Cinema Misfits

In the mid fifties, a Civil Defense short was created to address what can only be called The Tidiness Gap. I’m assuming a great deal of human Intel, along with U-2 flyover photos and information from defecting Russian spies was collected and analyzed before reaching one inescapable, frightening conclusion.

The Presidential cabinet meeting that convened as a result of this finding probably went something like this:

Top General: So what are these Bolshevik bastards up to?

CIA Agent: General. Mr. President. I’m not going to soft-pedal this. I’m going to give it to you straight. They’re painting their houses.

Shocked silence.

CIA Agent: Not only that, they’re raking up the leaves in their yards.

A gasp from the back of the room.

The President (shaking his head, to himself): My God. My God. It’s worse than we feared.

CIA Agent: Yes it is, sir. They’re also tidying up in their homes. Vacuuming. Dusting. Do you want me to go on?

The President: No. I’ve heard more than enough. (long pause before rising and addressing cabinet members) Gentlemen, this is unacceptable. We can not allow a Tidiness Gap!

And so the film unit of The Civil Defense department snapped into action, producing “The House in the Middle.” The short begins with an aerial shot of Anytown, USA. “One American town looks like any other when you see it from an airplane window,” notes the narrator, leaving out the observation that once hydrogen bombs have been dropped on them, they all pretty much look identical.

Since the film is intended for the outlying suburbs and towns not immediately in the kill zone of a ground zero explosion, the whole issue of large metropolitan areas being vaporized is discretely sidestepped.  The short also tends to focus on the atomic heat or “thermal wave” from a nuclear explosion, and doesn’t have a great deal to offer on the other after effects from the blast like…well, for one thing, radiation.

The short is apparently brought to us courtesy of “The National Clean up – Paint up – Fix up Bureau.”  Happily, this group wasn’t in charge of naming any other government agencies or The Air Force might be known as “The Department of Heavier Than Air Vehicles – That Go Up And Come Down – Drop Bombs and Fire Missiles – And Sometimes Have Pilots With Cool Names Like Maverick – And Iceman and Goose – Well Goose Isn’t That Cool – But Iceman Is.”

For the purposes of the short, Anytown, USA is replicated at the Nevada Proving Grounds by two miniature houses.  Despite the minimalistic representation, you’d be hard-pressed to single it out from any of hundreds of other towns in America – that is, if they didn’t look like two anomalous objects stranded in some kind of weird Daliesque landscape.  A huge melting watch wouldn’t look out of place there.

Structure-wise, the two houses are identical.  Inside, however, it’s a different story.  House #1 is noteworthy for its untidy housekeeping.  Newspapers and magazines are left lying around.  The tables are cluttered with junk.  House #2, on the other hand, is spic and span.  The trash has been thrown out and tabletops are tidy.

The narrator then walks us through the steps in a nuclear explosion. The light flash! The thermal wave! Quickly followed by the blast wave! When all is said and done, both houses on the outskirts of the atomic detonation survive, but the clutter inside House #1 catches fire, and even though the structure survived the blast, it ends up burning to the ground.

At this point, it comes as something of a shock to realize that Hazel might have been our first line of defense against nuclear attack. Perhaps the Civil Defense seal should have been replaced by The Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

A final test with three houses is staged for our edification, and ultimately, what the short comes down to is a retelling of the Three Little Pigs — with the atom bomb in the role of the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing and blowing the houses down. House #1 is an eyesore with leaves and trash in the yard. House #2 (the house in the middle) is painted and has an uncluttered yard. House #3 is in rundown condition due to years of neglect.

Guess which house survives? Right. The house in the middle.

If this test had actually been a Russian sneak attack, the lucky owner of the house in the middle would have survived to take part in digging mass graves for thousands of irradiated and charred corpses. Still, when Mr. Lucky Homeowner looked at the ruble of the two houses on either side of his home, he’d be able to take a certain amount of satisfaction in the fact he was still alive.

“I tried to warn them,” he might say, and then the tumorous growth on his shoulder which had been increasing in size and finally become a second freakish head, would add, “Yes you did. You and The National Clean up – Paint up – Fix Up Bureau.”

Here’s the helpful warning in its full-length glory, produced as it actually was by the friendly folks at the Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association.  No doubt it was a big hit at their convention that year (and what a rip-roaring event that had to be).