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MEMORY PIECE Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On the Beach still works—as a bad memories piece, if nothing else. Taken from Nevil Shute’s best seller which frightened many, the hook—the bombs have dropped, all of the Northern hemisphere was either been blown away or radiated to death and the last surviving outpost is Melbourne, awaiting the winds of fallout—comes out of real fears a nuclear war would erupt. Those of us who were kids during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis can remember vividly some of the nightmares we had. And waking ones, too: my family threw a Saturday night barbecue during the horrible last weekend of the crisis, and just as we were dancing to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” on the backyard patio, the municipal fire siren went off. For terrorizing seconds seeming to last an eternity, most of us at the party froze in the horror it was the warning the missiles were on the way, when in fact the siren was summoning our small town’s volunteer firemen to duty. Such “duck & cover” moments were duplicated countless times across the country. (Goldie Hawn directed a 2000 TNT drama entitled Hope which covers the same fears.) On the Beach doesn’t deal with the pre-bomb scares or the bomb’s dirty after effects, not like we saw in ABC’s The Day After or the British Threads; Kramer’s gloom & doomer is instead rather picturesque in its black and white photography by Giuseppe Rotunno—you never see any destruction, you never see any rotting corpses or the rodents feasting of them, you only see the empty streets of San Fran or the deserted power plants, you only hear the scratchy radiation detectors and the public bullhorns summoning the remaining Australians to repent. With Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Tony Perkins enshrouded in as much seriousness as they could muster, it’s an all star death watch. Despite the mandatory bits of preachiness, such as Astaire’s, it’s not as crummy a movie as it’s been attacked for being. Granted, it’s one of those patently “sincere” political messages on behalf of mankind, with pretensions to change the course of mutual self destruction—editorialists and Kramer partisans suggest it might have—but the movie manages to seem better than it really is because, while creating a chilling mood of reflection in viewers about extinction out of our control, it has the boozing Ava and stalwart Greg giving us some memorable moments. One of them never intended: novelist Shute, perhaps as a last vestige of Puritanism, refused to consummate the affair between Moira (Ava) and Naval commander Dwight (Greg) in the novel, but Kramer, in a rare instance of perception, said movie audiences would never accept doomed “beautiful people” acting virtuously correct. The surprise of the picture is how Ava holds it together for us—without much makeup, looking as if she’s gulping brandy as Method, she’s almost unconsciously eliciting our empathy, so touching in some of the best dramatic scenes she’s ever done she becomes the only survivor we care about. (Will she take that pill?) Rotunno, who lensed Rocco and His Brothers, Boccaccio ’70, The Leopard, The Organizer, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, Huston’s The Bible, Fellini Satyricon, Fellini’s Roma, All That Jazz, has a few inventive, breathtaking shots, not the least of which is Ava watching Greg as he sets sail for the last time. Ava’s also got a gloriously unnecessary walk, in pearls and petticoat, across a shipping dock producing a very wide smile. And it’s Kael who reminds us there’s one line we must be eternally thankful for: Greg to Ava, “Is your invitation to spread a little fertilizer still open?” On the Internet and especially over at IMDb, the many goofs of On the Beach are documented. But the know-it-alls missed one—the sailor who volunteers to leave the sub in San Diego to investigate the repeated Morse code signals. He’s got an oxygen tank and in protective gear, except for the pants—they’re cuffed and create a breach in the body suit. Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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