On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famed “The Sinews of Peace” address to an audience at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, during which he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” thus coining the famous Cold War term, “Iron Curtain.” This was 15 years before construction began on the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall,[1] and a year before the Cold War got its name.
The term “cold war” goes back quite some time, but its first use in this context was by George Orwell, famed author of the dystopian novel 1984, who used it to describe the future of the Atomic Age where global superpowers would be “at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with [their] neighbors,” in his Oct. 19, 1945 London Tribune essay, “You and the Atom Bomb.” The term took on its capital letters and its specific application to the ideological struggles, continuously simmering hostilities, and occasional proxy wars between the Eastern and Western Blocs, led by the USSR and USA, respectively, in a speech by American financier Bernard Baruch, given to the South Carolina House of Representatives[2] on April 16, 1947 where he said, “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a Cold War.” This phrase was then picked up and popularized by journalist Walter Lippmann in a series of articles appearing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1947.[3]
The Cold War officially came to an end on Dec. 25, 1991 following the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the political collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent years, tensions between the ex-Cold War powers have increased and the proxy wars have begun again. We do not yet have a name for new this period (“The Big Chill” is already taken and I can’t seem to gain any traction for “Cold War 2, Electric Boogaloo”[4]), so let’s set this aside for the moment and look back to the good old days of “Cold War Classic,”[5] from 1945-1991.
Naturally, when something this big happens, someone is going to make a movie about it, and the Cold War is no exception. Rather than collect together the best movies that came out of this period, today we’re looking at the best movies about this period.[6] The folks at Screen Rant have been kind enough to have assembled a list of the “25 Best Cold War Movies Ranked.”[7] These films cover all the Cold War highlights: the space race, the Cuban missile crisis, spies, proxy wars (as fought with guns in Afghanistan and muscles in the Olympics), mutually assured destruction though global thermonuclear war, etc. They even manage to work in James Bond,[8] a mysterious amphibian, and a (very dark) comedy at the end. As always, all of these movies can all be found in the EIDR Content ID registry, replete with hyperlinks to other sources with additional information including synopsis, genres, ratings, full cast and crew, box office performance, and information on where you can steam these shows so you can watch them tonight when you invite your friends over for your annual Cold War Viewing Party, or however it is you choose to spend your evenings at this time of year.
[1] Which began as a barbed wire barricade laid down on Aug. 13, 1961 to physically separate the Eastern and Western zones that had been established in Berlin by the Allied powers at the end of WWII.
[2] In a speech written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Herbert Bayard Swope.
[3] Later collected and published in the book The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (1947).
[4] Of course, inspired by Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), one of the least-necessary sequels of all time, with an unsurprising 29% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
[5] I’m also workshopping “Cold War I” and “The O.G. C.W.”
[6] Some of which were produced during the Cold War, while others look back on that period with either the perspective or nostalgia that time allows.
[7] Compiled by Colin Mccormick and Izak Bulten, updated Nov. 27, 2023.
[8] And, no, not as you’d expect: From Russia with Love (1963).