On the Beach: The last place on Earth

"There isn't time. No time to love. Nothing to remember. Nothing worth remembering."

Mark Twain once said that when the end of the world comes, he would like to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times. As a longtime central Ohioan, I appreciate the joke.¹ Its corollary must be: If nuclear war occurs, it would be better to be in Australia.

That is the premise underlying the 1959 film On the Beach, in which Australia is the last place on earth where radioactive fallout hasn’t yet reached. At heart, it’s a movie about awaiting death and appreciating the last few moments of human existence.

This was fairly shocking stuff for the late 50s, when the folly of “winning” a nuclear exchange was still a government talking point and “duck and cover” every kid’s mantra. As you might expect, it’s a melancholy, even lugubrious, movie with rather jarring shifts in tone.

The first scene features American nuclear submarine commander Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) pulling into port in Melbourne, his ship having been below for months. The year is 1964, and Towers has seen the world ravaged by nuclear fire, has lost his family, but remains on duty and largely in denial over what has happened. He is assigned an Australian liaison officer (played by Anthony Perkins in a pre-Psycho role), who has a wife and young daughter.

What Towers discovers in Melbourne is a society that has kept its head, one that seems determined to still wake up, go to work, attend social gatherings and press on until the fallout arrives. The first hour of the film feels like something out of a John Cheever story with suburbanites getting loaded at cocktail parties and the stirrings of a romance between Peck’s character and an astringent alcoholic played by Ava Gardner. (“You have to buy me a couple of drinks to get me started,” she tells Peck.²) The end of all life on Earth is largely a forbidden subject even though it lies only months away.

Still, it doesn’t take long for eulogies for the human race to start flowing, particularly from nuclear scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire), who worked on the Manhattan Project and serves as a stand-in for Robert Oppenheimer. “The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide,” Astaire tells his fellow partygoers. Yes, thanks, I will have another drink.

The damning thing, noted by several characters, is that everyone had seen this coming. The arms race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could only end one way, it seemed, with countries such as Australia caught in the wake. Mankind walked itself to the edge of oblivion, but even then, as Astaire notes, it had a choice. It chose poorly.

“It’s unfair,” Gardner’s Moira Davidson tells Towers. “It's unfair because I didn't do anything. And nobody I know did anything.” Did I feel the same way as a suburban teenager in Ohio in the 1980s? I did.

The movie drags a bit to the point that when Towers’s sub heads back out to sea, it comes as a relief. He’s assigned to sail to Alaska to take radiation samples to see if the world might be salvageable. Then there is a matter of a mysterious signal emanating from San Diego, where there are supposed to be no people left.

I won’t spoil the rest, but as the radiation draws near to Australia, things take an expectedly grim turn. The government begins to distribute poison capsules to the populace so that those who chose to end their lives before radiation sickness sets in can do so. Perkins’ Australian officer worries that his wife won’t be able to give the pills to his daughter while he’s away at sea.

On the Beach, directed by Stanley Kramer³, doesn’t carry the same cultural cachet as some of the other antiwar films of the day, such as Fail-Safe or Seven Days in May, but it may have been more shocking. In a sense, it was the The Day After of its time, a film that gave viewers a sober view of what could lie head in the near future if one side or the other simply pressed a button. The images at the end likely rocked more than a few movie-goers in 1959.

As you might imagine, the film’s message was controversial. The U.S. Defense Department refused to cooperate with the filmmakers, leaving them to rely on Australia for assistance. It’s why Peck’s involvement was so critical. He was at the peak of his career—a few years away from playing Atticus Finch. As the stolid American commander, Peck had instant credibility with audiences. That meant the portrayal of a world on the brink of extinction carried that much more resonance. And when he finally breaks down and confesses to having what we would now call PTSD, it’s a show-stopper.

Central to the film’s final act is a road race in which competitor after competitor ends up in a fiery crash. It seems ancillary to the story, but it isn’t. The drivers are choosing to die on their terms without pills or radiation sickness. Each character in the drama must decide how to greet an inescapable fate in their own way.

Keeping calm and carrying on in the face of catastrophe is, of course, a point of Anglo-British pride. But I have my doubts society would accept its fate so dutifully as the Australians do in On the Beach. The approach of the end of the world more likely would yield riots, panic and violence. Order would break down, as in the film we covered last year, Greenland. But in the end, as the movie’s final images make clear, how you choose endure the end really doesn’t matter. Everyone ends up in the same place.

WHERE CAN I DIND IT? On the Beach is not streaming on the major platforms although you may find it on YouTube. This is yet another example of a once-important film that may end up being forgotten because new generations won’t be able to find it. The DVD can be purchased for cheap. Remember: physical media is your friend. Once you own something, a corporation can’t come and snatch it away like they can with digital licenses.

ARMAGEDDON INDEX: (10/10):

PARTY GUEST: They pushed us too far! They didn’t think we’d fight no matter what they did!

OSBORN: And they were wrong. We fought. We expunged them. And we didn’t do such a bad job on ourselves.

DUST CLOUDS: When the U.S. and Australia signed the ANZUS treaty in 1951, it bound the two nations into a mutual defense pact and allowed for an American military presence in the country. That meant that the Australians were now a potential target in a global thermonuclear war. On the Beach played into the residents’ deepest fears: that despite their relative geographic isolation, the country could still fall victim to war between the two superpowers.

Tensions increased when Australia aided the U.S. during the Vietnam War, which brought the Cold War to close to home in Southeast Asia. During the early 1980s, with Reagan in the White House, those anxieties manifested themselves in a series of peaceful protests termed the Palm Sunday rallies that called for nuclear disarmament and a reconsideration of the alliance with America. Interestingly — and perhaps not coincidentally — this was when the original Mad Max movies were released.

TOP OF THE POPS: The number-one song in the U.S. when On the Beach was released was “Heartaches by the Number” by Guy Mitchell.

WHAT ELSE IM WATCHING: TV: MobLand (S1, Paramount), The Studio (S1, Apple); MOVIES: After Life (Kore-eda 1998), The Left-Handed Gun (Penn, 1957)

CLASSIC CORNER: in keeping with the theme of cherishing life’s moments, I watched the 1998 Japanese film After Life earlier this month. This modest setting of this film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda masks its metaphysical heart. A small facility in the countryside serves as a way station for the recently departed. The arrivals are told to select a single memory from the lives. The staff then recreates that memory as a short film—complete with actors and props—that the departed will carry with them forward into the afterlife. The story allows for extended rumination about what makes a life matter. I can’t recommend the movie enough. You might be surprised at the emotional punch it packs.

LAST ENTRY: The Road Warrior (1982)

NEXT ENTRY: I am “on the beach” in Greece and so we’ll have a brief hiatus. But when I return to the States, we’ll wrestle with Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991).

1. This was mainly for my friend and loyal reader, Amanda Becker, a proud Cincinnatian.

2. Gardner played variations of this role in both Fail-Safe and Night of the Iguana (1964), but to her credit, she was good at it.

3. Kramer was known for his “message pictures,” including Inherit the Wind (1960), about the Scopes “Monkey Trial” and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), about interracial romance.