On the Beach (1959 film)

On the Beach is a 1959 movie based on Nevil Shute's novel of the same name featuring Gregory Peck (USS Sawfish captain Dwight Lionel Towers), Ava Gardner (Moira Davidson), Fred Astaire (scientist Julian – John in the novel – Osborne) and Anthony Perkins (Australian naval officer Peter Holmes). It was directed by Stanley Kramer, who won the 1960 BAFTA for best director. Ernest Gold won the 1960 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Score.

In 2000 the film was remade for TV with the title On the Beach. It starred Armand Assante and Rachel Ward and was directed by Russell Mulcahy.

The story is set in what was then the near future (1963 in the book, 1964 in the first movie, and 2007 in the television production) in the months following World War III. The conflict has devastated the northern hemisphere, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and killing all life. While the nuclear bombs were confined to the northern hemisphere, global air currents are slowly carrying the fallout to the southern hemisphere. The only part of the planet still habitable is the far south of the globe, specifically Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, and the southern parts of South America.

From Australia, survivors detect a mysterious and incomprehensible Morse code radio signal originating from the United States. With hope that some life has remained in the contaminated regions, one of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Sawfish (USS Scorpion in the book), placed by its captain under Australian naval command, is ordered to sail north from its port of refuge in Melbourne (Australia's southernmost major mainland city) to try to contact whoever is sending the signal. The American captain, Dwight Towers, leads the operation, leaving behind a woman of recent acquaintance, the alcoholic Moira Davidson, to whom he's become attached, despite his feelings of guilt regarding the certain deaths of his wife and children in the U.S. He refuses to admit that they are dead and continues to behave as though they are still alive, buying them gifts and writing them letters. In the novel, he remains faithful to his wife, while in the film, he has an affair with Moira.

The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free cyanide pills and injections, so that they will be able to avoid prolonged suffering from radiation sickness. One of the novel's poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes, who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary, who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he has been assigned to travel north with the Americans, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the cyanide should he be unable to return in time.

After sailing to Point Barrow in the Arctic Ocean, the expedition members determine that radiation levels are intensifying. They then travel to an abandoned naval installation in San Diego (in the book, it is located near Seattle), where they discover that, although the city's residents have long since perished in the fallout, some of the region's hydroelectric power is still on-line, owing to the primitive automation technology available at that time. The mysterious signal is the result of a Coca-cola bottle being nudged by a window shade teetering in the breeze and occasionally hitting a telegraph key. (In the second film, the explanation is intermittent sunlight on a solar-powered laptop.) Bitterly disappointed, (most of) the submariners return to Australia to live out the little time that remains before the radioactive air arrives and kills everyone. One crewmember, who is from one of the coastal areas the expedition visits, jumps ship to spend his last hours in his hometown.

The characters make their best efforts to "enjoy" what time and pleasures remain to them before dying from radiation poisoning. Scientist Julian Osborne (John Osborne in the novel)and others organize a dangerous motor race that results in the violent deaths of several participants. Moira and Dwight share a brief romantic interlude on a fishing trip. When they return, Towers finds out one of his crew members has developed radiation sickness. Some citizens seek spiritual guidance from religious leaders. Others line up outside hospitals to receive their cyanide pills. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew on a final mission to scuttle their submarine beyond the twelve-mile (22 km) limit, so that she will not rattle about, unsecured, in a foreign port – even though the impending demise of everyone renders such an action pointless.

In the book (though this is not mentioned in the original film), the war is said to have involved the bombing of the United Kingdom and the United States by Egypt. The aircraft used were obtained from the USSR and so the attack was mistakenly thought to have been led by the Soviets, leading to a retaliation on the USSR by the NATO powers. The book also hints at a strike by the People's Republic of China against the USSR, aiming at occupying Soviet industrial areas near the Chinese border; this strike leads to a Russian retaliatory strike. This may have been a reference to the then-contemporary Suez crisis. In the later television movie, the Third World War is sparked by the People's Republic of China launching an all-out invasion of Taiwan that brings the United States to Taiwan's defense. After the U.S. deploys its forces to attack the Chinese with conventional weaponry, the Chinese launch an all-out nuclear missile attack on North America, which results in the United States launching a nuclear strike against mainland China.

Much of the novel's action takes place in Melbourne, close to the southernmost part of the Australian mainland. Shute is said to have despised the first movie version (which was released little more than a month before he died), feeling that his characters had been altered too greatly. However, the film shot in and around Melbourne (with some of the racing action shot at Riverside Raceway) was a great novelty for that city at the time. It was claimed that Ava Gardner described Melbourne as 'the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world'; the purported quote was actually invented by journalist Neil Jillett.

It should be noted that the uniform southward drift of the nuclear fallout as portrayed in the story is scientifically implausible. Global fallout levels would have been unlikely to be so high as to be so uniformly and promptly lethal, nor would fallout be likely to drift southwards so gradually and uniformly. In the book, Shute attributes this lethality to cobalt-salted bombs, but this detail is omitted from the film.

The film score played heavily on the motif of "Waltzing Matilda".