(foreboding music) ♪ Vietnam really is the great modern war on film.

It is one of the great subjects for cinema.

And I think our great understanding of what happened in Vietnam comes from movies.

It is the battle for this country that was falling to the Soviets, was falling to communists.

This is how America saw it.

And they thought of it as the teetering domino, that if it fell, then all the Far East and then the Middle East would tumble after it, and communism would be let loose across the planet.

(narrator) The 1958 film, The Quiet American, based on Graham Greene's novel, would be one of the earliest to delve into the escalating conflicts of Southeast Asia.

(man) Well, I'm sorry.

The noise of the mortar fire has made you awake.

(Granger) I wasn't sleeping.

(man) They will not attack tonight in any case.

It is too close to daylight.

But we continue to break up their concentrations.

(Granger) Concentrations, my eye!

Your eye, Monsieur Granger?

(Granger) Commies are concentrated exactly one to a tree, knocking off your mortar teams like sitting ducks.

Let them run their own war, Granger.

It's the French who are dying.

Too many French are dying that don't have to die!

They're my friends, I can't be unconcerned about friends who die unnecessary deaths.

Unnecessary?

What do you mean?

I mean the defense of this country that was conceived in the 19th century and being fought in the 20th, from Beau Geste forts that were built a generation before the trenches of Verdun.

The Quiet American, the 1958 version, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, is an adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, and it reminds you that Graham Greene was a great documenter, of certainly the early parts of the Cold War.

He sort of set his stories in these outposts of Colonialism, and showed you the kind of stirrings of revolution.

And showed you he did.

Our Man in Havana did Cuba.

Now, The Quiet American does Vietnam, or Indochina as it was then.

And here we find Michael Redgrave, who is this cynical journalist.

This has been his beat for a long time.

He knows the ways of the country.

He's slightly embittered.

And onto his patch comes this young American idealist, played by Audie Murphy.

Now this is set in 1954, this story.

So you're seeing the kind of germs of American infiltration to Vietnam, even then, even that early.

The CIA were already on the ground.

British were on the ground to a certain extent.

And the French were obviously the occupying forces.

So Vietnam was, it was a hot potato long before the late 1960s.

It was this political battleground.

(John) But it's also, it's a very, very pro-American film.

Audie Murphy, who plays the American in it, he said that he wouldn't have done it if he felt that the film was anti-American, and that's probably what antagonized Graham Greene.

But also, it did show that the seeds to the conflicts in Indochina, to the rebellions against the French, and then the Vietnam War, were based around these attitudes that are espoused in this film.

So, in a sense, it was quite prophetic.

(Ian) It's a really interesting film just to place into a kind of order before we get to the big battle films.

It just shows you what was going on in that country.

So, we're in 1954, and already things are shifting into revolution.

The French are about to lose the country.

They're about to be beaten away.

And this war had a great effect on France.

And, of course, then the Americans would come in, and the 1960s will ensue.

(reporter) On patrol 100 miles off the coast of Vietnam, the world's largest conventional aircraft carrier, the USS Constellation, spearhead of the most powerful naval force ever, the American Seventh Fleet.

But in the past six months, one explosive area alone has overshadowed all others for the hundred planes of the Constellation, the Gulf of Tonkin.

And last August came the first armed clash between the United States and the communists since Korea, when these jet bombers blasted torpedo boat bases and oil installations in North Vietnam in retaliation against torpedo attacks on American destroyers.

In the larger sense, this new act of aggression, aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in Southeast Asia.

The Americans became keen on stopping communists taking over anyway.

Of course, they fought in Korea almost immediately after the Second World War.

They were in Korea in 1950.

And the French also failed in Vietnam, which has been one of their overseas territories.

And they get out of Vietnam, and the Americans go in first of all as advisors, and then large numbers of young American men are drafted to go and fight and die in Vietnam to try and stop communism getting a hold on that country.

(narrator) Go Tell the Spartans, staring Burt Lancaster, would cover the earliest fighting of American troops in the Vietnam War.

I didn't get my combat infantryman's badge.

-Why not?

-New regulation from Saigon.

You gotta have 30 days under fire.

I've only got 22.

(Maj. Barker) Well, I guess you'll have to get out in the field, Al, and kick a little ass, huh?

When, sir?

When I don't need you here anymore.

What's the new map?

We got a query from Saigon about some crummy hamlet called Muc Wa, it's in this map plot here.

(Maj. Barker) What do they want?

(Capt.

Al) Complete position paper.

(Maj. Barker) Too goddamn many static defense posts as it is.

That's what happened to the French.

They got themselves tied down on static defense.

(Simon) When fighting the Cold War in its hot incarnation, such as in Vietnam, it's a war that becomes about the loss of life, inevitably on both sides.

And while lots of American boys who had no desire to serve in the military were called up, were trained, were sent out there, and many of them never came back, except in a coffin, you've also got the deaths not just of Vietnamese guerillas, but also Vietnamese civilians, who just got caught in the crossfire, so it is a truly terrible war.

(Ian) But for many people back home, it was, "Why so far away?

What is this place?"

People probably couldn't find Vietnam on a map, and suddenly their young men were being sent off to this mysterious country to fight for something they only vaguely understood.

What underpinned a lot of opinion on Vietnam, a lot of interpretations, certainly fictionally, and factually, was this perplexed nature of the war, that people didn't quite understand what they were fighting for.

Certainly, soldiers didn't quite understand.

And certainly, the American population didn't, this political reason.

And more than that, it was a very visual war.

It was a war that was filmed by news crews and shown on televisions, brought immediately back to home.

Within days of events happening in Vietnam, they were on television sets, if not quicker, in front of people.

And I think that had a huge effect on young people watching it, and a huge effect on filmmakers at the time, who were coming through and saying, "Look, all the war films we've seen in the past do not look like that.

This is different, this is horrific, visceral, and it's ambiguous as well."

(calm music) (narrator) In 1979, one of the most enduring films about the conflict in Vietnam was released, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

♪ (Gen. Corman) Walt Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this country's ever produced.

He was brilliant, he was outstanding in every way.

And he was a good man too, a humanitarian man, a man of wit and humor.

He joined the Special Forces.

And after that, his, uh, ideas, methods became... ...unsound.

Apocalypse Now is a 1979 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and it's ostensibly about the Vietnam War, but really it's based on Joseph Conrad's book of 1899, Heart of Darkness.

And in Conrad's book, which is about the ivory trade, then a trader goes into the deep, dark heart of Africa, and essentially establishes a mini kingdom and goes mad.

And, this, of course, is the Colonel Kurtz figure.

In terms of the Cold War, then, obviously, there's no Soviets, or even Chinese influence in Apocalypse Now, but it does show how America got itself bogged down in a war that it couldn't win, with people that it didn't understand.

And there is a significant Viet Cong presence in this, and they're more dedicated, they're more committed, they're more up for the fight than the Americans ever were.

And, of course that's true!

The Americans, they were just kids in a foreign country.

So, the difference in how the Viet Cong fought the war and how the Americans fought the war are played out in Apocalypse Now.

And it took years for them to get Apocalypse Now together not only to write it, but to persuade the studio to back it.

And when it finally fell to Coppola, he decided he wanted to make a film about the experience of Vietnam.

This is what had changed in that time, is that people have returned home and told their stories.

They had sort of seen what was on the television, now they were speaking to veterans and soldiers.

And they got an idea of what a psychological war it was, what an insane war, what a perplexing war it was on the ground.

And he did a lot of reading, Coppola.

He not only, obviously, read Conrad, but he read Michael Herr's book, Dispatches, all about reporting from the war, all these elements.

And he said, "I want to make a film about not the context, not the politics, particularly, but about the experience of Vietnam."

(light rock music) ♪ (male singer) ♪ This is the end beautiful friend ♪ ♪ ♪ This is the end--♪ (helicopter blades beating) (indistinct speaking) (man) Hang in there, buddy, they're gonna fix you up.

Hold on, hold on.

Okay, go, go, go!

(keys clacking) (helicopter whirring slowing) (man) Dan?

Dan?

Dan!

Secretary would like a word.

Do you wanna follow me?

(Robert) Well, you can say what you want to the president.

I've read every one of Ellsberg's reports, and I'm telling you it's just not the case!

Dan, you know Mr. Komer.

He's been discussing the war with the president, and, well, his sense is that we've made really progress over the past year.

But I've been doing my own review, and it seems to me that things have gotten worse.

But neither of us have been in the field, you have.

You're the one to know, so what do you say?

Are things better or worse?

(Dan) Well, Mr. Secretary, what I'm most impressed by is how much things are the same.

(Robert) See, that's exactly what I'm saying!

We put another 100,000 troops in the field, things are no better.

To me, that means things are actually worse.

Thank you, Dan.

-Mr. Secretary!

-Mr. Secretary!

(reporter) Mr. Secretary, sir!

The Post, which is set in the early 1970s, tells the story of Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, who is determined to publish secret papers from earlier administrations that show how even great, sainted, liberal heroes, like JFK, had lied about the extent of American involvement in Vietnam, and lied about what the Americans were doing to help anti-communists in Vietnam.

So, the first leak goes to the New York Times, and the New York Times has an injunction put on it.

But the same source who's stolen the papers, then leaks them to the Washington Post because Nixon is up to the same thing.

It's very easy to blame Nixon for everything that went wrong with Vietnam, but, in fact, this was something that was going on long before Nixon because, in fighting the Cold War, in fighting the Soviet threat, the communist threat, in fighting communists in those countries that the Americans feared would become Soviet satellites, or would become heavily under what they called Red Chinese, or Soviet influence, all the presidents from Eisenhower onward did things that were deceitful to the American people, and that put young American men, in particular, in danger.

And this is what the story tells.

In order to make it look really bad for Nixon, The Post ends with somebody ringing up from the Watergate building saying, "We've had a break-in."

(dramatic music) (narrator) Watergate would eventually bring Nixon's presidency to an end in 1974.

The following year would see the fall of Saigon and the end of the war in Vietnam, after nearly two decades of fighting.

Jimmy Carter would be elected president in 1976, at a time when the tensions of the Cold War seemed to be in retreat.

However, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and a new battleground was established during an era of technological revolution.

(computer) Shall we play a game?

Oh!

I think it missed 'em.

-Yeah, weird, isn't ' it?

-Yeah.

Love to!

How about Global Thermonuclear War?

(computer) Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

(David) Later.

Let's play Global Thermonuclear War.

-Fine.

-All right!

Wow!

(magical music) (computer) Which side do you want?

♪ I'll be the Russians.

(ominous music) ♪ (computer) Please list primary targets.

Who should we nuke first?

Um, oh, let's see.

How 'bout Las Vegas?

(David) Las Vegas, great!

♪ What next?

-Seattle!

-Yeah!

Kill 'em!

There was still this nuclear arms race going on in the background.

A clear and present danger constantly in not only American psyche, but in European psyche, all of us!

And every day, throughout the 1980s into 1990s, this carried on, this fear.

So, it became, in different ways, fuel again for filmmakers.

They were trying to channel that great sense of how close we are to apocalypse into films.

Wargames is almost a playful interpretation of the idea.

This is very much, almost a prescient film about how computers would sort of take over as the controlling forces of the Cold War, that everything would suddenly be about guided missiles and computer networks.

And this would then, obviously, lead on to the internet, and cybercrime, and all those things that subsequently came.

You can find a starting point in Wargames, which is just about Matthew Broderick's character, he's a geek who knows a lot about computers, and he has this set-up.

And he, using his telephone, managed to tap into this American computer system, which has been built, this huge system, to control warheads, and reciprocate any kind of Russian attack.

So, it was kind of the brains of the American nuclear arsenal with this big computer.

And it had a way of testing itself by playing games.

That's where the title Wargames comes from.

And, almost by chance, this young boy sort of taps into this, and he starts a war game going, in which the American computer, housed in this big base, believes that a Russian attack is coming, even though it's not.

And this is a bit like Dr. Strangelove.

It's that kind of nuclear paranoia.

(narrator) Not long after Wargames, another production was released that dealt with the threat of nuclear conflict, The Day After.

(reporter) After an emergency meeting with his cabinet and congressional leaders of both parties, the president tonight declared all United States military personnel on worldwide Stage II alert.

Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Koryagin, was summoned to the White House three quarters of an hour ago.

Both sides are engaged in frank and earnest talks aimed at finding ways to defuse the heightening crisis in Berlin.

(woman) My God, it's 1962 all over again.

Cuban Missile Crisis.

Do you remember Kennedy on television telling Khrushchev to turn his boats around?

(man) Full retaliatory response, he didn't bat an eye.

(woman) We were in New York, in bed, just like this, remember?

Nicholas Meyer's The Day After was judged at its time as the most successful television film ever made 'cause it actually has the Russians exploding a nuclear bomb over Kansas.

This was during the Reagan years.

Reagan himself saw the film and loved it, or was frightened by it, he said.

And he sent the film to all his chiefs, the joint chiefs of staff, everybody saw this film.

I can't tell you the millions of people who saw it in America and were terrified by it, too, 'cause they felt all along that something like that might very well happen.

That was the absolute epitome of a Cold War thriller.

It was shown to the Soviets a few years later, and it details what happens when the bomb is dropped.

And it obviously personalizes it, that it deals with people in Kansas.

And there's no life, that's what happens when the bomb is dropped.

There's no life at all.

And those people who are alive, will very probably die quite soon.

And so, letting the Soviets see this film, and the Soviets seeing it themselves, that was sort of a mini step forward in the Cold War.

The more people, the more individual people, and also the more people in positions of power who understand, and who realize, and who believe what's gonna happen when the bomb drops, the less likely that bomb is to be dropped.

(sirens blaring and people shouting) (sirens blaring distantly) (bomb exploding) (tense music) ♪ No more.

♪ (shattering) ♪ Is that, is that supposed to scare me?

-Don't be a wise ass!

-Let's take it easy.

Commander Farrell's trying to lay it out for us.

So, why don't you two guys just knock it off?

(man) How did you actually meet the secretary of defense?

♪ I was introduced to him by Pritchard.

I met him when I was in college.

-Pritchard?

-Yeah, Scott Pritchard.

Jesus.

General council for the secretary of defense, you got it, is that good enough?

Look, you know this already.

♪ No Way Out is almost the '80s version of the great '70s paranoid thriller, as if the message within it is that this is still kind of troubling us.

There's still potential for Soviet spies to be about, don't forget.

It's a terrifically well-put-together movie.

It's Roger Donaldson directs.

It's Kevin Costner at the height of his stardom.

And he starts a relationship with Sean Young and discovers she's also having an affair with the defense secretary, Gene Hackman.

And he's a bit of a dissolute kind of politician.

So, you have the kind of elegant young Navy officer, who's sort of the symbol of goodness and righteousness in America, and this rather dissolute politician.

And when the girl turns up dead, this is the contrivance of the story, it's given to Kevin Costner's character to investigate the crime 'cause she's attached to the Navy as well.

So, there's a kind of a weird way in which it loops back on itself.

And it's a very Hitchcockian idea that the key suspect in this murder trial is the guy investigating it.

And right in the background of the story, and slowly making its way to the foreground, is another plot.

It turns out there's a mole in the network, there's a mole in the Navy.

And part of Costner's job is also to find out who that is.

And is that the same person as the killer?

Does it all point inwards?

It's one of those really good '80s thrillers that just has a bit more of an edge to it because there is a revelation at the end, a final twist that turns the whole thing on its head.

And it's really one of those great films that you can return to knowing the twist and watch it again in a totally different way, putting it back together, and say, "Why did I never see that?

Or, why did I never see that?"

It's just a classic example of the spy thriller still worked.

You can condition it as a murder mystery.

You can do other things with it, but that idea of betrayal, of secrets, of people you can't trust, just meat and drink for movies.

(narrator) Along with No Way Out, one of the most critically lauded films about the Cold War era of suspicion was 2006's The Lives of Others, which delved into the world of the Stasi secret police in East Germany.

(dramatic music) ♪ (lock clicking) ♪ (knocking) ♪ (gasping) (doorbell buzzing) (knocking) The Lives of Others, by Florian Donnersmarck, was perhaps one of the most famous German films post-war.

It won the Best Foreign Film award from the Academy.

It takes place before the Berlin Wall was torn down, and it's the story of a loyal Stasi, member of the East German police, inveigles himself into the house of a famous writer.

And as he proceeds to put microphones everywhere, and tries to get them to betray the state, he begins to feel that he's doing wrong.

Somehow, this is not right, that the writer is, in fact, innocent.

Das Leben der Anderen is the Lives of Others is an astonishing film.

It's a truly great film, one of the great German films ever made.

It was made about 15 years after the Berlin Wall came down.

East Germany, is a country, at this stage, where you even have to register a typewriter.

You're not allowed to have a typewriter unless the authorities have got a record of it.

It's a film, when you see it, that, although you've got the benefit of hindsight, you can see that reunification was inevitable if that's how life was in 1980s East Germany.

And it's brilliantly acted by all concerned.

It's a film unlike any of the American or British films about the Cold War that really does show you, from the perspective of those who lived through East Germany, what East Germany was like.

It's a film I'd have taught in schools, actually.

I think anybody who tries to romanticize the Soviet era or what they did in Eastern Europe should see that film.

(narrator) While The Lives of Others covers the collapse of East Germany, Charlie Wilson's War, released just a year later, covers the battle in Afghanistan that would precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

(calm music) (Charlie) Zvi, look at me.

This is the front of the Cold War.

It's not in Berlin, it's not in Cuba, it's not in Czechoslovakia.

It's in a pile of rocks called Afghanistan.

These are the only people that are actually shootin' at the Russians.

Now, you and I know we have to get Soviet-made weapons into the hands of the mujahideen.

And you and I know where the largest stockpile of Soviet weapons outside the Soviet Union is.

Charlie Wilson's War, directed by Mike Nichols, and starring Tom Hanks, gives you an American perspective on the Afghan War, and exactly what they were getting up to in terms of fueling the mujahideen and keeping the battle going to the Soviets, without officially being part of the war.

It was a kind of mirror image of what the Soviets were doing with Vietnam, hovering around the edges, not officially being part of anything.

But the remarkable thing about Charlie Wilson's War is, and this is a really good script by Aaron Sorkin, is that money and the system of the CIA feeding into the mujahideen, and getting them weapons, getting them intelligence, and backing them as a force against the Soviets, brings about, really, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan 'cause it was economic in the end.

They literally could not afford to keep this war going, Soviet Russian.

It was having a devastating effect on the economy at home.

And it took Gorbachev to finally say, "We've gotta get out because we are gonna go broke as a country, and this is gonna have terrible effects at home."

But that had all been funded by America.

It's one of their great victories, if you want, in the Cold War.

And a lot of that is down to Charlie Wilson and this plan that had been concocted.

So, while it's kind of a very funny, lighthearted viewpoint on the Cold War, it's a very important one as well.

(President Reagan) We have signed the Geneva Accords, providing for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and the first withdrawals have begun.

We, and our allies, have completed technical arrangements necessary to begin implementing the INF Treaty as soon as it enters into force.

(narrator) In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was showing signs of its imminent demise.

One of the most popular films put into production during this unstable period was The Hunt for Red October, based on Tom Clancy's 1984 bestseller, written when the USSR still seemed invincible to many.

(Capt.

Ramius) Comrades, this is your captain.

It is an honor to speak to you today, and I'm honored to be sailing with you on the maiden voyage of our motherland's most recent achievement.

And, once more, we play our dangerous game, a game of chess against our old adversary, the American Navy.

For 40 years, your fathers before you, and your older brothers, played this game, and played it well.

But today, the game is different.

We have the advantage.

Now, it reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets.

Well, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence.

The Hunt for Red October is a 1990 film, directed by John McTiernan, who did Die Hard.

So, it's obviously quite action-packed.

And it stars Sean Connery as a Soviet submarine commander who's taking one of their submarines towards America, apparently to defect, but no one's quite sure whether this is true or not.

But also onboard are people who are certainly not trying to defect.

So, you have the decision that people have to make.

The Americans have to decide, is this a defector?

Hunt for Red October is an adaptation of the Tom Clancy military epic, military/Navy epic.

He was the kind of spy writer of the next generation.

If you move on from Ian Fleming and Lynn Dayton into America, and you get these writers led by Tom Clancy, who wrote what were called techno-thrillers.

And the central character is Jack Ryan.

He's the quintessential character of all Tom Clancy's work, in that he's a CIA guy who's been through actions, experienced, knows a thing or two, but is the embodiment of a moral order, the guy within the system who will stand up to corruption from within or without.

The guy we fall back on is Jack Ryan.

But it's also a film about a guy who's defecting.

And you have Sean Connery's character, who's the captain of the Red October, this Soviet submarine.

There's great parallels between the American submarine and the Soviet submarine with its old traditions, but they are tired of communism, they are tired of the Soviet Empire, and they want to come across.

Connery kind of steals the movie, in a way.

He's great fun and gives a movie-star quality to the idea of this old sea salt Soviet captain.

(ominous music) Forty years I've been at sea, a war at sea, a war with no battles, no monuments, only casualties.

(intriguing music) ♪ (reporter) On the steps of Boris Yeltsin's Russian parliament, a Red Army choir today joined a concert to celebrate the end of the military coup that centered on this building last week.

The men with guns, now security forces loyal to the Russian republic, not the Soviet Union.

And as the Russians rejoiced in what they considered to be their victory over a would-be dictatorship, the collapse of the Soviet Union continued.

(narrator) The turbulent period of the Soviet Union's dissolution would be covered by one of the great Cold War authors, John le Carré, in The Russia House, which was immediately brought to the big screen.

(bell tolling) They called him Dante, as in Inferno.

The others said that he was on holiday, a drinkin' holiday.

He worked in some place where drinkin' wasn't odd.

Everyone deferred to him.

He never spoke, he just got drunk and stared.

-Stared?

-Mm, at me.

(man) Did Dante arrive on his own, or with others?

I don't know.

(man) Keep going.

Then I decided to give them all a rest from wonderful me, let them talk Russian for a while.

There's a graveyard a couple of hundred yards up the hill.

It's a place of pilgrimage.

(speaking Russian) (melancholic music) ♪ (Dante) If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries.

(Barley) Ah, Dante, old chum.

Come to pay your respects to old Boris, have you?

(speaking Russian) Do you think he knows that people are allowed to read him again?

(Dante) All victims are equal, -none is more equal than others.

-Yes, well.

What becomes interesting for storytellers, and filmmakers, and Hollywood as a whole was once the Soviet Empire had begun its deconstruction, and the wheels were turning, essentially, to bring down the Soviet machine, what did that mean for stories and stories about the Cold War?

Did the Cold War exist anymore?

And it's become an interesting post-1989 pocket of cinema, I think.

John le Carré, who had been the key portrayer of the world of espionage within the Cold War started to explore its remnants and its echoes afterwards, the fact that you couldn't quite put it aside quite that quickly.

And in The Russia House, he positions the story almost on the border of the end of the Cold War and the new world after it.

Perestroika and glasnost are on the wind, they are coming in, but the old game is still being played, but it's even more meaningless now because the people have spoken.

The world is changing, the world is thawing and waking up, and that's why it's a romance, I think.

You have Barley Blair, who's a publisher, played wonderfully by Sean Connery, one of his great late roles.

And he meets this scientist, Klaus Maria Brandauer's character, and subtly, he says, this scientist, "I've got secrets I want to sell.

I've got serious secrets about the makeup of Soviet nuclear missile command.

So, Blair returns with this news, and a scheme is set up in which he will be the go-between, between the West and the East.

He will meet up with Katya, the estranged wife of Brandauer's character, and he will fall in love with her.

And the story sort of shifts from what you think is a spy story about this unlikely agent, into this story of Barley falling for Katya, and that becomes the metaphor for the thawing of the Cold War.

East and West sort of find something.

And it's not a straightforward romance.

He is the romantic Westerner, and she's the very practical Soviet woman who's grown up in hardship, and she will not have any of his sweet-talking nonsense.

But it's very sweetly done, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, she opens up this idea of life behind the Iron Curtain, that ordinary people existed.

(narrator) One of the most successful films about the dramatic changes that occurred for ordinary people living behind the Iron Curtain was 2003's Good Bye Lenin!

It took place during the collapse of the Berlin Wall, one of the great symbols of the Cold War.

(speaking German) (crashing) Good Bye Lenin is probably the most cheerful of all the Cold War films.

It's a very funny film.

This is about a family, the matriarch of whom is completely Stasi-oriented.

Everything the East German government's done is right.

The West is terrible.

And then, she has a heart attack, and she's put into a coma.

But when she wakes up, the wall is down.

Everything is completely different.

And the son says, "What are we gonna do with mother?

She's gonna be horrified by what's happened.

We can't tell her."

So, the point of the film is trying to maintain that everything's okay.

It's the same as it always was.

Well, if you go to bed a socialist, and wake up in a capitalist society, it must be a terrible shock.

And so, it's a funny film, and a very interesting film for the Germans to make at the time.

(Simon) Berlin was the focal point of East-West relations.

It's where, of course, where JFK goes in 1963, not long before his assassination, and says, "Ich bin ein Berliner."

And, of course, it's also where Ronald Reagan, in 1987, made that famous speech that included the line, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," which eventually-- Gorbachev himself didn't do it, but things moved, at that time, in the late 1980s, where Russia was in a state of almost dire economic collapse that it could no longer afford to maintain an empire in Europe, and so, yes, the wall did come down.

(John) When the Cold War ended, it was a surprise to everyone.

People didn't realize that the Soviet Union was in the state it was.

But before it happened in the Soviet Union, then it had happened in the sphere of influence, and the Americans weren't involved in this, not directly, they gave subtle help.

The people of Poland, the people of East Germany, the people of Czechoslovakia, the people of Hungary, the people of Romania, which is obviously a slightly different case, but those people tended to do it themselves.

There were self-made revolutions, the sort of revolutions that were, appeared to be about to happen in 1945.

That's what looked set to happen after World War II, and it just took a few more decades for those revolutions to happen.

So, the Cold War ended, and it ended because the Soviet Union couldn't continue.

America had won.

(dramatic music) (narrator) One of the great Cold War directors was undoubtedly John Frankenheimer, who captured the paranoia of the era so well in both The Manchurian Candidate, and Seven Days in May.

As the battle between two superpowers was coming to a close in 1990, he delved into the conflict one final time with The Fourth War.

(Ian) The Fourth War is what you might call a late Cold War thriller, almost the latest, and it tells the story of two old hawks of the battle.

On the American side, you have Roy Scheider, who is an embittered American general who regrets the recent histories, the loss of Vietnam.

He's a man encoded with this idea that honor is in battle, it's almost Patton's philosophy.

Opposite him is Jürgen Prochnow, who's almost the Soviet mirror image of Roy Scheider's character.

He's an old-school general.

He'd rather have battle than he would this game of deception.

And between them, these two retrograde generals, these two old antiques of the Cold War almost bring about a crashing down of the peace because a small incident, in which a potential defector is shot by Jürgen Prochnow's men while trying to cross the border, inflames Roy Scheider's character.

It's kind of the Cold War in microcosm.

You can actually look down upon it, and the film does a lot of views from helicopters and satellites, this idea of gazing on this small pocket just across the border, where all of the Cold War, in fact, is being reenacted.

And it's almost this absurdity, these men just wanna keep it going for the sake of keeping it going.

(downhearted music) (man) They fought with everything that day.

It was a battle unique to its time.

It regressed.

When they were out of ammunition, they went for anything they could get their hands on.

You know, I remember the commandant of cadets at West Point telling me that Einstein was once asked, "What type of weapons would be used in World War III?"

And he said, "I don't know, but the fourth war will be fought with stones."

♪ (energetic music)