The studio promised it would be a prestigious motion picture, with big stars and stunning visual effects. The movie would tell the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb, and give people a fuller understanding of what it means to live in a world with such weapons. It was 1947, 76 years before Oppenheimer, and The Beginning or the End was the first feature film about the Manhattan Project and the destruction of Hiroshima.
If you’ve never heard of The Beginning or the End, that’s because none of what the studio promised happened. But before studio executives, terrible screenwriting and the demands of the U.S. military and the Truman White House mangled the project, there was a good idea for an important movie.
It began with a letter from a Manhattan Project scientist to movie star Donna Reed, shortly after the end of World War II in 1945. How the two knew each other is a story that starts in the small town of Denison, Iowa.
Before The Donna Reed Show was one of the most popular TV programs of the late ’50s and early ’60s, before Reed became the first Iowa-born actor to win an Oscar, before she starred in the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life and before her first movie role in ’41 at age 20, Donna Belle Mullenger was a painfully shy sophomore at Denison High School.
“I saw in Donna a bright and intelligent girl, and sensed that underneath her shyness there was a natural charm,” Ed Tompkins later recalled.
Tompkins was teaching biology and chemistry at Denison High, when Donna became one of his students in 1936.
“I think anyone that had him for a teacher would agree with me that he was the most interesting teacher we have had, and he had a good sense of humor that made classes fun,” Mearl T. Luvaas wrote in the Denison Bulletin-Review in 2012.
Tompkins grew up on a farm outside Winterset, and before leaving to earn his bachelor’s degree at the State Normal School of Colorado (now the University of Northern Colorado), he’d been a shy high school student, embarrassed by the overalls he wore to school. Tompkins could tell Donna was another farm kid who felt awkward at school.
He talked to her about his school days and how he was finally able to overcome his shyness. Tompkins encouraged her to take part in school activities. He also gave her a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which had been published earlier that year.
Reed credited those talks and that book with changing her life. She followed Tompkins advice and started participating in extracurricular activities. Donna excelled at speech contests. She won leading roles in school plays. Throughout her 45-year-long career in show business, Reed would always mention her high school chemistry teacher when asked about people who influenced her.
Tompkins was gone by the time Reed started to shine in school. He left Denison in the fall of 1937 to start graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. But Tompkins kept in touch with some of his former students. He and Donna regularly corresponded as he worked on his Ph.D in chemistry, and even after he graduated in 1941 and became a chemist at the Armour Research Foundation, part of the newly formed Illinois Institute of Technology.
By that time, Reed was in California and about to become a star.
By the time she graduated in 1938, Donna had decided to become a teacher. But her family couldn’t afford college. The country was still suffering through the Great Depression, and Hazel and William Mullenger had four children younger than Donna — two boys and two girls — to care for. Fortunately, Donna’s Aunt Mildred, who lived in Los Angeles, had a solution.
Donna could move to L.A., live with her and go to Los Angeles City College. California residents could attend tuition-free, they just needed to pay a $5 student fee each semester (adjusting for inflation, that’s a little over $100 today). Donna left Iowa and headed west.
At college, she continued to pursue her interest in the theater, even as she worked three jobs. In December 1940, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photo of her after she won a campus beauty contest. It caught the eye of Bill Smith, an agent. He signed her up, and got her a screen test at MGM. The studio gave Donna a contract and a new last name, changing Mullenger to Reed, and quickly began casting her in movies.
Her first movie, a crime drama called The Get-Away with Reed as the female lead, hit theaters in June 1941. The New York Times called it “deadly dreary stuff,” but bad reviews did nothing to slow Reed’s career. Before the year was over, she appeared in two more movies, and even worked steadily throughout World War II.
However the war did dramatically change the course of Ed Tompkins’ life.
In 1942, Tompkins was recruited for the Manhattan Project, the massive, top-secret scientific effort to develop an atomic bomb. Tompkins was sent to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the laboratory and production facilities were focused on enriching uranium. Everything about Oak Ridge was top secret and on a strictly need-to-know basis. Neither Tompkins nor almost anyone else at Oak Ridge knew the uranium would be used for a bomb, they just knew their work was vital to the war effort.
Working at Oak Ridge meant almost entirely cutting yourself off from the outside world. Tompkins stopped writing to his former students. Reed didn’t know why he had stopped replying to her letters until shortly after the war, when she learned from a newspaper story he’d been part of the Manhattan Project. She wrote Tompkins a letter, sending it care-of the Oak Ridge laboratory.
Tompkins replied quickly with a long letter expressing the worries he and some of his fellow scientists had about the atomic bomb, and the public’s lack of understanding about how the bomb “necessitates a reevaluation of many of our previous modes of thought and life.” It wasn’t like other weapons, he explained, adding “a hundred long-range rockets carrying atomic explosives could wipe out civilization in a matter of minutes.”
That wasn’t the message the Truman administration was promoting to the public. There was no need for change or concern, according to the administration. The bomb guaranteed America’s safety. There was no moral ambiguity about using atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities with little connection to the Japanese military. The deaths of well over 100,000 civilians in those two cities were just the sort of thing that happens in war. Stories about severe radiation burns and sickness among survivors were nothing to worry about.
Tompkins explained that many Manhattan Project scientists were working to inform the public about “the horrors of atomic warfare” through newspaper interviews and by writing books, but they realized a movie would reach “a large segment of the population.”
“It would, of course, have to hold the interest of the public and still not sacrifice the message,” he wrote. “Would you be willing to help sell this idea to MGM?”
As journalist and historian Greg Mitchell points out in his 2020 book about the movie sparked by this letter, The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, there were few dissenting public voices in October 1945.
“The day before Reed received the Tompkins letter … more than ninety thousand locals had gathered in the Los Angeles Coliseum to witness a ‘Tribute to Victory,’” Mitchell writes. The event featured “a re-creation of the bombing of Hiroshima” with a B-29 dropping “a package that produced a large noise and a small mushroom cloud. The crowd went crazy,”
After thinking about it for a few days, Reed phoned her old teacher and said she would help.
Reed turned Tompkins’ request over to Tony Owen, who was then both her husband and her agent. Owen immediately began contacting producers, but had little success. In another phone call, Reed told Tompkins producers were nervous. Some told Owen they’d be willing to make a nuclear bomb movie only with the approval of the military and only if the movie didn’t have any “political repercussions.” Tompkins remained hopeful, but Reed warned him that whatever movie he had in mind would likely end up very different after studio executives took charge of it.
Before October was over, Owen found a willing producer. Samuel Marx had already been interested in making a movie about the bomb. He had a fuzzy vision for a history-making epic and instant classic. He was excited Owen could connect him to Manhattan Project scientists. Marx and Owen went to see the head of MGM, Louis B. Mayer.
Mayer got caught up in Marx’s enthusiasm. He green-lit the still-vague movie, declaring it would be “the most important picture” the studio ever made.
Owen and Marx flew to Oak Ridge at the beginning of November, where they were greeted by Tompkins and four of his colleagues.
“We are very happy that you are here!” Tompkins said, according to notes Marx made of the visit. “We hope you can tell the world the meaning of the bomb, because we are scared to death.”
That was not the attitude Marx was looking for. Like the other producers, he knew cooperation from the military was essential — the movie would need army equipment as props and bases as filming locations — and he knew how important it was to make a movie President Truman wouldn’t find objectionable.
In the end, Marx would grant Truman and his representatives, as well as Leslie Groves (the army general who had been in charge of the Manhattan Project) the right to change the script or anything that had been filmed. Both Groves and Truman had no patience for people with qualms about atomic weapons or the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both found scientists annoying.
“I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again,” Truman said after a White House meeting with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer told Truman he felt guilty the bombs he created had been used against largely civilian targets. Truman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “This kind of sniveling makes me sick.”
Even though Marx was determined to please Groves and Truman — both made major changes to the movie — he did assure many concerned scientists the final product would reflect their opinions.
Tompkins was the first to receive that assurance. It wasn’t true.
Marx hired Ed Tompkins as a consultant for the movie, and had him move to Los Angeles. Marx was interested in using Tompkins to get technical details right, or close enough. MGM’s publicity department was interested in using Tompkins’ and Reed’s decade-old connection as teacher and student to generate early interest in the movie. For the first few months of 1946, MGM got newspapers around the country to run stories about their Denison High days and how Tompkins was the one who first suggested MGM’s upcoming movie to Reed.
In March 1946, the Des Moines Register Sunday Magazine ran a story saying MGM had slated Reed to star in The Beginning or the End. It wasn’t true. Reed was never approached about being in the movie. When the Register story appeared, she was busy getting ready for a movie at a different studio. The following month, Reed started filming her role as Mary Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life at RKO.
As MGM was using Tompkins and Reed to promote the movie, Tompkins was growing more frustrated. Marx was ignoring his suggestions about the movie and its message. After a tense meeting in early February 1946, in which Marx called him “less than useless,” Tompkins wrote to a colleague that he finally realized he was working for “a bunch of potential bastards.” He quit and went back to Oak Ridge.
Ed Tompkins had a long and distinguished career, first at Oak Ridge, and later at the University of California Radiological Laboratory and the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. He died in 1986 at age 78, following complications from surgery.
Donna Reed also had a long and distinguished career, winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1954 for her performance in From Here to Eternity, and finding great success in movies and TV. She continued acting until just a few months before her death from pancreatic cancer at age 64 in 1986.
The Beginning or the End was a flop. It had a muddled and occasionally ridiculous storyline, in which all its characters overcome their worries about the bomb. The actors were B-list at best. The special effects paled in comparison to newsreel footage of the actual bomb. The movie arrived in theaters, over budget and behind schedule, in March 1947. According to MGM’s records, the studio lost almost $1.6 million on it (about $24 million in today’s dollars).
In 1958, Reed and Tompkins briefly reunited on This is Your Life, a popular TV show that recounted the lives of celebrities by surprising them with people from the past. Tompkins was one of the surprise guests on the episode about Reed. The two talked about Denison High and how he helped her overcome shyness. There was no mention of The Beginning or the End.
Paul Brennan is Little Village’s news director. He watched ‘The Beginning or the End’ so you wouldn’t have to. It felt much longer than 112 minutes. This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.