We're all grieving death, whether it's past, present, or future. Our entire existence is centered around outrunning our own mortality. As a culture, we're obsessed with legacy, with leaving something behind to be remembered by. But I think, in the end, each and every one of us knows in the back of our minds that we'll one day be forgotten. Stanley Kramer's On the Beach is a story about waiting for the end.
The year is 1964, just around the corner from the film's 1959 release. Nuclear war has already rendered the northern hemisphere inhospitable; who started it is not important anymore. The survivors in the global south, including Australia, are living on borrowed time, as the radiation will eventually envelop the globe in a quiet cloud of death. Melbourne, Australia is now the capitol of the world — what's left of it, anyway. People try to live their lives like it's normal: they shop, they swim, they watch car racing, they argue. But they know: the end is near, and soon all their little problems will be solved forever.
Oh, there's a glimmer of hope: a theory that the radiation might have dissipated faster than previously thought, and a strange, incomprehensible Morse code signal is coming from somewhere in North America. The last surviving American submarine, now under command of the Royal Australian Navy, is dispatched to the northern hemisphere. But their readings disprove the dissipation theory, and the Morse code signal is just an errant windowshade, caught on a telegraph key and blowing in the wind. Hope is dead, and Melbourne is next.
While in later years, the exact science of the situation is proven to be somewhat different than the assumptions that Nevil Shute, author of the book the film is based on, was making, it's not really the point. What matters here is the human drama, brought to us by such cinema luminaries as Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Ava Gardener, and a pre-Psycho Anthony Perkins, doing his best to fake an Australian accent. Stanley Kramer's cinematography is simple, straightforward, but no-nonsense, almost documentarian, like watching a newsreel from the frontline of human extinction.
On the Beach isn't the first feature film to depict a world after nuclear war — there were several throughout the 1950s, from Five to Day the World Ended; but On the Beach is by far one of the bleakest of the decade, a grimly fatalist screenplay about the inevitability of death and the desire to go out on one's own terms. A romance subplot serves the rare distinction of being both valuable to the story and also ending on a down note, as the American submarine captain rejoins his men to sail north in an attempt to die closer to home. The government hands out suicide kits as clergy do their best to keep their congregants calm. In the end, the streets are empty, a massive banner fluttering in the wind that reads, "THERE IS STILL TIME... BROTHER!"
But the clock is ticking for all of us.
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