In
this last of meeting places
We
grope together
And
avoid speech
Gathered
on this beach of the tumid river...
This
is the way the world ends—
This
is the way the world ends.
This
is the way the world ends
Not
with a bang but a whimper.
—T.S.
Eliot, The Hollow Men
T.S.
Eliot's chilling assessment of what the end
of days might be like found a near perfect novelistic analog in Nevil Shute's big bestseller On the Beach, with one exception: while
things in this post-apocalyptic drama may indeed be winding down to a veritable
whimper, there was indeed a bang, and a calamitous one at that. On the Beach deals with the devastating
after effects of a nuclear holocaust which has wiped out the entire northern
hemisphere. The only known survivors are in the southern hemisphere, including
residents of Australia, who are waiting in various states of agony for a huge
radioactive cloud to make its way to their isolated island, where it will
certainly bring death and destruction. Shute's novel was remarkable for its
understated, almost stoic, approach toward this almost unimaginable fate, and
it played into Cold War fears of untold nuclear catastrophes in a very visceral
way. Stanley Kramer's 1959 film
based on the novel changes several salient elements of Shute's original, but it
maintains the same reserved, melancholic tone that infused the novel. There is a
tamped down emotionalism running rampant throughout the film, as if the
characters aren't exactly in a state of denial, but have come to the conclusion
that carrying on as best they can until the inevitable greets them is the best
way to muddle through. The film has none of the special effects bells and
whistles that would come to define the post-apocalyptic genre in subsequent
years, and is instead a rather quiet, introspective character study of several
people caught in a cataclysmic set of events which they all struggle to come to
terms with in their own way. On the Beach
doesn't really celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, and in fact a lot of
this film is relentlessly depressing, but there is a potent subtext of the
(perhaps illogical) resilience of people who know they have limited time to
live and who (for the most part, anyway) refuse to panic in the face of their
imminent demise.
Stanley
Kramer may be too often dismissed as the purveyor of middlebrow message pictures, but there's one thing
you can usually count on in virtually every Kramer film: the director's economy
of presentation. Even Kramer's longest films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Judgment at Nuremberg waste little time in setting up their
narrative. Kramer isn't a fan of huge expository scenes, he wants to show the
audience what's happening. That proclivity is very much on display in the
opening few minutes of On the Beach,
where Kramer (with the help of scenarist John
Paxton, of course) nimbly details the context of the film. There's been a
cataclysmic battle, no one seems to be alive in the northern hemisphere, and a
sub's crew is therefore making its way toward Australia to search for anyone
living there.
The
sub's commander is Dwight Towers (Gregory
Peck), whose arrival in Australia is greeted first by Aussie Lt. Peter
Holmes (Anthony Perkins) and, later by a
pretty, if hard drinking, Moira Davidson (Ava
Gardner), to whom Holmes and his young wife Mary (Donna Anderson) introduce Towers. The Australian Navy has detected
an intermittent signal that seems to be garbled Morse Code emanating from San
Diego, where it had been thought all life had perished. The Aussies task Towers
and his Sawfish submarine with taking the perilous journey northward to
investigate.
In
the meantime, Towers has come to realize that the Australians are dealing with
their own impending mortality in radically different ways. It's only a matter
of time until radioactive clouds reach the continent, and the government has
already begun preparing its citizens for the worst. Suicide pills are
available, though people like Mary, who has just given birth to a baby
daughter, simply can't bring themselves to face that desperate inevitability. Peter,
on the other hand, feels it's absolutely necessary that Mary deal with the situation
unemotionally, since he, as the Sawfish's liaison officer, could well be on the
sub when the decision needs to be made back home.
Moira
drowns her sorrows in drink, while more erudite types like scientist and race
car enthusiast Julian Osborn (Fred
Astaire) seem at least to be relatively consigned to their fate. Towers
himself knows on one level that his own family perished in the nuclear
holocaust, but he is in a state of denial, even as one last chance at romance
with Moira is dangled in front of him. The fascinating thing about On the Beach is that, while there are
traditional thriller or mystery elements like the mysterious radio signal at
play in the plot, it's the intense personal stories that actually provide the visceral
intensity the film often displays.
What's
equally compelling about the film is how it shows the almost insanely sanguine
quality of virtually everyone at least at one point. Peter and Mary spend a day
at the beach, and they're surrounded by countless other Australians frolicking
in the sun as if they hadn't a care in the world. Towers and Moira finally have
a bit of a fling, but for different reasons, and without the typical whiff of
scandal which usually attends such affairs. Kramer is rather circumspect in the
way he presents the inevitable demise of all these characters, and indeed
Paxton's screenplay averts some of the overt tragedies that await various
characters in Shute's novel. But there's an unambiguous portent of ominous
foreboding hanging over this film that's kind of like the cinematic equivalent
of a huge radioactive cloud lingering just beyond the horizon.
Shute
used that excerpt from T.S. Eliot's The
Hollow Men quoted above as the epigraph for the first editions of his
novel, and it sums up the fetid, decaying atmosphere that envelops On the Beach. This is a stifling,
claustrophobic film that manages to be incredibly disturbing with absolutely no
depictions of any carnage or destruction whatsoever. Life goes on, the
philosopher says, until of course it doesn't. Or as a different kind of philosopher, Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb,
once wrote, Life is what you do while
you're waiting to die. On the Beach
is a devastating examination of exactly how different people wait. Technical
merits here are generally very good to excellent, and On the Beach comes highly recommended. [Kauffman’s rating: 3.5 out
of 5 stars]
Labels:
drama, Fifties, romance, sci-fi
On the Beach (YouTube entire film)
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