Everything about On The Beach 1959 Film totally explained
On the Beach is a
1959 post-apocalyptic drama film 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.
Plot summary
The story is set in 1964, what was then the near future (1963 in the book) 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, 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 (Peck), leads the operation, leaving behind a woman of recent acquaintance, the alcoholic Moira Davidson (Gardner), 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're dead and continues to behave as though they're still alive, buying them gifts and writing them letters.
The Australian government makes arrangements to provide its citizens with free
suicide pills and injections, so that that'll be able to avoid prolonged suffering from
radiation sickness once it arrives. One of the film's poignant dilemmas is that of Australian naval officer Peter Holmes (Perkins), who has a baby daughter and a naive and childish wife, Mary (Donna Anderson), who is in denial about the impending disaster. Because he's been assigned to travel north with the Americans to search for signs of life, Peter must try to explain to Mary how to euthanize their baby and kill herself with the (unspecified) poison should he be unable to return in time. Mary, however, reacts badly, almost violently, at the prospect of killing her daughter and herself.
By one theory postulated by an Australian scientist, the radiation near the
Arctic Ocean could be less than that at mid northern hemisphere latitudes, and if so this would indicate the possible survival of southern hemisphere populations. One of the goals of the expedition is to determine the Arctic radiation level.
After sailing to
Point Barrow in the
Arctic Ocean, the expedition members determine that radiation levels are intensifying. On the way back, they stop at
San Francisco. The views through the periscope indicate what they've seen elsewhere; there are no signs of life, and minimal or no damage. One crewmember, who is from San Francisco, jumps ship to spend his last hours in his hometown. He is last seen in a motorboat, fishing and awaiting his death.
The
Sawfish then travels to an abandoned oil refinery in
San Diego (in the book, it's a naval base located near
Seattle), where they discover that, although the city's residents have long since perished from radiation poisoning, the hydroelectric power is still on-line. The ship's communications officer is sent ashore in a radiation suit to investigate. 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. Bitterly disappointed, the submariners return to Australia to live out the little time that remains before the radioactive air arrives and kills everyone.
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. The deadly radiation has arrived. Some citizens seek spiritual guidance from religious leaders from the
Salvation Army. They hang a banner from
City Hall that states, "There Is Still Time .. Brother". Others line up outside hospitals to receive their suicide pills. Later, Mary Holmes gets ill and she and Peter share a tender moment together before Mary decides that she's been "foolish and impractical" and asks her husband to "take care" of her and their daughter. Dwight wants to stay with Moira, but his remaining crew wants to head for home. In the end, Captain Towers chooses not to remain with Moira but rather to lead his crew in a final attempt to make it back to the States.
Unlike the novel, no blame is placed on who started the war -- it's hinted that it may have been an accident.
Like the novel, much of the film takes place in
Melbourne, close to the southernmost part of the Australian mainland. Nevil Shute is said to have despised the film (which was released little more than a month before he died), feeling that his characters had been altered too greatly, especially the scene where Moira and Dwight sleep together. However, the film shot in and around Melbourne was a great novelty for that city at the time.
The racing sequences were filmed at
Riverside Raceway in California. These scenes include an impressive array of late 1950s sports cars, including examples of the
Jaguar XK150 and
Jaguar D-type,
Porsche 356,
Mercedes-Benz 300 SL "Gullwing",
AC Ace, and
Chevrolet Corvette.
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. It would also be unlikely that a major strategic center such as San Francisco wouldn't have been hit by an enemy bomb, with both San Francisco and the naval installation near San Diego left physically unscathed. In the novel, San Francisco was found to be heavily damaged and San Diego wasn't mentioned at all.
Differences between the novel and film
Nevil Shute was displeased with the final version of the film, feeling that too many changes had been made at the expense of the story's integrity. Gregory Peck agreed with him, but in the end, producer/director
Stanley Kramer's ideas won out.
The novel describes Moira Davidson as a slender, petite pale blond in her mid-twenties. In the film, she's portrayed by the tall, curvaceous, brunette 37-year old Ava Gardner.
A naval base in Seattle is the location in the novel where the strange Morse signals are detected. The film uses an oil refinery in San Diego as its location.
San Francisco is shown as undamaged in the film, while in the novel it has been largely destroyed with the Golden Gate Bridge having fallen.
The northernmost point of the submarine's journey in the novel is the Gulf of Alaska, while the film uses Point Barrow. In reality, ice cover would have made it impossible for the submarine to have surfaced off Point Barrow.
The nuclear scientist in the book is named John Osborne, a thirty-something bachelor. In the movie, he's portrayed by 60-year old Fred Astaire, and is renamed Julian. Moira and Julian (John) are cousins in the novel, but formerly romantically linked in the film.
Admiral Bridie and his secretary, Lieutenant Osgood, are in the film, but not in the novel.
Moira and Dwight never sleep together in the novel; Dwight remains faithful to the memory of his wife and Moira, though disappointed at first, comes to respect his stance. Film director Stanley Kramer believed that audiences wouldn't believe that Dwight, as played by Peck, could resist the charms of sex symbol Gardner, so a love scene was inserted.
The novel ends with a dying Moira sitting in her car, taking her suicide pills, while watching Scorpion head out to sea to be scuttled. Unlike the book, no mention of scuttling the sub is made in the film; instead Captain Towers' crew requested that he try take them back to the United States, where they can die on home soil. In the film, Ava Gardner is seen merely watching Dwight's submarine disappear, and not committing suicide.
Academy Awards
The film score played heavily on the motif of "Waltzing Matilda".
Ava Gardner's supposed Melbourne remark
It has often been claimed that Ava Gardner described Melbourne as 'the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world'. However, the purported quote was actually invented by journalist Neil Jillett, who was writing for the Sydney Morning Herald at the time. His original draft of a tongue-in-cheek piece about the making of the film said that he hadn't been able to confirm a third-party report that Ava Gardner had made this remark. The newspaper's sub-editor changed it to read as a direct quotation from Gardner, and it was published in that form. It entered Melbourne folklore very quickly.
Miscellany
The U.S. Department of Defense as well as the United States Navy refused to cooperate in the production of this film, not allowing access to their nuclear-powered submarine. The film production crew was forced to use a non-nuclear, diesel-electric Royal Navy submarine, HMS Andrew.
The film premiered simultaneously in several major cities around the world, including Moscow.
The movie was shot in part in Berwick, then a suburb outside of Melbourne, Australia and part in Frankston, also a Melbourne suburb. The well-known scene where Peck meets Gardner, who arrives from Melbourne by rail, was filmed on platform #1 of Frankston railway station, now demolished, and a subsequent scene where Peck and Gardner are transported off by horse and buggy, was filmed in Young Street, Frankston.
Some streets which were being built at the time in Berwick were named after people involved in the film, as shown in Melway Edition #1 (1996), (External Link
). Some examples are: Shute Avenue (Nevil Shute) and Kramer Drive (Stanley Kramer).
The Davidson farm is now a large housing estate, a part of the outer South Eastern suburb of Narre Warren North. However the electricity pylons on the hill visible in the film are still there, although there are 4 lines instead of one. The hill hasn't been built upon.
Among the uncredited bit players was Graham Kennedy.Further Information
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