A Day Called X (1957). CBS Television, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Held by the Internet Archive; public domain.
A Day Called X
A dramatised civil defence exercise using the real city and its real officials, playing out the hour between warning and departure.
- Year
- 1957
- Made by
- CBS Television, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration
- Directed by
- Harry Rasky
- Free to use because
- In the public domain — no licence terms attached
The note
Everybody in it is playing themselves — the mayor, the police, the housewives — in an evacuation of a real American city staged for television. Ford narrates in a register borrowed from documentary rather than drama, and the effect is a kind of controlled dread that no fictional treatment matched. Public domain.
A Day Called X, 1957. CBS Television, with the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Directed by Harry Rasky. This is the film’s soundtrack: narration, score and location sound, streamed from the Internet Archive’s master. No picture — the audio is the work. In the public domain; no Creative Commons or non-commercial terms apply.
The soundtrack