This movie has been shown on TCM and I've seen it, but thought it was not great--though it was amusing at times, as when that walking three dollar bill,
Art Baker as Truman and
Ludwig Stossel (!) as Albert Einstein heave into view. My memory of
The Beginning or the End (1947) is as a very sincere movie that did suggest a deep ambivalence about Hiroshima while accepting that it was inevitable that someone would develop this weapon...so why not us?!
Robert Walker, playing the only wholly fictional character, had the best part in the movie. You can read more about the movie
here in Life Magazine from March, 1947. The Wilson Quarterly
here has some amusing sidelights on the production of the film, when Hollywood, the Manhattan Project scientists, and the Pentagon tussled over the liberties being taken in characterization and trying to avoid any national security slips.
Oh, now I see! You were intrigued by the idea of
Joseph Calleia portraying Enrico Fermi!
I honestly don't remember Calleia in that movie, though I bet they didn't feature a recreation of a scene when Fermi actually bet his fellow scientists that the first nuclear explosion would set the world's atmosphere on fire. Even though he was a fine actor, I don't think that
Hume Cronyn was nearly as charismatic as the real life J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Montgomery Clift (after his car accident) could readily have played "Oppie."
I think that the atomic bomb might be too loaded a subject for a movie to encapsulate well. I've seen several that tried to capture that moment in time.
Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) featured Paul freaking Newman playing that very large commanding officer who often looked like an unmade bed, General Groves, and Dwight Schultz (The A Team nerd) was Oppenheimer! Robert Taylor was good in
Above and Beyond (1953), but probably only the Japanese could or should make any movie about what it's like to experience a nuclear explosion. As we mentioned a few days ago on these boards,
Godzilla movies as well as Kurosawa's heartfelt
I Live in Fear (1955) and the British made
Seven Days to Noon (1950) certainly were films that reflected the emotional toll of atomic power's existence within a decade of this event.
Just my opinion, but a recently aired program on The American Experience on PBS, called
The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2009), a documentary that blended factual footage with the gifted
David Strathrain as Oppenheimer reading the scientist's own eloquent words, came pretty close to conveying the import of that moment in history. You can see this doc and more info
here on PBS.org.