On the Beach | | Cast : | Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire | | Director : | Stanley Kramer | | Studio : | Mgm/Ua Studios | | Format : | Black & White, Closed-captioned | | Released Date : | December 17, 1959 | | DVD Released Date : | March 23, 2000 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), French (Dubbed), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed) | | Audience Rating : | NR (Not Rated) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | June 04, 2005 | | Summary | Peck bombs | Content
 | After having recently read a bio of Gregory Peck, I was curious enough about those of his films that I haven't yet seen to watch ON THE BEACH. Mind you, I'm a big GP fan, and visited Rome based almost solely on ROMAN HOLIDAY. Well, that's another story. Let's just say the experience was a far departure from stumbling across Audrey Hepburn.
Here, Peck plays Cmdr. Dwight Towers, USN, captain of the sub USS Sawfish, left to its own devices in the mid-Pacific after a nuclear exchange between superpowers makes toast out of the Northern Hemisphere. Towers takes his boat to Australia, otherwise untouched by the Armageddon, though the radioactive cloud that now covers North America, Europe, and Asia is expected to descend upon the Aussies in five months time. In the meantime, Dwight falls for local lush Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), but not without a repressed angst over his wife and kids left behind in the States, all of whom are now nothing more than glowing skeletons. Between frolics on the beach with Moira, Towers carries out one more mission with the Sawfish at the behest of the Royal Australian Navy - to make a quick dash up to Alaska to monitor the radiation level, and circle by California on the way back to investigate mysterious radio signals emanating from San Diego, the cause of which is perhaps the film's cleverest construct.
The film's antiwar message, which presumably appealed to Peck's liberal political leanings, caused the U.S. Navy to deny the use of one of its submarines for the filming. (The RAN loaned one of theirs.) In any case, Towers, while steadfast, square-jawed, and handsome in his uniform as only Gregory Peck can be, is remarkably unemotional throughout. No impassioned speeches to his crew about duty, honor, and country. Moreover, in the original novel by Nevil Shute, the romantic attraction between Dwight and Moira is unconsummated because of the deference the former feels for his dead wife, an element of the story that Peck wanted to retain in the screenplay. But Director Stanley Kramer insisted on a juicier ending to the affair to raise audience morale in the face of an unrelentingly somber theme, and Peck caved, though his subsequent ardor seems of the detached sort.
At 2 hours and fourteen minutes, ON THE BEACH is in need of some serious editing, particularly the extended and incongruous sequence where atomic scientist Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire) realizes a lifelong dream by racing an old Ferrari in the last Australian Grand Prix before the killer cloud arrives. (Perhaps that's why editor Frederic Knudtson, nominated for an Oscar, lost.) Then there's the improbable casting of Anthony Perkins as Peter Holmes, the RAN officer with family concerns temporarily assigned to the Sawfish for no other apparent reason than the scriptwriter had to put him somewhere.
Though ON THE BEACH was the eighth-highest-grossing film of 1960 earning $6.2 million on initial release, it seemed to me an ineffective anti-nuclear and anti-war vehicle. Only the film's beginning scenes of a bustling Melbourne compared to the ending shots of a deserted city were in any way thought provoking. An infinitely better anti-war picture - and one which doesn't veer off into extraneous subplots - was 1983's TESTAMENT, in which Carol Wetherly (Jane Alexander) is left to cope in suburbia with her three kids after a Soviet nuke vaporizes her husband and San Francisco to the west, but leaves Carol's community directly unaffected by the blast. Things are OK until the fallout arrives. In one incredibly heart-breaking scene, Wetherly, while standing in front of the funeral pyre consuming the town's dead residents and one of her children, screams for God's damnation of those that have visited this catastrophe on her world. There's more passion in this one sequence than in the entirety of ON THE BEACH. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 10, 2005 | | Summary | Is this the way the world ends? | Content
| 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 | | | Date | December 19, 2004 | | Summary | Beached | Content
| 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.
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| Rating | | | Date | November 16, 2004 | | Summary | A believable doomsday; yet still a bit drippy | Content
| 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 | | | Date | August 26, 2004 | | Summary | A Touching Sledgehammer | Content
| 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!" |
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