Crew
Director – Jack Sholder, Screenplay – Bruce Gilbert, Based on the Novel Trinity’s Child (1983) by William Prochnau, Producer – Thomas M. Hammel, Photography – Alexander Gruszyinski, Music – Trevor Jones, Visual Effects Supervisors – Craig Barron & Michael Pangrazio, Special Effects Supervisor – Howard Jensen & William Schirmer, Production Design – Michael Novotny. Production Company – HBO Pictures/Paravision International, S.A…
Cast
Powers Boothe (Major Cassidy), Martin Landau (President), Darren McGavin (Condor), Rebecca De Mornay (Captain Moreau), Rip Torn (Colonel Fargo), James Earl Jones (General Charlie Alice), Jeffrey DeMunn (Admiral Harpoon), Peter MacNicol (Tom Sedgwick), Glenn Withrow (Tyler), Ronald William Lawrence (Hooker), Kieran Mulroney (Radnor), Nicolas Coster (General Renning), Randal Patrick (O’Toole), Daniel Benzali (Bascombe)
Plot
The US military is placed on full alert after reports of a nuclear detonation over the Russian republic of Tadzhikistan. A bomber commanded by Major Cassidy is launched to the Soviet Union. Russian nuclear strikes then hit US soil. The US President receives a call from the Soviet Premier explaining that this is due to breakaway military factions. The Premier proposes trying to defuse the situation with minimal losses on both sides. Some of The President’s advisors urge him to ignore this and launch a full attack. The President is flown to safety as one of the bombs strikes near Washington D.C., but the shockwave of the blast downs the helicopter. With The President believed dead and most of the cabinet wiped out in the strike, Condor, the Secretary of the Interior, the most senior official left in the governmental chain of command, is quickly sworn in as President. However, the hawkish Colonel Fargo urges the indecisive Condor to use the opportunity to commit to a full nuclear strike that will obliterate the entire Soviet command. Taken to a FEMA field hospital, The President desperately tries to countermand these orders and stop the strike.
The nuclear war film began in the late 1950s/1960s with the likes of Five (1951), On the Beach (1959), Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965), all of which brought home the grim realities of an all-out nuclear strike. After quietening down during the 1970s, the genre underwent a revival in the 1980s with a host of offerings that include The Day After (1983), Special Bulletin (1983), Testament (1983) and WarGames (1983). There were efforts made for British television such as Whoops Apocalypse (1981), Threads (1984) and Rules of Engagement (1989), as well as the animated theatrical film When the Wind Blows (1986). From other countries, there was Malevil (1981) from France, the Japanese anime Barefoot Gen (1983), the Canadian Countdown to Looking Glass (1984) and the Soviet-made Letters from a Dead Man (1986). By Dawn’s Early Light was the very last of these nuclear war films – it was a US-made film that came out in March 1990 five months after the Berlin Wall fell by which point the Soviet Union was fragmenting with rebellion from breakaway republics, before the union’s dissolution in December 1991. (For a more detailed listing of titles see Nuclear War Films).
By Dawn’s Early Light is adapted from Trinity’s Child (1983), the only novel written by William Prochnau. Prochnau was a journalist who worked for Vanity Fair and The Washington Post – he was apparently on Richard Nixon’s enemies list at one point. The film is very much rooted in politics, which Prochnau covered on his beat, although the film updates the book’s Reagan-era setting to the then-contemporary end of the Cold War.
The story’s structure reminds of 1960s works like Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe in which the drama switched back and forward between concurrent plotlines – between The President in his bunker, Strategic Air Command and the crew of a bomber. By Dawn’s Early Light does exactly the same, adding one or two more locations – The White House, a FEMA hospital and Darren McGavin’s replacement president aboard Air Force One. In all cases, the effect this has is to create tight, urgent drama as we watch the escalating emergency.
Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe have plots where US bombers are sent to drop nukes on Russia due to respectively a mad Air Force captain and technical errors. By contrast, By Dawn’s Early Light places the culpability on the Russian side and has breakaway Russian generals firing the nukes. In all three films, The President is trying to defuse the situation on the phone with the Russian Premier. In all three, there is the supporting character of a hardline military advisor who is urging that The President take the opportunity to go full-on nuclear war and wipe out the other side. There is a scene early on here where the Soviet Premier is suggesting that they try and contain the situation by creating equivalent fatalities on either side, which sounds very much like the plot of Fail Safe. On the other hand, By Dawn’s Early Light reaches a position that is far more hopeful than the bleakness of Fail Safe – here it is seen that Martin Landau’s President is capable of exerting a sensible-headed decency and can work together with the other side to limit the mutual devastation.
The film comes with an impressive cast, all of whom give solid performances – James Earl Jones even received an Emmy nomination for his role as a general. Especial praise goes out to Darren McGavin as the weak-willed Secretary of the Interior who steps into the presidential position and is immediately persuaded to take a disastrous course of action by Rip Torn, who is on great form as the harshly hawkish general. These older shows are often amusing in terms of seeing faces before they became famous – here during the FEMA field hospital scenes you can see Daniel Benzali, back when he still had hair, as one of the doctors tending the injured Martin Landau.
By Dawn’s Early Light was directed by Jack Sholder who had first appeared with the slasher film Alone in the Dark (1982) and then made the embarrassment of A Nightmare on Elm Street Part II: Freddy’s Revenge (1985). At the time, Sholder would have just come from the modest hit of the body-hopping alien film The Hidden (1987), the biggest hit of his career. He subsequently went on to the timeloop film 12:01 (1993), the cloning film Natural Selection/Dark Reflection (1994), the unsold series pilot Generation X (1995) from the superhero comic-book, Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (1999), 12 Days of Terror (2004) about a killer shark and the monster movie Arachnid (2001). Sholder was also responsible for directing uncredited additional footage on the problem-ridden Supernova (2000).
Trailer here
Full film available here