I just watched a 1953 movie called Split Second, featuring Stephen McNally (the bad guy), Alexis Smith, Jan Sterling, Keith Andes, Richard Egan and Arthur Hunnicutt. A desperate killer holes up in a ghost town that's going to be atom-bombed the next day at 6 a.m., and he has two crooks with him along with several other folks.
This was an entertaining movie, but there was so much wrong with it.
One of his pals has been shot, and the killer realizes that one of the people he's captured is a doctor's wife. So he calls the doctor and tells him he needs to save his pal if he wants to save his wife (who has been fleeing to get a divorce).
The doctor flies to the area and saves the wounded pal, but his wife decides it's safer to go with the killer and save herself from the bomb.
They don't know that the bomb detonation has been moved up from 6 a.m. to 5. The killer takes his injured pal and the doctor's wife and heads off, not knowing they're fleeing right toward the bomb. The others hurry to a cave in the hills, and they hear the bomb go off.
There's the expected blast, wind and destruction. The ghost town and the killer's car are obliterated. Weirdly, you can hear the doctor's wife scream as the bomb blast blows over them. She wouldn't have been aware of it.
Next, even if the bomb had gone off at 6, they couldn't get out of the blast radius in an hour.
Finally, the people in the cave would come out into the radiation zone and die within a few days or weeks of radiation poisoning. I guess the writers, director and actors couldn't have known that in 1953.
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