The Missiles of October (1974)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

A lot of fun.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Long, long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the world and I was a college undergrad, I made an interesting discovery... at least it was interesting to ME. The discovery was this... unless it personally grabs him by the noogies and gives a sharp yank, John Q. Public doesn't give a rodent's rectum about history. As a History major, I was appalled to discover that my fellow undergrads didn't know about things that happened 5 years ago, and frankly didn't give a damn about them; if you go to 100 or 200 years ago, that's completely off the RADAR screen. We're seeing today that events that far back produce some really garbled, half remembered jingoistic pronouncements from the average person on the street... or even from wannabe political leaders, who should KNOW better, but instead give us fairy tales about Paul Revere ringing church bells to warn the British about not taking our guns away! In 1974, ABC-TV presented a production called "The Missiles Of October", covering Kennedy's Cuban missile crisis of a decade before. I wasn't aware that it was going to be broadcast. One evening in October, I went to the Boar's Head... the campus beer bar at my college. I was stunned by what I saw there. The place was packed, but the jukebox was shut down. Dead silence... except for the sound of a 21 inch TV set over the bar, presenting the ABC broadcast. EVERYONE... from the bookworms and nerds to the jocks... was absolutely mesmerized by the program. It connected with them immediately... and I understood immediately WHY it connected. I still remember the cold, leaden lump of raw, animal instinct fear that formed in my chest as I'd watched and listened to John F. Kennedy on TV a decade earlier while he informed the American people that nuclear weapons were being aimed at us from 90 miles off our southern coast. As a child of the Duck & Cover generation my first automatic thought wasn't comforting... I'm living in Chicago, and Chicago is a prime target. If this breaks loose, we're gonna get hit first. I wondered if a week from then I was still going to be alive... it was a 13 year old who was grappling for the first time with the concept of mortality. Yeah... the audience in the Boar's Head remembered. "The Missiles of October" grabbed 'em by the scrotum on a downhill pull.THIS was history that was up close and personal; they'd lived through it. "The Missiles of October" was a VERY well constructed bit of stagecraft, and is historically accurate.Over the years I've wanted to see it again. Now, I can; it's been released on DVD. Playing the part of JFK is William Devane; he did a great job with the role. As Nikita Krushchev we have Howard DaSilva... the irony here is overpowering because DaSilva was named before HUAC as a Communist sympathizer and was subsequently blacklisted. Now, he was playing the part of the most powerful member of the Communist Party who had ever been born. In an interesting bit of casting... a VERY young Martin Sheen plays Robert Kennedy. And he plays the hell out of it! Neamiah Persoff is Andre Gromyko, and Ralph Bellamy plays UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. ABC sure didn't pinch pennies on the TALENT here. Everyone is top rate. The material presented is pretty historically accurate; the script is based on Robert Kennedy's book THIRTEEN DAYS. The DVD release is pretty good, but you have to keep in mind the technical limitations of the time when the production was mounted. This was done with analog cameras (probably the then state of the art Image Orthicon, or possibly the follow-up Vidicon cameras). Compared to current "chip" cameras, the image presentation is "soft"... but that works well with this material. It imparts a slightly dreamlike quality to the production. It's clear that they shot this to 2" Ampex videotape; in a very few spots, head switching errors (2 inch machines were fiddly devices and were notorious for head switching glitches)are momentarily present... but all in all, it's a pretty good DVD transfer. HIGHLY recommended !!! The movie 13 DAYS has better fireworks, and more Bells & Whistles... but "The Missiles of October" does a much better job with the back room diplomacy that brought the world back from the brink of nuclear war.

I find this movie now on DVD one of the most compelling works of art it has ever been my pleasure to behold. This movie is from the less is more school. No high tech camera angles and silly special effects get in your way here. No stupid insipid love story tangles its way through the plot where some couple must give you today's obligatory R Rated steamy love scene at some point when you just wished the action would go on. This movie is just cold hearts, raw nerves, hardened steal will's of both sides exposed in abundance as the world of the early 1960's creeped toward thermonuclear oblivion in the Cuban Missile Crisis.Brinksmanship and a world tittering on the brink of a testosterone cliff a fall from which guranteed no return to life as it existed before is what this movie was about. Missiles of October is told in a play format. The sets are obviously sets so you do not waste your time on the decorations of the people or the places. You simply are given a reference of where you are by the set. The real action is the dialogue the intrique in the tangled the goings on. This movie works on a level of raw emotion. The missiles of October is a movie stripped bare of the heavy syrup and confectionary sugar laden movies of today. The Missiles of October does not spoon feed the audience each moment of their movie experience till only one rather inexcapable formulalic conclusion offered by the screen writer can be reached.The Cuban Missile Crisis was a series of mis-steps wrong judgement calls and finally at the 11th hour some common sense where. In this movie both sides The Soviet Union and the United States had to get off their high horses and admit we together do not want to end human kinds existence as a species on this earth and take almost every other living thing with us as we exit. The fact that the set's look deliberately cheesy and the acting is done as a play just makes the truly superior acting stand out and grab you all that much more. Oh to say I was pleased with The Missiles of October is to dabble in understatement up past your neck for I in all ways loved it such that I can not be without two copies of this in my home. One to watch and one to keep in a safe fire resistant place. The Missile's of October blew me away because it is true, this happened in real life. I was just a baby at the time but I lived through this time. This movie in play format is awesome because the acting was first rate and people this was high drama life or death stakes would have affected all of us had it gone wrong because it was all real life baby and no movie gets any better than that in my humble opinion.Oh and its like way educational too so buy this one its one of the WOLF's major must haves like number one on my serious subjects list.

Generally very good, but "kennedy-friendly", that is, JFK comes out the consumate crisis-manager, when in reality nobody was in control of events (JFK and Khrushchev truly were "sleepwalking through history").To be fair to the makers of the film, the script is based on available documents in 1974. Nowadays, we know that Kennedy explicitly traded existing US bases in Turkey for the USSR bases in Cuba -- something that was denied for years -- and that the Russians had tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba to defend against invasion; which would have immediately turned into a direct confrontation into the nuclear realm. In reality, the Cuban Missile Crisis seems to have been "won" (narrowly) by the Soviets -- although Khrushchev's career didn't survive it (but Castro's certainly did :-)Wonderful work by William Devane as JFK (Martin Sheen as RFK has a little more trouble with the accent, but the two of them portray the personalities of the two men very well), but perhaps the best portrayal of all is Howard da Silva as Nikita Khrushchev. Very nice casting choices (and performances) for pretty much every player. Long, but thorough.

Overall, an excellent made for TV movie with William Devane simply being the best actor who has yet played JFK. He does the accent JUST right without overdoing it -- unlike future JFK Martin Sheen, who hams it up as RFK here. His accent (as it was in KENNEDY) is overdone with, uh, a lot of, uh, this, uh, sort of thaaaaang (I am, uh, speaking like, uh, a Kennedy). Other than that, a really well-made film. Can't wait to see 13 DAYS!