Gotcha! (1985) and the Cold War Era of Movies

I was born in 1990. That means I missed much of history, as we all have. But it also means that I missed much of film history. There were a great many eras of film that passed before I was even a thought. The silent film era was long gone, sixty years before I took my first breath. Westerns would never be as big in my life as they had been in the 50s 60s, and 70s. The slasher genre had its heyday in the 1980s, though I got to see the 90s renaissance. Another thing that was before my time was the Cold War. I never got the full effect of the Cold War in the movies that came out during my life.

The end of the Cold War came around the time of 1989. The symbol of West versus East was the Berlin Wall, and it began to be dismantled in November of that year. Communist countries such as Poland moved away from communism. East Germany was dissolved into West Germany. Two years later, the USSR would crumble and separate into a handful of different nations. And I was born right at the end.

I never got to experience the Cold War in the same way as the generations before me had. I didn’t know the fear of a nuclear apocalypse in quite the same way. The fear of communist espionage hasn’t been a big issue for decades. There hasn’t even been a real fear of war coming to North America. Aside from the whole September 11^th thing, I guess. The Cold War had a grip on people’s anxieties that no other time in North American history really has, and I was only alive for maybe a year of it.

Even with the way that Russia has been involved in the modern political world, there hasn’t been a threat like the Cold War since the Cold War. People don’t have the same sort of fear that anybody could be an undercover Russian operative. And this is a modern world where an undercover Russian operative infiltrated the NRA, a major political backer for the Republican party. This is a world where the Russian government may have interfered with an American election. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be that constant fear of death or deadly operatives.

That’s why watching movies made during the Cold War can feel so distant. Obviously, they were made in a different time when the world was a different place. The mentality of filmmakers and their audiences was one that showed fear of the bad things that could result from the Cold War. Cold War thrillers were made that depicted the espionage aspects. Wars were fought between communist nations and America, which resulted in many movies about the needlessness of war. There were movies that showed America being invaded by an outside force and the people who would have to stand up to defend the nation. Each of these movies played off the public’s fear of Russia. It’s a fear I’ve never really had.

Some of the movies managed to have themes that outlasted the Cold War era. Apocalypse Now was a Cold War era movie depicting the Vietnam War, which was a result of the Cold War between the democratic USA and the communist USSR. The film didn’t focus too much on the Cold War of it all, though. It was about how war was Hell. The Cold War dispute had led to a bunch of people being thrown into war where death was all around them. Their lives were destroyed through what they saw and experienced. This is a theme that is as relevant to today’s world as it was to the audiences of 1979. The movie may have been the result of the Cold War, but it was about something that people could relate to both in and out of that era.

Other movies, like Red Dawn were much more of the time and don’t have the same impact in the modern day. People don’t have the same fear of invading forces coming to North America and taking over. Red Dawn saw a group of teenagers fighting back against the invading Russian forces through guerilla warfare tactics. The remake replaced the Russians with North Koreans and didn’t find nearly the same success. There just isn’t a climate for that sort of cathartic release anymore.

Although war movies were a big part of the Cold War era entertainment, they weren’t the only outlet for the fears of the Cold War. Espionage thrillers became one of the most popular genres. The CIA and KGB were duking it out in the spy game. The media picked up on espionage and geared their output toward that. The James Bond movies became popular as soon as they began in with Dr. No in 1962. Mission: Impossible was on television from 1966 to 1973. The Avengers, a British spy series, was a staple of the entire sixties.

The high point of these kinds of thrillers in film might be The Manchurian Candidate. The 1962 film was about a Korean War pilot who had been taken as a prisoner of war. He was brainwashed before being sent home without any memories of the brainwashing. The memories slowly returned and he uncovered an assassination plot that he had to stop. It still stands as one of the best movies ever made about the Cold War paranoia and got remade in the mid-2000s, set in the Gulf War.

The popularity of The Manchurian Candidate and other films like it led to the 1970s being filled with political thrillers and espionage films. Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and The Conversation all dealt with surveillance and espionage in some ways. It was a time when North America was paranoid about what could be happening with the American government and the Russian government. They never knew who was watching them, who was an operative, or when a full-on war would break out. The movies of the 1970s showed that paranoia in full effect.

Cold War paranoia changed as the world moved into the 1980s. The thriller style storytelling fell out of favour for straight up action. Espionage was now filled with action scenes and near-death experiences. There was lots of shooting and chases, which would normally arise suspicion from the regular, everyday people. But when it came to the movies, it didn’t. Only the main characters were affected. Even if it happened in broad daylight, the people around them wouldn’t take any real notice. They would get out of the way to not be harmed. That was about it. And if the main character tried to mention anything about their spy life, the people they told wouldn’t believe them.

That 1980s mentality to movie espionage was on full display in Gotcha! The 1985 movie saw Jonathan (Anthony Edwards), a paintball loving veterinary college student, travel to Paris on vacation. He fell in love with Sasha (Linda Fiorentino), a mysterious Czech woman. Sasha urged Jonathan to visit East Berlin, where it was revealed that she was a spy. She planted a roll of film on Jonathan and disappeared. Now with the roll of film, Jonathan had to escape from some Russian spies who were trying to kill him.

A few elements of the Cold War were present throughout Gotcha! First and foremost was the espionage battle between the CIA and the KGB. Jonathan had unknowingly been given a roll of film that both agencies wanted. There was no explanation given for what was on the film. There was no reason given about why each agency wanted the film. The most that was given was that they each wanted the film and would do pretty much anything to get it. The KGB was chasing Jonathan and trying to kill him. They killed a woman who was talking to Jonathan. The CIA ransacked Jonathan’s apartment to find the film. Jonathan was in the middle of a battle between two countries’ espionage agencies.

Then there was Berlin itself. Gotcha! showed the divided Berlin of the Cold War. Following World War II, Germany was divided into two separate nations. West Germany was the Federal Republic of Germany, a democratic, capitalist state that sided with the western world. East Germany was the German Democratic Republic, a socialist nation that sided with the USSR. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to separate the two halves of Berlin and, in turn, the two halves of Germany. It was a heavily patrolled border. Gotcha! showed Jonathan and Sasha crossing that border from West Germany to East Germany. Jonathan then hopped the border two more times while trying to escape the KGB. It was a stressful leap each time.

The fears that were built up in Gotcha! included a fear of the spy agencies and a fear of the communist and socialist republics of the east. The spy agencies would ruin someone’s life and even kill them for a roll of film. If they would do that for a roll of film, imagine what they would do for something that was a bigger deal. That’s frightening. Especially when you could be involved in that, simply because you fell in love with a woman you met on a trip to Europe. And going to East Berlin was like going to a war-torn country that decided to remain in the war instead of rebuilding and prospering, Buildings were run down. Streets were deserted. The people were menacing. And there were strip searches at the border. If you wanted to go to the Soviet controlled part of the world, Gotcha! was going to try and pout a stop to that.

Most movies that were made as a result of the Cold War pushed these messages. Foreign spy agencies were bad and would stoop to deadly lows in order to get information from anybody. Even if you didn’t have real information, they would try and get something out of you. And when they were done, so was your life. The USSR and the countries they allied with were the big bad guys of the world and could end it in a nuclear holocaust at any time. World War II was over, but the Korean War and the Vietnam War came to continue the democracy versus communism and socialism conflict. The east was the run down, scrappy, dirty side of the Cold War and the west was the clean, strong, well-kept side. Movies picked up on these Cold War stereotypes and put them into play in their stories.

I didn’t live through the Cold War, so I don’t know how much of this storytelling was real. If I were to guess, there was a good heap of propaganda put onto each story. North America and their allies had to fear the east so that they didn’t become the east. All I can do is watch the movies and take their messages with a grain of salt. The era was a bunch of fear throughout the hearts of North Americans as they thought the world would end at any moment. The tensions between the USSR and the USA ebbed and flowed but came to a great many high points. There were times when the world almost ended. It didn’t. I’m here. I’m writing this. And now I’m done.

Not quite, though, because here are some notes:

• Gotcha! was the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Steve Eastin, who was in Ed (week 11) and Robot Wars (week 37).
• Kevin Sifuentes was in Gotcha! after being featured in Steel (week 127).
• George Fisher returned from Jingle All the Way (week 160) to be in Gotcha!
• Gotcha! featured Irene Olga Lopez who was also in Showgirls (week 170).
• Finally, Alex Rocco showed up in Gotcha! after being in Dudley Do-Right (week 336).
• Have you seen Gotcha!? What Cold War era movies were good or bad? Did you live during the Cold War? What are your memories of it? Discuss this and more in the comments or on Twitter.
• Twitter or the comments could be used to tell me what movies I should be watching. I’ve got a schedule that I’m always updating and suggestions are a welcome inlet for movies I might not otherwise know about. Fill me in on newer or older movies that would fit within the Sunday “Bad” Movies lineup.
• Sunday “Bad” Movies is on Instagram. Check it out.
• Now let’s do a quick talk about what’s coming up. The next post will be going up in October, so things are going to horror for a few weeks. First up is an animal attack movie. Sort of. It’s a demonic, resurrected animal attack movie. Rottweiler was released in 2004 or 2005. It will be a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies in 2019. Next week, in fact. See you then.