It makes you want to go outside, smell the air, marvel at the full supermarket shelves and the working telephone lines. To me, this is the key scene of the film: the contrast between what these people once had and what has been lost is staggering. Now, as the parents watch the performance, they see no future for these beautiful innocents.

A school play about the Pied Piper was in rehearsal before catastrophe hit, and, desperate to recapture some normalcy and to divert the children's attention from a reality to horrible to contemplate, the town decides to go on with the show.In the earlier rehearsal scenes, life was normal, the future shone brightly in the children's faces. All his wife, Carol, and two children have left of him are their memories and some flickering images on home movies, glimpses not just of a lost loved one, but of a lost - and loved - world. A family loses its husband and father who simply walked out the door, waving a breezy goodbye one morning, and disappeared into the holocaust. The story and scenes are permeated with a sense of enormous loss. Batteries to power transistor radios suddenly become more valuable than $20 bills in a town where, suddenly, there's nothing left to buy. But slowly the bonds that hold western societies together (electricity, communication, fresh food, medical help) begin to fray and ravel. The town and its citizens, including the Weatherly family, escape initial destruction.

If you are, too, you must watch 'Testament' (and another small gem of a slightly earlier era called 'Fail-Safe.') This is a wonderful film that slowly, unbearably reveals what happens in the small, idyllic town of Hamlin after a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers wipes out a large part of America. As a child of the Cold War years, I have always been interested in films about that most unthinkable event: the detonation of a nuclear bomb or bombs somewhere on our fragile planet. At the time, I was 30 years old and the mother of a two year-old son. I first saw 'Testament' when it came out in 1983.

The testaments movie online