Take Aim

Take Aim (Выбор цели) is a 1974 two-part Soviet biographical drama film directed by Igor Talankin.

Plot
The film depicts the nuclear arms race that took place between all sides in the World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The first part centers on the war years, dealing with the Manhattan Project and the American effort to beat the Germans to the bomb, as well as with Stalin's decision that the USSR must have its own atomic project. The second part displays the Soviet post-war nuclear program. The plot deals mainly with the personal dilemmas facing all the scientists who worked on the atomic weapons.

Production
The film was produced solely by Mosfilm, without a direct participation of DEFA, and yet several East German actors were invited to play the German historical figures. Fritz Diez, who appeared as Hitler on screen for the sixth time in his career, was also given the role of Otto Hahn.

The producers faced a technical difficulty in a scene which contained a nuclear explosion. After several experiments, the special effects coordinator, Samir Jaber - a Syrian citizen who worked for Mosfilm - decided to create the required sequence by trickling a drop of orange-tinted perfume into a watery solution of aniline and filming it close up.

Reception
The film won the 1975 Kishinev All-Union Film Festival Grand Prize. Talankin received the Silver Pyramide in the 1977 Cairo International Film Festival.

Cast

 * Sergei Bondarchuk – Igor Kurchatov
 * Georgiy Zhzhonov – Vitaly Petrovich Zubavin
 * Nikolai Volkov – Abram Ioffe
 * Irina Skobtseva – Marina Dmitriyevna Kurchatova
 * Nikolai Burlyayev – Fedya
 * Alla Pokrovskaya – Tanya
 * Yakov Tripolsky – Joseph Stalin
 * Mikhail Ulyanov – Georgy Zhukov
 * Nikolai Zasukhin – Vyacheslav Molotov
 * Sergei Yursky – J. Robert Oppenheimer
 * Erich Gerberding – Leslie Groves
 * Oleg Basilashvili – Boris Pash
 * Alla Demidova – Jane
 * Innokenty Smoktunovsky – Franklin D. Roosevelt
 * Jerzy Kaliszewski – Harry S. Truman
 * Horst Schulze – Werner Heisenberg
 * Miloš Nedbal – Max von Laue
 * Fritz Diez – Otto Hahn/Adolf Hitler
 * Siegfried Weiß – Niels Bohr
 * Mark Prudkin – Albert Einstein
 * Boris Ivanov – Leó Szilárd
 * Nikolai Lebedev – energy minister
 * Sergei Kurilov – Vladimir Vernadsky