Scrolling through events for 22nd April (on this occasion it happens to be Good Friday 2011) I spotted the name of Alida Valli. She died on this day in 2006. She had a most haunting face which is remembered largely due to her portrayals, firstly as a suspected murderess in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947) and secondly as a young refugee, actress, comedienne, girlfriend of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). As regards the later film, she features in one of the best ever ending sequences in cinema:
She appeared in over 100 films. Here is a simple tribute to her and her co-stars Joseph Cotton, Orson Wells and Anton Karas, whose wonderful music remains locked in the brain to this day.
A birth on the 22nd April, 1904 led to another type of ending altogether. Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City. He became, during World War II, the scientific director of what was called 'The Manhattan Project'. To create an atomic bomb. He is sometimes referred to as the father of the atomic bomb. He achieved his goal on the 16th July 1945 in the New Mexican desert near Los Alamos. He said that when the bomb exploded on that day it brought to his mind words from the Bhagavad Gita (the Hindu scripture). It was the end of the world as we knew it. Thereafter everything around us was contaminated by potentially lethal radiation. It goes on to this day, and currently the first ever victims from 1945 are again suffering from nuclear fallout. The urgency with which we sought to create a nuclear reaction has left us with the curse of trying to control it. There seems to be no end to that endeavour, but it would be one of the best endings ever.
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