Rating: 
Summary: On The Beach...revisited
Review: I first saw " Onthe Beach" (OTB) after reading the Nevile Shute novel. I remember Pauline Kael saying in one of her more vitupritive reviews, "will anyone in the future remember On the Beach as anything but a bad movie". I was confused. Perhaps my response at the time had been the sentimental attachment of a high-schooler (after all, that "Waltzing Matida" theme can get to you). But now, Pauline, I can answer yer question. OTB is really not about the end of the world...but rather about the end of each of our worlds. "Fail Safe", "Dr Strangelove", etc...these are the movies about the end of the world. But this film is just about the end of one life...A few lives. And how we watch these finalities played out is like a chess game. Sure,there are moments spiced with Kramer's understandable ham-fisted "MESSAGE" about Nuclear War...but also we experience the slight, breathless moments when we know something forever is lost. I liked it a lot then... I like it now, too. Less for its attacks on radioactive death...more, for its reflections of how we may face our own "end". Remember, this film came out at at time when most American films were glamorizing pillow talks and chariot races and west side stories. These films, as well as the exquisite foreign films of the time also hold up...on their own levels. But there is a poignancy, perhaps not then intended, with all the lead actors either dead or retired that gives a new message to the quote from which the novel and film arose: "Here by the Sea, by the tumult river, here on the beach......sorry, misquoted, but intent on making a point. Looking forward to other comments. I believe the quote ends with the phrase, "Life ends not with a bang, but a whimper".
Rating: 
Summary: the ultimate Cold War film
Review: This is the film that for me captures the terror I felt as a child, growing up at the height of the Cold War; it is bleak and intense, with scenes that are forever etched in my mind. It's one of the great films of that era ("Seven Days in May" and "Fail Safe" are others) that I can watch repeatedly, and their power and impact are never diminished.
Based on Nevil Shute's best seller, and brilliantly directed by Stanley Kramer, the use of sound effects combined with Ernest Gold's Oscar nominated score is very effective. Sometimes the simplest noise set against complete silence is ominous, and gives the feeling of the desolation of empty cities.
As time runs out, people try to avoid the "morbid discussion" of what awaits them, and some make the most of those precious days, weeks and months, like the elderly scientist Julian (in an exceptional performance by Fred Astaire), who completes his dream of being a race car driver.Both strong and tender, Gregory Peck is fabulous as Dwight Towers, the commander of a submarine, who has trouble accepting that he is alive, while his family are victims of the "monstrous war". The woman who falls in love with him is Ava Gardner, who has spent far too much time being consoled by a bottle of brandy. The plot is filled out by Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson, a young couple facing the fact that their baby has no future.
In the late 50s and early 60s, the scenario in this film was all too real; we face other dangers now, but there was something truly chilling about those Cold War years, and this film vividly brings back the memory of them. Total running time is 134 minutes.
Rating:
Summary: Worth viewing, even if not realistic
Review: On the Beach fails the realism test in two ways: scientifically and behaviorally. The first is forgivable; 40+ years ago, there was less understanding of what nuclear war would do the planet. But the second aspect -- human behavior -- is where the story fails. The idea that people would get up, wash and shave and dress, go to their jobs, peacefully obtain their rations of food and so on, with a cloud of certain death getting closer every day... it just doesn't ring true. Looting, pillaging, murder, and general anarchy seem much more likely.
Nevertheless, the movie -- while very melancholy (or depressing, as many reviewers have said), is worth watching. (Especially, as some have noted, for Astaire's performance).
Rating:
Summary: Is this the way the world ends?
Review: I guess the only way we'll know if this movie is accurate in it's depiction of the behavior of the last people on earth is to actually experience it. I like to believe that most people are good so maybe this is the way it would be. I don't really want to find out. My main interest, and I don't expect anybody else to appreciate it, is seeing how my home town of MELBOURNE has changed in 45+ years. It was interesting to see the downtown before it was overrun by McDonalds, Subway, Starbucks etc. And of course the buildings are much taller now. The beautiful Davidson farm is probably now covered in suburban housing. Dallas down under! ( No offense to you Texans! ) About the only places that still look almost the same are Williamstown, although it's now pretty much a yuppie enclave, and of course the Race Track at Phillip Island. All in all I loved the movie, although a lot of the dialogue is really corny, some of the aussie accents are cringable, and I really got sick to death of hearing "Waltzing Matilda". The irony is, it's probably more popular outside of my great country than in it.
Rating: 
Summary: Beached
Review: What if they gave a nuclear war and nobody came? Okay, not funny. It was a whole lot less funny in 1959, the last year of the "duck-and-cover" decade. So sue me. I just sat through one of the longest two hour movies I've ever seen, and I'm still a little punchy.
1959 was the year ON THE BEACH came out, a post-nuclear war movie directed by Stanley Kramer. The premise is promising - nuclear war has wiped out life on Earth, save for Australia. And an American nuclear sub. The radiation cloud is slowly making its way to the last refuge of life, though.
As promising as the premise is, the execution is disappointing. Kramer, with a world of options in front of him, decided to go the turgid melodramatic route. Gregory Peck plays the submarine commander and the Man Repressing His Emotions. Ava Gardner is the Boozed-Up Damaged Woman. At least Kramer cast his leads to type. Fred Astaire plays another boozehound and Anthony Perkins is an Australian(!?) naval officer who, most of the time, remembers he speaks with an accent.
Even though I thought ON THE BEACH was a misfire and about as thought provoking as the back of a cereal box, it did have some nice touches. Horses and bicycles crowded out the cars as the supply of petrol decreased. Coffee, too, was scarce and replaced with an inferior substitute. Funny, though - nobody seemed to be short of cigarettes. Guess Australia must have been stockpiling them in the fifties.
Rating:
Summary: A believable doomsday; yet still a bit drippy
Review: Since I've been a high school student in the terrible years of the Cold War's culmination, I've had an interest in scenarios of nuclear war, such as "Testament", "The Day After", "Fail Safe", and even "Dr. Strangelove". Having recently enjoyed Stanley Kramer's fine depiction of contemporary life in the early 1960's, I figured this film had to be on par for realism, and in showing the world that would result in 1964 from the implementation of mutually assured destruction, the viewer is indeed assured a treat. Gregory Peck stars as an American nuclear submarine commander, who has left the wreckage of the northern hemisphere, for a station in that one last pocket of pure air (but little petrol), Australia. I did not know, actually, that Australia would not have picked up a few ICBMs of its own, but that's how the story goes. The folks down there await "the time" when radiation will engulf them, too, and the submarine is shown taking a trip into the hot zone, with its resident scientist played by Fred Astaire. I don't think I've ever seen such a fine picture of just what kind of world is left, when the radioactive plume is let loose. It has so much structure, but no sentient life. I could have done without all the romance, heavy drinking scenes, and that infernal "Waltzing Matilda" song, and the auto race with Astaire is barely tolerable to a guy moviegoer. But hey, the cloud comes, and that's it. Incredibly, in 2004, with a lot of fine-and-dandy arms in their delivery systems, "there is still time, brothers". It is stark, and it gave me a whole series of bizarre dreams when I finally went to bed. Just a little heavy on the romance side, I'd have to say.
Rating: 
Summary: A Touching Sledgehammer
Review: Stanley Kramer's movie version of the Nevil Shute novel strips the book of all subtlty. Gone are any touches of humor, any rays of hope, any pithy social commentary. What is left is a sledgehammer of a film; unsubtle as a huge blow to the forehead.
Everyone is going to die soon, no exceptions, and it's all because of evil governments, scientists, and humanity out of control.
The nuclear sub USS Swordfish surfaces in Melbourne, Australia at the end of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. Because the earth's winds only gradually exchange the northern and southern air masses, Australia has been spared for a last few months. Gregory Peck takes his sub to the Arctic and to the US West Coast, first to check a theory that radiation levels may be falling, and then to investigate a mysterious bad-morse-code message from San Diego. Through it all, no one has any real hope, as humanity boozes, prays, and denies its way towards the end.
Gregory Peck is, as ever, brilliant, and Ava Gardner is well-cast as a lush, although miscast as his love interest. A craggy-looking Fred Astaire and a non-psychotic Anthony Perkins round out the cast.
The film is not based on the best post-nuclear war novel of the period. 'A Canticle for Leibowotz' and 'Alas, Babylon' are both better. The film also beats the viewer to death with its main, indeed only, point- all nuclear weapons are folly. It is also technically inaccurate. Even 40 years ago there were ways to scrub radiation from air and water in sufficient quantity to create some enclaves for survival. This isn't done, nor does anyone flee to Antarctica to gain a few more months of life. Nor is anyone trying to reach space. Everyone has just given up and is spinning their wheels until they can take suicide pills. And yes, in ostensibly Christian Australia, no one seems to have any compunction about killing himself and going to hell, apparently having already made the earth into one.
Yet, despite all this, and despite being naiive and dated, somehow this film works. The sheer, sad hopelessness of the plot, the touching renditions of Waltzing Mathilda, and the shots of empty streets are so evocative that it is hard not to cry and cry.
I missed some of the best lines ("A nice place to live in the tropics, only no one lived there anymore") and characters (Peter's old uncle, desperately trying to finish off the vintage port at his club ere the end) from the book. Also, Shute had done a magnificent job of showing a society going through the same stages as a terminally ill patient. Kramer should certainly have left this in!
"Frankly, I blame the wine committee!"
Rating:
Summary: The end of the world as we know it...
Review: An unforgettable movie that is as important and as powerful today as when it was first released. Shute took his title from a stanza from T S Eliot's The Hollow Men:- In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river... The tumid (swollen) river is metaphorical, as is the beach, given that Eliot's bleak, desolate landscape is a spiritual one, as in his classic work, The Wasteland. Shute's movie is utterly compelling all the way through, partly due to the subject matter, helped along by a stunning cast, and very capable production and direction. The scene in which the Sub arrives in the US to check on the erratic morse signal was actually shot in Australia, as they could not obtain permission to film it in the US. There was a very creditable 2000 Showtime version with Rachel Ward and Armand Assante, which was truer to the book, although set closer to present time, but the Peck version is still the definitive one. You cannot top this movie for dramatic content, brilliantly delivered by Peck, Gardner, Perkins and Astaire above all. Yes, this could still happen, and yes, nuclear deterrence may well have worked so far, but I always remember a line from Bob Dylan's "If God's On Our Side", which goes... If God's on our side,
He'll stop the next war... Maybe he did. Peace y'all.
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