But in the tradition of some of the most notable films about nuclear fallout, this movie was made for home audiences. It was originally produced for PBS’s American Playhouse, but it got a theatrical release through Paramount because of that, it qualified for Academy Awards, earning Alexander a best actress nomination.
The movie was adapted by John Sacret Young from a three-page short story by a California school teacher, Carol Amen, who died a few years after the film’s release. It’s about the steady crawl of inexplicable mass death into peoples’ lives. The film’s focus instead is on the fallout-the radiation in the air, not the carnage you can see. This is not a film about war, though surely there must be some geopolitical explanation for the nation getting hit on both coasts with nukes. Testament is an apocalypse movie in name, but not in spirit. There’s hardly enough time for Carol Wetherly ( Jane Alexander) and her children to process this news before warning becomes reality: a hot, white, blinding flash of light. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is real,” a news anchor says, before a message from the president warning people to keep phone lines clear. There’s a fuzzy signal, and then a live news announcement: nuclear bombs are falling.
It’s early in Lynne Littman’s 1983 film Testament, and the beginning of the end of the world-or something like it-is coming, accompanied by the starkest, most unsettling silence.
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