On the Beach: Hollywood’s star-powered World War III drama
A haunting nuclear apocalypse drama that pairs A-list stars with an unusually intimate sense of doom, Stanley Kramer’s newly reissued On the Beach imagines humanity’s final months, finding romance, regret and fragile hope at the end of the world.
There are five months left to live. Nuclear war in the northern hemisphere has wiped out most of the world’s population. All that remains is in Australia, where everyone is getting on with life the best they can, knowing that the end is coming for them when the fallout arrives on their shores. On the Beach (1959) follows a group of survivors as they stare down the apocalypse.
During the 1950s, cinema was littered with films in which very real fears of the nuclear threat were packaged into tales of mutant beings running rampant over society. Godzilla (1954), with its both literal and metaphorical allusions to the atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the most poignant and enduring, but there were countless American monster movies centred on nuclear anxieties throughout the decade too.
While the independently-produced Five (1951) is generally considered the first US movie to directly address the fears of a monster-less nuclear annihilation, and The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) beat it to cinemas by half a year, On the Beach was the most high-profile early project to bluntly discuss the terrifying prospect.
Producer-director Stanley Kramer was classic Hollywood’s top maker of message movies, a pioneer in tackling issues such as racism and fascism when they were still considered too hot to touch by his peers. It’s no surprise the chance to grapple with nuclear tension appealed to him, and Nevil Shute’s massively successful 1957 novel, for which the film was named, gave him his chance.
Because his productions often revolved around speeches and imparting lessons, Kramer has a reputation for blunt-force moralising. He largely works in a more subtle key in On the Beach, despite the enormity of the stakes. While the film, like the book on which it’s based, was very much intended as a warning against the cataclysmic dangers of nuclear war, intimate human drama takes precedence. Characters discuss the horrors they’re facing, but in a register that reads as raw and genuine, not overly prescriptive.
Although there is the faintest flicker of hope when the submarine crew go to America to investigate a mysterious signal that might imply improbable signs of life, it’s clear from the outset that no one really believes it will lead to anything. It’s just a welcome distraction from the imminent certainty of oblivion. The drama here is centred on whether our leads will be able to fight through the understandable panic to find peace and meaning as their lives come to an end.
Kramer assembled an exceptional cast to play these doomed men and women, many of whom were at fascinating points in their careers.
Only a year before he’d star in Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins is tremendously touching as Peter, the young navy officer who has just become a father, and has no idea how to help his depressed wife Mary (Donna Anderson) face the horror that lies ahead of them. After Psycho, Perkins would spend much of his career typecast as Norman Bates-like creeps. On the Beach was a poignant example of how affective he could be as a regular guy.
Ava Gardner plays Moira, the ‘town drunk’ who falls in love with Gregory Peck’s submarine captain, Dwight. After nearly 20 years signed to MGM, Gardner’s role in On the Beach was her first as a freelancer – it started a period of transitioning out of primarily glamorous roles into more interesting, multi-dimensional ones. Like everything around them, Dwight and Moira’s love affair is terribly sad: he’s still in denial about his whole family having been killed in America, and she’s painfully aware that, at least to begin with, she’s operating as a surrogate for his wife. Yet, between the stars’ megawatt chemistry, charisma and skill, and Kramer’s unusually lyrical direction (a swooping scene set to ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the film’s theme, is quite something to behold), their romance still manages to power through the despair all around them.
Last time audiences had seen Fred Astaire, he’d been dancing with Cyd Charisse in Silk Stockings (1957). In On the Beach, he’s Julian, a depressed nuclear scientist ruminating on both his mistake in helping build the bombs, and on being alone during the end of the world. Astaire is charged with delivering the movie’s few didactic speeches about the foolishness of humanity destroying itself via nuclear bomb, but thanks to his textured, lived-in performance, it doesn’t feel like preaching. After a quarter of a century suspended in the amber of his elegant dancing frivolities, that he had such a convincing dramatic turn in him proved a welcome surprise.
The top-flight cast garnered On the Beach an extravagant, showy release. It held simultaneous starry premieres in 18 cinemas across seven continents (it was even screened in Antarctica), in a bid to emphasis the global import of its message.
Despite the splashy roll-out, it underwhelmed financially, and was a mixed-bag critically. Criticism of On the Beach tends to belong in one of two opposing camps: that it waters down the harsher edges of Nevil Shute’s novel too much (Shute himself was perhaps the biggest proponent of that view), or that it’s almost unbearably depressing.
Really, however, its ability to directly confront the horror of a nuclear apocalypse while still finding room for soaring romance proves to be the film’s superpower. Though having four movie stars at its centre lends an unavoidable glamour, there’s also far more of an impact watching Fred Astaire contemplate suicide than there would be an actor without his long, sunny Hollywood history. On the Beach manages to have its cake and eat it too – the stars both leaven the bleakness and make it hit all the harder.
Nuclear anxieties have ebbed and flowed over the years, but films and TV programmes based around them have kept coming. In the immediate aftermath of On the Beach, there was The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and The War Game (1966) in Britain, and Panic in Year Zero (1962), Fail Safe and Dr Strangelove (both 1964) stateside. Later, there’d be Threads (1984), Where the Wind Blows (1986), By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), Crimson Tide (1995), and many, many others, all the way up to A House of Dynamite (2025).
There have been bleaker nuclear films, and there have been those with more of an overt Hollywood sheen. On the Beach’s capacity to deftly navigate between those two sides, in the process revealing exciting new facets to its long-established stars, still makes it stand out from the pack all these decades later.