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The Rosenberg File: Case Closed. Prod. by Jan Legnitto. Discovery Channel, 1997. 53 mins. (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, Box 2053, Princeton, NJ 08543-2053; 1-800257-5126; <[email protected]>; <http:// www.films.com> [Sept. 23, 2002])
This is a video that gets more sophisticated as it moves along. It opens with broad strokes of the filmic brush. They paint a scene of 1940s Cold War tension, of a band of Communist conspirators who spied for the Soviet Union, and of a remorseless process of detection by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its helpers that led to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on a charge of having betrayed atomic secrets to the Russians. These introductory scenes are simple, even simplistic. In a crude ploy, Alexander...