On The Beach (1959) – Film Review

Director: Stanley Kramer
Cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardener, Fred Astaire
Certificate: PG

By Sarah Morgan

What do Stanley Kramer’s post-apocalyptic drama and Howden in East Yorkshire have in common?

Nevil Shute, of course. The Ealing-born author spent several years living in the town (and wrote rather disparagingly of its womenfolk in his autobiography) while working for Barnes Wallis, of The Dam Busters fame, on the R100 airship. When Wallis left the project, Shute, under his birth name of Nevil Shute Norway, became its chief engineer before the whole thing was disbanded in 1930.

He was already an accomplished writer by this point, but it wasn’t until 1957, seven years after emigrating to Australia with his wife and children, that Shute wrote On the Beach, which many regard to be his masterpiece.

“Limited time to live”

It wasn’t long after publication that director Kramer set about turning it into a movie featuring an all-star cast that includes Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins, and the result is something rather extraordinary.

Set in 1964, it focuses on a group of people who come together Down Under knowing they have only a limited time to live. Most of the world’s inhabitants have been killed by the radioactive fallout from a nuclear war, and it’s slowly moving towards them. Once it arrives, they will also succumb to its poison.

Peck plays Commander Towers, whose US submarine arrives in Melbourne. He and his crew are placed under the rule of the Australian Navy, and on disembarking find friendship with the understandably melancholy locals, in particular lonely alcoholic Moira (Gardner), who falls for Towers, nuclear scientist Julian Osborn (Astaire), who feels guilt for the part he played in developing the bombs that are destroying the world, and Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), a young officer with a wife and baby daughter.

Towers, although attracted to Moira, can’t bring himself to act on his feelings because he finds it impossible to come to the terms with the fact that his wife and children back home in the States are dead.

Eventually, he and his crew head off on an expedition to assess the speed at which the fallout may be dissipating and to investigate a mysterious signal coming from a base in San Diego. On their return to Melbourne, they and their Australian friends face whatever the future may hold.

“Heartbreaking”

There’s no doubt that On the Beach is one of the most downbeat films I’ve ever seen, but thanks to the uniformly excellent performances of its cast, it’s utterly compelling and forces viewers to consider what they would do if they were in the same situation.

Donna Anderson, who makes her film debut here as Perkins’s distraught wife Mary, deserves a special mention – she is heartbreaking throughout, particularly as her concern for her child begins to impact devastatingly on her already fragile mental health.

As for Gardner, she too had a connection to Howden, bizarrely enough. A local character, now long gone, whose family had links to the local aeronautics industry, used to tell a story that he once walked down the stairs at his family home to find her sitting in the hallway, around the time she would have been married to Frank Sinatra; he never knew what she was doing there, but she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

So, as I sit in my own house in the town writing this, I raise a glass to both Shute and Gardner – and hope I never have to deal with the kind of terror and heartbreak his characters have to face.

Sarah Morgan( Writer )

Sarah Morgan studied film journalism at post-graduate level with the BFI and has been writing about TV and film for PA Media’s newspaper, magazine and new media customers since 1996. She’s also written for a wide range of other publications, both online and in print, including the book Offbeat and Intermission magazine, and is a regular contributor to the Talking Pictures TV podcast. When she isn’t watching movies, she’s collecting and reading vintage crime and horror paperback books or, for her sins, watching her beloved Sheffield Wednesday.

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