifice at what these men were doing.

And it has a slightly strange tone to it, really, for a film about Americans going back into war, which suggests that soldiers are going to be dying again and it's a worthwhile cause.

(Mike) You know how to fire a carbine, sir?

Just release the safety there and squeeze the trigger.

It fires automatically.

it'll stop firin'.

I'm a lawyer from Denver, Colorado, Mike.

I probably can't hit a thing.

Judas, how'd you ever get out here in a smelly ditch in Korea?

That's just what I've been asking myself.

(airplanes buzzing overhead) (soft music) ♪ (narrator) Throughout the 1950s, a succession of films were released that tapped into the ever-growing feelings of paranoia that were present in the West, one of the first being 1952's Invasion, U.S.A. ♪ (bartender) What's that guy yakkin' about?

(grim music) Something big going on.

♪ Speak up, jerk.

No longer a rumor.

The blue alert is on.

No official word from Washington yet.

(man) Official word on what?

(newscaster) But here's the news bulletin from United Press.

A wireless operator from Seal Point, Alaska, reports over 500 planes were seen -at 4:20 this afternoon.

-500 planes?

-What kind of planes?

-They passed over Seal Point at an altitude of 10,000 feet, heading south.

(dramatic music) ♪ A dispatch from Washington.

All military leaves are cancelled.

Members of the Armed Forces are to report to the nearest headquarters immediately.

The plot of Invasion, U.S.A., starts in a Manhattan bar, where Gerald Mohr's character, he's kind of an ad executive, he's taken a kind of survey of people's willingness to sign up to the draft.

There's a hint of, "Are you willing to fight off, you know, the commie threat?

Would you go to war?"

And we go through various people in the bar.

And then we cut to the television hanging in the bar.

It's all turned up loud.

And you start to realize an invasion is already underway.

Planes are seen over New York, the city is leveled, bombs are dropped, paratroopers arrive in Washington, D.C., hit the ground.

Everything they were terrified of is happening in front of their eyes.

They watch it on a television screen.

In some ways, it's a very prescient film about, you know, a future where people watched Vietnam and watched the events of 9/11, all of it happening on television.

And here you have these people in the bar observing the dreaded invasion by the Russians happening before their eyes.

What it is, really, it's almost like a public information film, made at this very kind of low, grungy level that says, "Imagine if the Russians invaded," you know, "Imagine, where would they turn up?"

Would they arrive on the beaches?

Imagine seeing planes flying over New York and imagine bombs dropping."

It wasn't messing around.

It was saying, "This is what's going to happen.

You better be ready.

So if that draft comes along, what do you think?"

So it's an exploitation film, but very political in its makeup and very direct.

And I think out of all the kind of paranoid films of the 1950s in America, in a way, it kind of sums it all up.

You know, you watch Invasion, U.S.A., and it goes, "This is what we're worried about.

And this is what you should be worried about."

(narrator) The collective fears of America would even manifest themselves in more extravagant stories, such as 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

(Dr. Bennell) Now you must listen to me, you must understand me.

I'm a doctor, too, I am not insane.

I am not insane.

(Dr. Hill) Now suppose we just sit down over here, Dr. Bennell, and you tell me what happened.

(soft, tense music) ♪ Well...

It started--for me, it started last Thursday.

♪ In response to an urgent message from my nurse, I'd hurried home from a medical convention I'd been attending.

At first glance, everything looked the same.

(train bell ringing) It wasn't.

(panting) Something evil had taken possession of the town.

(somber music) (narrator) The science fiction premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where humans are replaced by alien imposters, was viewed by many audiences as a reflection of people's fears of communist infiltration and the unrelenting sense of paranoia that accompanied it.

Those exact fears would then be addressed head on in The Manchurian Candidate.

♪ (Dr.

Yen Lo) Allow me to introduce our American visitors.

I must ask you to forgive their somewhat lackadaisical manners, but I have conditioned them, or brainwashed them, which I understand is the new American word, to believe that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey where a meeting of the Ladies Garden Club is in progress.

(woman) You will notice that I have told them they may smoke.

(laughs) I've allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes.

(laughs) The Manchurian Candidate by John Frankenheimer is probably the most terrifying of all the Cold War thrillers.

(soft, tense music) Because it was about someone who loses his mind through some appalling torture.

That person is Laurence Harvey.

He's in the Korean War.

He gets repatriated as a hero.

♪ And he--his friend, Frank Sinatra, smells some kind of a rat, because although he's a hero to everybody, there's something in him that seems cold-blooded, although he's thought to be a very decent chap in every other way.

And it's discovered that he's actually been brainwashed.

(John) Unbeknownst to him, he's now in the service of the Communists.

And the only person who understands that Raymond isn't what he seems is the Frank Sinatra character.

And he, too, has been brainwashed, like all the platoon, to say that Raymond is the greatest, most kindest guy that ever lived.

But Frank Sinatra, he has another memory that Raymond isn't the nicest, kindest, bravest guy who ever lived.

He's a horrible spoiled brat.

And eventually Raymond is programmed, and he's been programmed to shoot an American presidential candidate.

But against this, you have a backdrop of a McCarthy figure, Senator Iselin, who is a rabblerouser looking for communists everywhere.

And, essentially, he's just a drunk.

He's not very bright at all.

The real brains behind Senator Iselin's "more American than you" campaign is his wife.

She is the villain of the piece.

She's played by Angela Lansbury absolutely brilliantly.

But what the Manchurian Candidate really shows, it's the idea of communists everywhere, of their being in government, of them having ideas, of them trying to overturn the United States system.

It was a way that people like McCarthy, and his film version, Iselin, could portray communism as being close.

It justified a climate of fear too.

And the Manchurian Candidate taps into all that absolutely wonderfully.

(soft, tense music) (narrator) McCarthyism as a term had been created as early as 1950 to describe the movement helmed by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

He had led a relentless and deeply polarizing investigation into rumored communist infiltration of the American government.

But before McCarthy had even become a prominent figure, though, the House of Un-American Activities Committee was putting Hollywood itself under immense scrutiny.

The only way that we can defeat their aims and purposes is to expose them before they strike and to get them out of these industries.

Our committee is the only agency of government that has the power of exposure.

Therefore, this investigation must go on without fear or favor, and our slogan must be: No quarter to the enemies of our country.

(narrator) As a result of the House of Un-American Activities Committee's actions, many figures in the American film industry were blacklisted.

Hollywood would eventually cover this traumatic period in its own history with Guilty by Suspicion.

(chairman) Son, you came here and you confessed your membership.

Now all we're asking you to do in good faith, and also to purge yourself of your mistakes in the past, is to help us in identifying the people in those photographs.

(Larry) Look, I don't want to be an informer.

(chairman) Real Americans have appeared before this committee, and they have demonstrated their loyalty.

I wanna ask you something.

How do you think we got your name in the first place?

I thought you were no longer a member of the Communist Party.

(Larry) I'm not, I told you.

(chairman) I think you're still a member of the Communist Party, and I know some people that'd be very interested to know that.

Guilty by Suspicion is directed by Irwin Winkler, and he'd been Martin Scorsese's long-time producer, and was better known as a producer of films than he was as a director, and he directed a couple of films.

But he was very passionate about making a film about House of Un-American Activities and about the very direct effect it had on Hollywood.

It's a story of Robert De Niro's character, who's a director who's been away working in Paris and returns to Hollywood just as the-- the hearings are beginning and the paranoia is starting to sort of feed out amongst the community.

And it's a snapshot of those lives and that world in particular.

And what he's come back for, mainly, is that he won't sell out his great friend, you know, played by George Wendt.

He's a writer who has had communist connections, he's been blacklisted, and they want him to name the name at the hearings.

And he won't do it.

It comes down to an idea of, would you choose your friends over your country, is what is put to him.

You know, what are you willing to do as an individual, as a director?

Would you reinforce your career?

Because he's told De Niro's character that he can name names behind closed doors, he doesn't have to go public.

So it's about his integrity, 'cause he could do it secretly.

And that's the key to the film.

It's about how you hold on to your integrity in the face of all this.

Winkler dresses up a beautiful look at 1950s Hollywood, almost by night.

It's a very kind of almost noir-y kind of feeling he creates in the film.

But, really, it's about the agonies that these people were put through.

There are suicides we see in the film.

There are devastated lives that kind of are just left in the wake of the HUAC Hearings.

And it's about the cost very much on a psychological basis.

(narrator) In 2005, Goodnight, and Good Luck., would also return to the era of McCarthyism, showing what led to its eventual downfall.

(Edward) But we believe, too, that this case illustrates the urgent need for the Armed Forces to communicate more fully than they have so far done.

The procedures and regulations to be followed in attempting the protect the national security and the rights of the individual at the same time.

Whatever happens in this whole area of the relationship between the individual and the state, we will do it ourselves.

It cannot be blamed on Malenkov or Mao Zedong or even our allies.

And it seems to us, that is, Fred Friendly and myself, that this is a subject that should be argued about endlessly.

Good night, and good luck.

Good Night, and Good Luck., is a 2005 film directed and starring George Clooney.

And the premise, which is based on truth, although not strictly true, is that Ed Murrow brought down Senator McCarthy.

He makes a program saying that all the things that McCarthy had been saying were not factually correct and that it was wildly overstated, this campaign that McCarthy had mounted.

And then McCarthy insisted that he came on the program to rebut the charges that Ed Murrow had made.

And, of course, this just makes things worse and it simplifies things in that it suggests that Murrow was the only architect of McCarthy's doom, and that isn't strictly true, but he certainly had a lot to do with it.

But also, I think, it shows how all-pervasive McCarthyism was, but how, too, that it could be resisted.

(Ian) Murrow, played by David Strathairn in the film, puts it beautifully.

He sort of gets all of the kind of journalists and producers together, says the fear is here in this room.

You are all terrified.

Said it's got this far, we have to draw a line.

And that's what it is, and it's a remarkable thing.

Sensibly, Clooney never casts McCarthy.

You don't see the actual debate.

You only get sort of clips of McCarthy, real world clips of him, just to show you there's an echo of the real world within the context of the film.

It's a lovely little piece of sort of history making, and a lovely piece about the power of journalism and the idea that politics isn't the absolute end.

You can take it on.

So then it's a great film about America and what America is meant to represent.

And we're out.

(mellow music) ♪ (Dianne Reeves) ♪ I've got my eye ♪ (majestic music) ♪ (announcer) On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs number 44 and 45 against the Senators.

On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin.

I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with, real shifty.

Having been stationed in Berlin and having dealt with them, I know what I'm talking about.

Let's go back to last June.

Considering the abnormal situation of a divided city, life in Berlin was more or less normal.

Traffic flowed freely through the Brandenburg Gate, and it wasn't really too much trouble to pass from one side of the Iron Curtain to the other.

Some of the East German police were rude and suspicious.

Others were suspicious and rude.

The eastern sector, under Communist domination, was still in rubble, but the people went about their daily business, parading.

(singing) Trust Billy Wilder to turn the Cold War into a screwball comedy.

He was, of course, a son of Berlin, and he cut his teeth, in filmmaking terms, in Berlin and become one of the great Berlin exiles who'd gone to work in America when Hitler came in.

So, going back to Berlin was very significant, you know, for this guy.

It was kind of a homecoming, if you want.

But instead of doing a great dark drama, and Wilder was perfectly capable of that if you think about Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity or The Lost Weekend, he said, "No, I'm gonna look at the madness of this city in a Cold War and treat it with comedy and lightness."

And it's a truism, isn't it, that, you know, you can often see things through comedy much clearer than you can through drama, because it sort of sends it up and makes it more apparent.

It's a wonderful film.

In fact, the film opens almost as a parody of The Third Man, which you get this voiceover talking you through Berlin, "Modern Berlin, the West and the East."

And you get these lovely pictures of all of the kind of people at cafés enjoying their West Berlin life, then the terrible East Berlin poverty.

Of course, this contrast becomes one of the central kind of jokes of the film.

I think he made a film that may be more hopeful than was possible once the wall had gone up.

It really kind of reflected badly on his optimism, I think, he imbues the film with.

Then at the same time, I think it's a very telling portrayal of Berlin, then he uses comedy to drive it.

And it's that fun and wonder and the idea of free spirits telling jokes.

(soft music) (narrator) One, Two, Three was in the middle of filming in Berlin when the wall dividing the two halves of the city was constructed and production had to be moved to Munich.

This critical time where the tensions of the Cold War were coming to a head were captured in Steven Spielberg's 2015 film Bridge of Spies.

(Thomas) Now, we have our man over there, Powers, good man, but with a head full of classified information.

Abel has a head full of classified information too, but he hasn't given us a lick.

(James) And, sir, take it from me, he won't.

(Thomas) Yes, we know that, but the Russians don't.

They want their man back before he cracks.

And we want Powers back for the same reasons.

(sighs) (James) I think you are saying, sir, that there might be a happy ending for everyone.

(Thomas) Yes, if we, um, indulge their fiction.

(John) Bridge of Spies was based on a true story of a very, very public incident where Gary Powers, a fighter pilot on the U-2 surveillance plane, he was forced down over the Soviet Union.

Now, naturally, this was a fantastic propaganda coup for the Soviet Union, because, one, Powers didn't die, and, two, he was living proof that the Americans were launching spy missions across the Soviet territory.

Clearly, it was true.

Clearly, there was nothing that the Americans could do about it.

So the more noise and the more publicity that came from this, the more it benefited the Soviets.

Naturally, the Americans wanted their fighter pilot back.

And, naturally, the Soviets were in the position to extract as much as they could from this situation.

So, Bridge of Spies, which is-- it's a fictionalized version, but it's loosely true, is based on the lawyer who was sent to try and organize a swap between the Soviets who caught Gary Powers and the Americans who had a Soviet spy called Rudolf Abel.

And that was the deal that he was going to negotiate.

But there was a catch.

(James) Where do they want this negotiation to take place?

(Thomas) There.

(James) There?

East Berlin.

(soft, tense music) Well, isn't East Berlin getting rather... (Thomas) Oh, yes, the place is getting complicated.

♪ (man) Yeah, complicated.

♪ The Soviet side has been setting up checkpoints for the past few months to try to stop people hemorrhaging to the western sectors and it hasn't worked.

We have intelligence to suggest that they may go one step further and wall off the entire eastern sector.

♪ (narrator) The lives and livelihoods of agents on both sides of the Cold War would be brought into even greater focus during this period thanks to John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

(soft, tense music) (Control) Hm, I wonder whether you're tired, burnt out.

Well, that's phenomena we understand here.

It's like metal fatigue.

We have to live without sympathy, don't we?

We can't do that forever.

One can't stay out of doors all the time.

One needs to come in.

In from the cold.

I'm an operator, Control, just an operator.

(Control) There's a vacancy in Banking Section -which might suit you.

-Sorry, I'm an operational man.

I'll take my pension.

I don't want a desk job.

You don't know what's on the desk.

(Alec) Paper!

John le Carré was a much more thoughtful and serious writer of spy fiction than possibly anybody else in Britain.

The Richard Burton character, Leamas, in Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is sent out to Berlin to get somebody back and to infiltrate and to supply information.

And he's unwittingly assisted in this by a very idealistic girl played by Claire Bloom, and she is a communist, she is idealistic, and she really believes in all this.

And they are rumbled in the end, as all spies seem to be in these films, but they have a sympathetic communist who says he will help them get out of the country.

He's obviously-- he's been doing some work, I think, for MI6 and is on the verge of turning.

And they arrange, at the end of the film, for the spotlight on the Berlin Wall, the search light, to be turned away so they can get out.

And he tries to get the-- he goes over the wall himself, he tries to get the girl after him, she won't come.

The spotlight comes back and she's shot dead.

There's a deep irony here that somebody who really supported that system, um, was killed trying to get out of East Germany.

And Leamas, Richard Burton, is so horrified by what's happened to her because he's become quite fond of her and realizes that, you know, she is a human being before everything else, that he goes back over the wall and is shot himself and dies.

It is a disturbing film, and it offers a sort of bleak picture of the immovability of the Soviet Bloc and the Soviet menace.

We've got the divided continent, we've got Berlin at the pivot of that divided continent, itself divided.

And it's very hard to see how anything is ever going to change.

♪ (narrator) But while the future appeared bleak, tales of successful journeys across the Berlin Wall were also popular fare, both the real live versions covered by the news and the film adaptations that soon followed, including 1962's Escape from East Berlin.

♪ (sentimental music, energetic chatter) ♪ (baby crying) ♪ (mellow music) ♪