‘On The Beach’ or — It Only Feels Like the End of the World?
I was a bit trepidatious settling down to watch Stanley Kramer’s ‘On the Beach’ (1959) last night as I’d found the last Kramer film I watched, ‘’Judgement at Nuremberg’ (1961), to be both exceedingly dull and rather daft. Still, this was apparently about the end of the world so it would have to take real talent and skill to make THAT boring, right? Well…
East and West have annihilated each other in a nuclear exchange. The reason why isn’t given. Only Australia remains inhabitable but with the radioactive fallout fast approaching that won’t be for much longer. The submarine, USS Sawfish, is the last functioning sea-going vessel and vestige of a now destroyed United States. Stationed in Australia the Sawfish makes reconnaissance missions to monitor the ever approaching lethal radiation levels that will soon cover the entire globe. Yet when an indecipherable Morse code signal is detected emanating from San Francisco the Sawfish sets sail in the vain hope that, just maybe, there’s hope for survival and a possible future for the human race.
Pretty weighty stuff what with the whole end of the world and impending annihilation of humanity stuff going on, eh? And you could accurately describe ‘On the Beach’ with the words “worthy”, “heart-felt”, “well made”, “professional”, “resonant” and “powerful”. Unfortunately you could also use “tedious”, “dull”, “unexciting”, “inadvertently hilarious”, “daft”, “lumbering”, “ponderous” and “mind-numbling annoying” with equal accuracy. The characters in the movie might be struggling to find a reason to carry on living in the face of impending doom but they should try sitting through ‘On the Beach’ instead rather than starring in it if they really want to experience a reason to give up on life.
The big problem, for me, was, apart from the almost suicide-inducing pacing, the simple fact that ‘On the Beach’ is too long. It’s well over two hours but imagine if this had been a tight, little B-movie at 85 minutes?! You could easily chop 45 minutes out of this and not only lose nothing but actually improve it all. A good example is an initially nice joke regarding how the local wine club should have had the foresight to see this nuclear Armageddon coming. It’s a funny gag although Kramer then unnecessarily repeats only a few moments later, not only with diminishing effect but somehow retroactively making the original delivery of it annoying in the process, too. In short, it all feels incredibly laboured and we can feel accusations of “ramming the point home” rising up.
Not that there’s nothing to appreciate here as this is, still, a very well made film. There’s an almost Antonioni-esque sense of isolation to the abandoned industrial cityscapes and even though the movie is light on action, excitement or rapt engagement of any kind whatsoever Kramer handles the emotional and psychological exchanges and interactions with incredible skill and maturity. The scene where Gregory Peck emotionally “breaks” at the station is nicely built up to and executed as we realise that these are people struggling to articulate the most terrifying and tragic emotions and feelings to each other, and it is in the power in these heart-felt exchanges, many left unsaid, where ‘On the Beach’ is most effective.
Kramer also pulls off some nice cinematic touches, whether it’s tilting everything off the horizontal axis to emphasise psychological distress and unbalance or outlining Peck and Gardener’s faces with dazzlingly beautiful, yet deadly, reflected solar radiation. There’s also a pretty exciting (finally!) scene where Fred Astaire races in a deadly, end of the world Australian Grand Prix in a Ferrari that was completely unexpected yet also happily welcomed in its explosion of joyous nihilism.
‘On the Beach’ is far from a bad film being too well crafted and tackling such important issues to be fully the case, yet with its glacial pacing and somewhat repetitive submarine missions it frequently feels like a particularly boring episode of TV’s ‘Stingray’.
The movie, ultimately, asks a very important question — what are you going to do with your limited time on this planet? To which my only reply whilst watching it was — “Anything other than watching this!” Although it has given me an idea for a post-apocalyptic movie of my own where, after a nuclear exchange, a man emerges from the rubble to discover the only pieces of culture left intact and viewable after the conflict are Stanley Kramer films. The camera fades to black as we hear his howls of horror at being left in such a living, and tedious, nightmare.
