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On the Beach is a 1959 American apocalyptic science fiction drama film, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer,[2] it is based on Nevil Shute‘s 1957 novel of the same title depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war.[3] Unlike the novel, no one is assigned blame for starting the war, which attributes global annihilation to fear, compounded by accident or misjudgment. The film received mixed reviews from critics.

The film was nominated for multiple awards, including at the Oscars for film editing and score. It was awarded a Japanese Blue Ribbon Award and a “United Nations Award” at the British Academy Film Awards. Ernest Gold’s score won the 1960 Golden Globe.

Plot

In the future year of 1964, World War III has devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing all humans there. The cobalt bomb‘s fallout is elevated compared to that of atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs. Air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the Southern Hemisphere, where Melbourne, Australia will be the last major city on Earth to perish.

The American nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, commanded by Capt. Dwight Towers, arrives in Melbourne and is placed under Royal Australian Navy command. Peter Holmes, a young Australian naval officer with a wife Mary and infant child, is assigned to be Towers’ liaison. Holmes invites Towers to his home for a party and meets Julian Osborn, a depressive nuclear scientist who helped build the bombs. Towers develops a tentative attraction with Moira Davidson, a lonely alcoholic. Although Davidson falls in love with Towers, he finds himself unable to return her feelings because he cannot bring himself to admit that his wife and children in the United States are dead.

A new scientific hypothesis suggests that radiation levels in the Northern Hemisphere might have fallen faster than anticipated, suggesting that radiation may disperse before reaching the Southern Hemisphere, or at least leave Antarctica habitable. Soon after, the Australians also detect an incomprehensible continuous Morse code signal coming from region of San Diego, where there should be nobody alive to send it. Towers is ordered to command the Sawfish, with Peter and Julian, on an investigation mission.

Arriving at Point Barrow, Alaska, the sub crew discovers that the radiation levels are not only highly lethal but higher than in the mid-Pacific Ocean, meaning the dispersal hypothesis is wrong; there will be no salvation from the radiation. Stopping next in San Francisco, Sawfish finds the city devoid of life. A crew member with family in the city deserts and swims ashore, so he can die at home.

The submarine next stops at a refinery near San Diego, which has been pinpointed as the source of the mysterious Morse signals. A crew member discovers that the power source is still running on automatic control. Nearby, a telegraph key has become entangled in a window shade’s pull cord and a half-full bottle, and is being randomly pulled by an ocean breeze, causing the radio signals.

Sawfish returns to Australia to await the inevitable. Towers is reunited with Davidson at her father’s farm. He learns that all U.S. Navy personnel in Brisbane are dead and that he has been given command of all remaining American forces. Osborn, having bought the fastest Ferrari in Australia, wins the Australian Grand Prix, in which many racers, with nothing left to lose, die in fiery crashes. Fulfilling Towers’ wish, Davidson has leveraged her connections to open the trout season early. Towers and Davidson go fishing in the country. As drunken revelers sing “Waltzing Matilda” in the hotel bar, Towers and Davidson make love in their room.

Returning to Melbourne, Towers learns that the first of his crew members has radiation sickness. With little time left, Towers takes a vote among his crew, who decide that they want to return to the United States to die. Osborn shuts himself in a garage with his Ferrari and starts the engine in order to end his life by carbon monoxide poisoning. Others queue to receive government-issued suicide pills at hospitals or clinics. Religious faith is important to Mary, who asks God to forgive them for choosing suicide. Before they swallow their pills, Peter and Mary reminisce about the day when they met on the beach.

Towers says farewell to Davidson at the docks. Choosing duty over love, he takes the Sawfish back to sea. Heartbroken, Davidson watches from a cliff as the Sawfish submerges. Within a few days, the streets of Melbourne are empty and silent. A Salvation Army street banner over the bowed head of a war memorial figure[Note 1] reads: “There is still time .. Brother”.

Cast

Production

As in the novel, much of On the Beach takes place in Melbourne, close to the southernmost part of the Australian mainland. Principal photography took place from January 15 to March 27, 1959.[4] The film was shot in Berwick and Frankston. Some streets under construction at the time in Berwick were named after people involved in the film, such as Shute Avenue (Nevil Shute) and Kramer Drive (Stanley Kramer).[5][Note 2] The film was one of several foreign productions in Australia in the late 1950s.[6]

The beach scenes were filmed at Canadian Bay Beach in Mount Eliza.[7] The exterior of Peter and Mary’s house was a real house in Mount Eliza. The General Post Office was used as the Department of the Navy building. Scenes were also filmed at Queenscliff High Light,[8] the Shell Geelong Refinery, Melbourne Public Library,[9] Flinders Street Station and Queen Victoria Memorial Hospital. Because Melbourne lacked conventional film-studio facilities, the production leased the Melbourne Showgrounds from the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria. The pavilions and office buildings of the complex were converted to a studio. Sets for Julian’s garage, the interior of Peter and Mary’s house, the lighthouse and the Sawfish submarine interiors were constructed in the Government Pavilion.[10]

The Australian Grand Prix racing sequences were filmed at Riverside Raceway in California and at Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit. These scenes include an array of late-1950s sportscars, including examples of the Jaguar XK150 and Jaguar D-Type, Porsche 356, Mercedes-Benz 300 SL “Gullwing”, AC Ace, Chevrolet Corvette, Swallow Doretti[11] and the Chuck Porter Special, a customized Mercedes 300SL. The cars were driven by notable racers such as Ken Miles and Chuck Stevenson.[12]

The U.S. Department of Defense refused to cooperate in the production of the film and denied access to its nuclear-powered submarines. The British submarine HMS Andrew was used to portray the USS Sawfish.[13] Additional resources were supplied by the Royal Australian Navy, including the use of HMAS Melbourne.[14][15] The exteriors of the naval base were filmed at Williamstown Naval Dockyard.[7]

Ava Gardner’s wardrobe was created in Rome by the Fontana Sisters, three iconic Italian fashion designers who had previously dressed Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa and The Sun Also Rises.[16] Gardner is said to have described Melbourne as “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.”[17] However, the quotation was invented by journalist Neil Jillett of The Sydney Morning Herald. The quote entered Melbourne folklore very quickly.[18][15][19]

Frank Chacksfield‘s orchestral performance of the love theme from On the Beach was released as a single in 1960, reaching #47 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Nevil Shute, the author of the original novel, was displeased with the final cut, feeling that it contained too many changes at the expense of the story’s integrity. After initial collaboration with Stanley Kramer, Shute provided minimal assistance to the production.[20] He felt that the love affair between Towers and Moira ruined a central element of the novel, Towers’ fidelity to his dead American wife.[21] The film diverges from the novel in several key aspects. For example, the city of San Francisco is shown to be intact in the film but is destroyed in the book. Several characters differ greatly in their age and physical description, and the film creates some characters that do not appear in the book. At the end of the novel, the submarine is scuttled while Moira ingests suicide pills, but in the film, the submarine returns to the U.S. and Moira’s fate is not depicted.[22]

Release

On the Beach premiered in 18 theaters on all seven continents on December 17, 1959. The Hollywood premiere was attended by Astaire and Perkins, director Kramer and other celebrities, including Cary Grant. Gardner attended the Rome premiere, and premieres in New York, London, Tokyo, Stockholm and Melbourne were attended by local and foreign dignitaries.[23] The film also was screened in a theater at Little America in Antarctica. Although the film had no commercial release in the Soviet Union, a special premiere was held in Moscow, which Peck and his wife attended.[24]

Reception

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote: “In putting this fanciful but arresting story of Mr. Shute on the screen, Mr. Kramer and his assistants have most forcibly emphasized this point: life is a beautiful treasure and man should do all he can to save it from annihilation, while there is still time. To this end, he has accomplished some vivid and trenchant images that subtly fill the mind of the viewer with a strong appreciation of his theme. … The great merit of this picture, aside from its entertaining qualities, is the fact that it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving, after all.”[25]

Critic Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “You may argue all you like over ‘On the Beach’—and you will—but almost no one will deny that it is an important motion picture. It is also important AS a motion picture, a distinction by which I mean to call attention to the now-assured mastery, the brilliant economy of statement, with which director-producer Stanley Kramer has coordinated the filmic elements in his depiction of the end of the world.”[26]

The film recorded a loss of $700,000.[1]

Awards

Award Category Nominee(s) Result Ref.
Academy Awards Best Film Editing Frederic Knudtson Nominated [27]
Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture Ernest Gold Nominated
Blue Ribbon Awards Best Foreign Language Film Stanley Kramer Won
British Academy Film Awards Best Foreign Actress Ava Gardner Nominated [28]
United Nations Award Stanley Kramer Won
Golden Globe Awards Best Motion Picture – Drama Nominated [29]
Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture Fred Astaire Nominated
Best Director – Motion Picture Stanley Kramer Nominated
Best Original Score – Motion Picture Ernest Gold Won
Best Film Promoting International Understanding Nominated
Laurel Awards Top Drama 4th Place
National Board of Review Awards Top Ten Films 9th Place [30]
New York Film Critics Circle Awards Best Film Nominated [31]

Legacy

On the Beach was remade in 2000 as an Australian television film by Southern Star Productions, directed by Russell Mulcahy and starring Armand Assante, Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward.[32] The remake was also based on the 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, but updates the setting of the story to the future year of 2005. It also shifts the cause of nuclear war from the Middle East conflict to a confrontation between the United States and China. The updated narrative also places the crew on the fictional Los Angeles–class USS Charleston (SSN-704) submarine[33] and changes Towers’ final actions.

The 2013 documentary Fallout by Melbourne filmmaker Lawrence Johnston explores Shute’s life and Kramer’s production and direction of On the Beach, with interviews of Shute’s daughter, Kramer’s wife Karen and Donna Anderson, one of the film’s surviving cast members.[34][35]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ ”The Driver”, a recast statue by Charles Sargeant Jagger then displayed in the forecourt of the State Library of Victoria.
  2. ^ An additional scene was shot in the Melbourne nightclub Ciro’s. Among the audience in the scene were several popular Melbourne television personalities, most notably Graham Kennedy. The scene was not used in the finished film.

Citations

  1. ^ a b c Balio 1987 p. 144.
  2. ^ Mitchell 2001, pp. 177–183.
  3. ^ Weaver 2011, pp. 62–71.
  4. ^ “Original print information: On the Beach (1959).” Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved: January 1, 2015.
  5. ^ “Melbourne: Melway street map”. Archived 2013-04-22 at the Wayback Machine Melway, 1969. Retrieved: January 1, 2015.
  6. ^ Vagg, Stephen (January 5, 2024). “Wrecking Australian stories: The Siege of Pinchgut”. Filmink. Retrieved January 5, 2024.
  7. ^ a b “Cultural Atlas of Australia”. www.australian-cultural-atlas.info.
  8. ^ Aiton, Doug (November 28, 2014). “My Place: The Narrows, Queenscliff”. The Age.
  9. ^ Radic, Leonard (January 9, 2019). “Flashback 1959: When Hollywood came to Melbourne”. The Sydney Morning Herald.
  10. ^ “On the Beach”. www.melbourneroyal.com.au.
  11. ^ “Rare Swallow Doretti car found in a Devon barn”. BBC News. January 31, 2014. Retrieved July 9, 2022.
  12. ^ “On the Beach, Movie, 1959.” Internet Movie Cars Database, May 26, 2010. Retrieved: January 1, 2015.
  13. ^ RN Subs – HMS Andrew (P423): http://rnsubs.co.uk/boats/subs/amphion-class/andrew.html
  14. ^ Lind 1986, p. 237.
  15. ^ a b Gillett 1980, p. 29.
  16. ^ “We The Italians | Italian lifestyle and fashion: Sorelle Fontana. The trio of sisters who dressed Rome’s Dolce Vita glitterati and ignited Italy’s postwar fashion industry”. www.wetheitalians.com.
  17. ^ Thompson, Nathaniel. “Articles: On the Beach (1959).” Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved: January 1, 2015.
  18. ^ “Review” (lift-out magazine). The Weekend Australian, December 18–19, 1999.
  19. ^ Quinn, Karl (April 22, 2017). “The Leftovers puts Melbourne on the map, just in time for the end of the world”. Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved November 7, 2021.
  20. ^ Mitchell 2001, p. 181.
  21. ^ Dawson-Taylor, David. “On the Beach.” Nevilshute.org. Retrieved: January 1, 2015.
  22. ^ Lindsey, D. ““Book vs. Film: On the Beach.” themotionpictures.net, August 7, 2013.
  23. ^ Fishgall 2002, p. 208.
  24. ^ Fishgall 2002, p. 211.
  25. ^ Crowther, Bosley (December 18, 1959). “Screen: ‘On the Beach’“. The New York Times. p. 34.
  26. ^ Scheuer, Philip K. (November 29, 1959). “‘On the Beach’ Grim Lesson for an Atom-Rattling World”. Los Angeles Times. p. 1, Part V.
  27. ^ “The 32nd Academy Awards (1960) Nominees and Winners”. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
  28. ^ “BAFTA Awards: Film in 1960”. British Academy Film Awards. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
  29. ^ “On the Beach”. Golden Globe Awards. Retrieved August 20, 2023.
  30. ^ “1959 Award Winners”. National Board of Review. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  31. ^ “1959 New York Film Critics Circle Awards”. New York Film Critics Circle. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
  32. ^ Turegano, Preston. “Beach’s passion doesn’t run deep, as radioactive love boat founders”[dead link]. The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 28, 2000, p. TV3.
  33. ^ Kronke, David. “‘Beach’: It’s the end of the world as we know it”. Los Angeles Daily News, May 28, 2000. Retrieved: January 11, 2015.
  34. ^ Luke Buckmaster, Fallout movie review: science to art and back again Archived 2015-11-07 at the Wayback Machine Crikey, July 28, 2013. Retrieved August 17, 2015.
  35. ^ Philippa Hawker, Fallout endures from ’50s classic Sydney Morning Herald, October 31, 2013. Retrieved August 17, 2015.

Bibliography

  • Balio, Tino. United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-29911-440-4.
  • Fishgall, Gary. Gregory Peck: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 2002. ISBN 978-1-45169-849-7.
  • Gillett, Ross. HMAS Melbourne: 25 Years. Sydney, NSW: Nautical Press, 1980. ISBN 0-949756-00-8.
  • Lind, Lew. The Royal Australian Navy: Historic Naval Events Year by Year (2nd ed.). Frenchs Forest, NSW: Reed Books 1986, First edition 1982. ISBN 0-7301-0071-5.
  • Mitchell, Charles P. “On the Beach (1959).” A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-31331-527-5.
  • Shute, Nevil. On The Beach. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1957.
  • Warren, Bill. Keep Watching The Skies, American Science Fiction Movies of the 1950s, Vol II: 1958 – 1962. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 1982. ISBN 0-89950-032-3.
  • Weaver, Roslyn. “Nevil Schute: On the Beach (1957).” Apocalypse in Australian Fiction and Film: A Critical Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7864-6051-9.