The House in the Middle (1954) is a 13-minute documentary short.
This very strange movie is an instructional film purporting to show the key to surviving a nuclear blast: keep your house clean and painted! A deadly serious narrator explains that houses that are kept neat with a fresh coat of paint are better able to withstand nuclear detonations. After a short clip of run-down urban housing, the film cuts to the Nevada Test Site (then called the "Nevada Proving Grounds"). Various small test houses are shown subjected to a nuclear detonation. The film shows that houses that are dirty and messy and unpainted catch fire immediately and burn to the ground, while houses that are neatly maintained and have a fresh coat of paint hold up much better and escape the thermal blast and shock wave mostly intact.
So, as long as you keep your house painted, a nuclear holocaust is no big deal.
Compare Duck and Cover, a similarly weird short film about how to deal with nuclear war, but aimed at children. This film is credited to the "National Clean Up—Paint Up—Fix Up Bureau", purportedly a public-service group, but actually the National Paint, Varnish and Lacquer Association, a bunch of businessmen who wanted to sell paint.
Tropes:
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Broken Aesop: Most notably when the test compares the house that's neat and tidy inside with the house that's messy. Sure, the messy house burned to cinders while the tidy house didn't, but the tidy house is obviously wrecked. - Empathy Doll Shot: The messy house is shown to have a baby stroller on the grounds along with some other assorted trash. After the detonation, a man picks up the twisted, warped metal frame of the stroller, which is all that's left.
- Instructional Film: An utterly insane short film that tries to suggest that putting a fresh coat of paint on your house is all you need to survive World War III.
- Narrator: A super-serious narrator explains how urban "eyesores" are going to be tinder boxes in nuclear war, but well-kept suburban homes will be okey-dokey.
- Product Placement: A particularly sneaky version, as the folks taking such pains to show middle America how painting their homes might save them from nuclear war were...paint salesmen.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Zig-Zagged. On one hand, no, a painted house is not in any way more impervious to nuclear detonations than an unpainted one, at least on an observable level. Even the claims of the lead in paint of that era forming a protective barrier are utter bull honkey when you realize that the lead levels are too negligible to have any sort of effect. On the other hand, the film does have a point that better-maintained houses are safer in general, since a house that is regularly cleaned and kept in good condition and which doesn't have flammable crap laying around it is less likely to catch on fire than, say, a rickety shack surrounded by dry brush and fire hazards. Who knew.
- Re-Cut: There are actually two versions of this film. There's the 1953 version made by the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which consists of only the test footage and is in black-and-white, and the 1954 version that is in color and includes the narrator in an office set.
- Red Scare: Not specifically discussed but an obvious theme, as it was the commies who were going to drop nukes on God-fearing America.
- Title Drop: Many references to "the house in the middle" and how it came through nuclear war just fine.
