Ladybug Ladybug

In a small rural primary school, an air raid siren goes off in the middle of an ordinary day. The teachers do not know what to do: is the warning real, or is it a fault. Nobody can get confirmation on the telephone. In the end they decide to walk the children home, with teachers accompanying them. On the way the children start talking among themselves and the panic spreads. Frank Perry directed it from a screenplay by Eleanor Perry, whose source was an account of a real incident published in a magazine in October 1962. In the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, civil defence sirens had gone off by mistake in a Californian community and the schools began evacuating. The film tells the fear in the children's own words and presents the nuclear threat not as an image but as an uncertainty.