At the time of its release, Stanley Kramer’s leisurely paced but undeniably powerful post-nuclear warning must have been a real shocker. The 50s where the decade where, for the most part, big screen preoccupations with nuclear power and radiation extended not much further than creating some giant monsters that would rampage around for an hour and a half before being seen off by a tag team of Earnest Scientist and No-Nonsense Military Type. In Kramer’s film, the cold, hard, terrifying truth of what a nuclear war would really mean is brought into sharp, unflinching focus – and in those days before Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965) and a very long time before the 80s TV nuclear scare movies (The Day After (1983), Testament (1983), Threads (1984)) the effect it must have had on contemporary audiences must have been galvanising.
Seen today, the film is still powerfully moving, but it’s clear that it has some problems. It’s grasp of what radiation actually is and how it works is, at best shaky, though perhaps that’s being unfair – Kramer and original novelist Nevil Shute don’t seem overly concerned with the science and mechanics of nuclear weapons, simply on the consequences of their use.
The casting too creates a few problems – Gregory Peck is fines as the forlorn captain of the stranded US Navy submarine Sawfish, and Fred Astaire proved a genuine revelation in his first serious, heavyweight role, a few accent issues notwithstanding. But Ava Gardner is wholly unconvincing as Peck’s love interest, not even bothering to try for an Australian accent (Anthony Perkins gives it a fair shot but maybe the rest of the Hollywood types trying to pass themselves off as Aussies should have followed Gardner’s lead). The supporting cast are mostly good, though it’s curious that the American crew of the submarine are mostly played by Australians, the Australians are mostly played by Americans and British doctor Julian Osborne is played by Astaire.
And perhaps someone should have told Kramer and his composer Ernest Gold that not everyone in Australia is as enamoured of the song Waltzing Matilda as we non-Aussies like to thing they are. In On the Beach, the song turns up in endless permutations such that at the end the casual viewer might actually be left wondering if the Australians actually know any other tunes!
But these are minor irritations in a film which still has much to say and still says it rather brilliantly. Unlike Peter Watkins (The War Game), Nicholas Meyer (The Day After) or Mick Jackson (Threads), Kramer focuses not on the sensational but undeniably effective shots of vaporising buildings, smouldering bodies and shell-shocked survivors, but on ordinary people trying to hold together the remains of a normal life while simultaneously preparing for death. The film that most effectively picked up where Kramer left off is Lynne Littman’s extraordinary Testament, which similarly chooses to view nuclear obliteration through the eyes of ordinary, everyday people trying to make sense of the madness that has descended on them.
In place of grandstanding effects sequences showing the end of the world as we know it, Kramer creates equally unforgettable images out of the hopelessness and despair felt by the survivors. The best remembered sequence has Peck and his submarine crew setting off for San Diego, chasing a mysterious radio signal, the last hope that others have survived the cataclysm, only to find the mundane truth in one of the most shattering and bleak reveals in cinema – their mission has been prompted by nothing more than an open window blown by the wind bashing randomly on a Morse code key…
Yet for all the air of despondency and melancholy that hangs over the film, it’s not all doom and gloom – Kramer and scriptwriter John Paxton manage to find some scraps of humour along the way, particularly from two Colonel Blimp types bemoaning the fact that they’ve not going to have enough time before the inevitable happens to finish off supply of port laid on by their club.
But as the film nears its climax, and the crew of Sawfish arrive back in Melbourne, the film becomes almost unbearably grim. One crewman has already jumped ship, preferring to die on home soil rather than go back to Australia and face an uncertain future and Peck and his men arrive just in time to find the Australian authorities handing out suicide pills to the survivors as the first case of radiation sickness is reported, suggesting that the irradiated cloud of war is just over the horizon.
Yet even here, Kramer, Shute and Paxton offer us brief glimmers of hope. The lead characters all face the end with various degrees of dignity – Astaire’s final scenes are unbearably poignant – and the final shots of the film bring us back to a Salvation Army banner that has been glimpsed several times throughout the film – “It’s not too late”, it reads, sagging now over almost deserted streets. Today, it might seem heavy-handed and preachy – in 1959, it was the only way to ensure that shell-shocked viewers didn’t leave cinemas and leap into the path of the first truck they saw…
On the Beach opened to controversy at a time when the nuclear debate was nowhere near as fierce as it would become in the following decade. Most critics were kind to it – Kramer had a reputation for creating serious, worthy films and his insistence on foregrounding the human drama and completely excising the sensationalism certainly helped – though there were some rather extreme reactions, none more so than the reviewer for the New York Daily News, who accused it of possessing a “thinking [which] points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race.”
On the Beach refuses to take sides on the debate and is all the better for it. Kramer et al seem less concerned with the right and wrongs of nuclear weapons than they are with the moral choices that will be faced by those who may survive their use. As such it’s an unusual entry in the nuclear movie canon and, despite a few flaws, it remains one of the best. Those with a taste for a thoughtful, intelligent and unashamedly emotional approach to the subject will find much to enjoy here.
The EOFFTV Review 