At some moment during the course of On the Beach, the movie adaptation by Stanley Kramer of Nevil Shute’s novel about the end of the world, one of the characters remarks that people must have an instinct for getting indoors and into bed to die. It is this idea which becomes the film’s most effective cinematic device for portraying the last days of the last men on earth—after the atomic holocaust, when huge radioactive clouds are sweeping away what the war has left behind. The year is 1964. It is not clear how long the war has been over—a few months maybe, or weeks—or quite how it took place; somewhere there is a hint that the Russians attacked and “were expunged” by an American counterattack. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, only Australia (where most of the movie takes place) and New Zealand still boast human habitation, and the scientists are predicting that radioactive dust—moving from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere—will close in on these places in five or six months and wipe out the whole population in a matter of a few days. There is only one “hope”: a scientist has a theory that the Arctic region may for some reason or other have escaped; this theory is exploded in a reconnaissance trip to the Arctic made by the one remaining United States submarine. A strange, unintelligible radio signal from the vicinity of San Diego is investigated, too, and turns out to be the result of a coke bottle’s knocking against a radio key. So the remnant of mankind settle down to die, which, by the end of the film, they have already begun to do—disappearing quietly from off the streets.
In fact, everything that happens in On the Beach happens quietly. There are countless long slow shots in which the characters go about their final bit of living: fixing the morning tea and warming baby’s bottle; sailing wordlessly in a racing yacht; preparing to make love in a country retreat against a background of monotonous drunken singing; even an auto race, with only the steady roar of the cars going round and round the track, becomes a quiet occasion—a handful of unexcited onlookers stand watching, and when the cars crash and burst into flame, to whom can it matter? In the submarine sequence we see American sailors lining up at the periscope for a glimpse of San Francisco (they were in the Pacific during the war, and this is their first sight of home). There is one jittery blast of music, and then San Francisco flashes onto the screen: a ghost city, perfectly intact and totally empty. Everything stands as if it were left but a moment ago, the seamen have nothing to say. For the audience this scene is perhaps more shocking than a heap of burning rubble. Nevil Shute’s vision of the end of man by radioactivity has found its most powerful possible expression in Mr. Kramer’s notion that only a cowed silence will serve as a response to his scenes of annihilation.
Mr. Kramer’s technique depends a great deal on his restraint, his refusal to make any explicit comment about what the movie has to show. There are, for instance, only two real “speeches”—one by Fred Astaire (playing a nuclear physicist) and one by Gregory Peck (the submarine commander)—and even these are made reluctantly, as if they were being dragged up through layers of repression. But beyond restraint there is a refusal to be concerned with the business of how people would in fact behave when faced with the prospect of their own extinction. No one either appearing on the screen or sitting before it can possibly believe from the evidence of Mr. Kramer’s camera that something enormous (to say nothing of terrifying or awesome) is about to happen. People walk or ride through the Australian summer streets, have a party or a picnic at the beach; a wife hopes for a promotion for her husband; a lady drunk is reclaimed by love; a man whose wife and children had been left in America turns down the lady’s advances on grounds of fidelity. Here and there someone mentions bravery or “being realistic” or his inability to comprehend what has happened, but the movie never really makes the point that the last men on earth must carry on “no matter what” or that they are too bewildered to do otherwise. For nowhere is there a gesture to suggest that someone, even for a moment, has been seized with the knowledge of his certain death.
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Radiation sickness, we are told, begins with vomiting and weakness, then becomes painful and utterly debilitating, and may take several days to kill. The death it brings is not pictured as particularly ghastly, at least no more ghastly than several other common forms. No one expresses fear at the prospect of suffering; and in any case, “when the time comes” the government distributes a pill to everyone that will effect a quick, painless suicide. People are seen lining up patiently in front of the hospitals, stating their names, the names of the members of their families, being checked off on some mysterious list, receiving a little box containing the proper dosages. (This is a piece of carrying-on-as-usual that strikes one not as unreal but as utterly insane. What possible inequity—hoarding, say—must such a system be set up to eliminate?) Suicide is doubly painless here because it doesn’t even have to be committed. When there is no hope for anyone, getting up some morning and taking one small pill becomes a matter of convenience and esthetic taste.
And since most of mankind has died as a result not of bombing or starvation but of radioactivity, On the Beach is not upsetting in the way one might expect: on the contrary. Though it asks us to contemplate the end of the human race—and though to do so, as we must in this case, through the offices of a group of vital, glamorous people is rather unnerving—the movie creates a series of images that work to soothe rather than heighten our sense of personal horror. The war is barely mentioned, except as a kind of great bewildering “it” (whose fault was it? what started it?), and naturally cannot be described since by definition the only survivors are those who never even came near. The two American cities shown, San Francisco and San Diego, were not touched; they were only—and literally—cleaned out: there is not a single corpse to be seen anywhere, not even that of a dog or cat. The stark, oddly thrilling shots of “the destruction” on the West Coast lead us to suppose that everyone, even without the benefit of pills, had enough time to die decently, and arranged to do so. Nor is the life in Australia “postwar” in the usual way. There are some shortages, material and spiritual, but not enough time is left for any of them to become acute. The last community in the world will be allowed to cross over—as the camera assures us most of the already dead have done—instantly from total life to total death.
Now, there may be a certain intellectual horror in knowing that in one moment—or even within the space of a few days—all life on earth will cease. It is, however, not this aspect of a hydrogen war that lies at the base of our deepest anxiety: what we all really fear is the pain, terror, and suffering that would undoubtedly attend such a war, and perhaps even the possibility that we ourselves would be left after it was over, sick and maimed, to pick up the pieces of a contaminated world. A man, moreover, would have to be deeply, even madly religious to suffer personally from the idea that in future there will be no men on earth.
Yet this is precisely the idea that On the Beach expresses and would presumably stir us into action about. At one point in the film we are shown a Salvation Army meeting: a huge banner hangs in the public square announcing There Is Still Time. . . Brother. Later we see the scene again. This time the square is virtually empty, the preacher’s box deserted; the banner which had earlier summoned the Australians to salvation is flapping in the breeze, and now its message is for us. But what is there “still time” for? When Fred Astaire, the nuclear physicist, is called upon to explain why there was a war, he tells his companions it was the result of the existence of weapons that man had learned to manufacture but not to manage. By 1964, then, there are no such things as policies, decisions, responsibilities—only the atom and its inevitabilities. Perhaps for anyone who actually came out on the other side of an atomic war, this view would be right. What would it matter then if the war had been caused by “justified” actions or tragic mistakes? But as for us, is the movie saying there is “still time” to turn back or divert the uses of atomic power—and in favor of what, peace at any price, or conventional armaments?
The answer to this question makes no difference. Whatever meaning Mr. Kramer intended the message on the Salvation Army banner to have, the real effect of his movie is not to stir one’s fears about anything, least of all about the bomb. If On the Beach avoids imagining what the world would really look like after an atomic war and if it never makes an attempt to portray how the last men on earth would behave while waiting for death, this is because Mr. Kramer has fallen victim to the most insidious seduction of our time—the seduction of the apocalypse. What he has given us is a fantasy in which all problems are solved by a single explosion. His Australians have achieved that perfect peace in which there is nothing more to do and nothing more to worry about; our life in the cold war seems full of strife and death by comparison. The world they leave behind is portrayed in the sweetly sad images of San Francisco and San Diego and the elegaic last days of Australia rather than in a picture of what must have become of New York or Moscow. There are scientists who say that a real atomic war would kill 55,000,000 Americans and leave another 10,000,000 sick or injured. In such a prospect lies the true horror; to imagine that 180,000,000 Americans will be killed is like reading a fairy tale, and has much the same effect on our feelings.
Watching On the Beach stirs a momentary longing to achieve what Mr. Kramer claims to be warning us against: a small world from which has been obliterated not only a life of responsibility but even death itself. It is doubtful that anyone leaves the theater thinking about how to prevent an atomic war.
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