I found the movie quite enjoyable. It was filmed in 1959 and I guess it reflected the sign of the times

There is a remake made in 2000.. I hated it compared to the original. It showed panic, looting, blaming everyone and anyone, lots of swearing. Again the sign of the times.

That's why I love the older movies.. You don't get the trash... Everything is left to the imagination.

AusFem--

Yeah, I've heard about that 2000 version, and . . . I have no plans to see it.

I'll stick with the (apparently more cerebral) 1959 version:)

@northcoast said:

Back on that other website that shut down its boards a couple weeks ago (I don't feel like dignifying it by saying its name right now), there were a number of people on the On The Beach board who said the film was too unrealistic in that there was no depiction of chaos or violence as people were experiencing the end of the world. There was a sense of doom, and, in the case of Mary (played by the lovely Donna Anderson), a vivid sense of despair, but in all other respects people just more or less kept to their daily pre-war routines.

Digging deeper, it seemed that older viewers of this film-- especially those who watched it when or not long after it was originally released --didn't appear to have a problem with this.

But younger viewers seemed to think it was way too optimistic in its depiction of how people would handle such a situation.

Personally, as a big fan of post-apocalyptic films, I've seen plenty of violent ones, and I tend to think that's what would really happen-- violence, further destruction, chaos, societal breakdown.

But I did not mind the more subdued situation shown in On The Beach, and found it a refreshing alternate view of how The End might be handled.

Thoughts?

Valid point. If an End of the World scenario were to take place, there would be a lot more violence.

That said, the main problem I had with this otherwise excellent film was the central premise; to wit, the notion that all animal life would be wiped out by an ever-expanding 'cloud' of radioactivity. That, to be blunt, is baloney.

There's a lot about this movie that is implausible. I can't remember if the novel was quite as daft; it was one of those books we were forced to read in school. I do remember I wasn't a fan of Shute's writing.

It has a lot of faults beyond conjecture about how people would behave post apocalypse. The endless repeating of Waltzing Matilda. The dodgy accents. And that really appalling, even for the day, back projection with Astaire in the Grand Prix.

But what really didn't sit right with me was the central love story, itself surrounded by a cluster of smaller love stories. There's a time and a place for everything. The end of the world doesn't seem like the right place for romance to me.

My guess is that with 6 months to live everything would turn to shit pretty quick. Does anyone really believe that steward in the Club would keep serving drinks right up until the lights literally went off?

And oh my there's a lot of talking in this movie. How on Earth can a movie about global apocalypse turn into a nearly 2 and a half hour talk fest about the characters' intimate feelings?

From chapter 9 (final chapter from Nevil Shute's fairly short book, less than 300 pages in paperback):

He smiled back at her. "I like mine chocolate-coated."

"So do I," she said. "But I don't think they make them like that. I'm going to take mine with an ice-cream soda."

That was the scientist John (Julian, in the movie) chatting with a shop girl about when the time came to take the cyanide tablets. So yes, one could say that the novel was also "daft", to use your word.

I do agree that in a real-world scenario, things would not be so relaxed and that people would not continue working right up to the end. My point was that, in my view, this film was simply a different take on the genre, and, we must recall, it was meant to be both "talkative" and reflective, to get people to think about the very real possibility of nuclear war, especially at the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s/early 1960s. When this film was first released, it was simultaneously shown on all seven of the Earth's continents (yes, even in Antarctica, at a scientific research station), and including in Moscow, at a time when the USSR was allowing very little of anything from the "West Bloc" behind the Iron Curtain.

So again, the point of the film was to get the world to contemplate the lunacy of using atomic weapons, rather than use it as a vehicle for a "post-apocalyptic Western" or some weird horror-fantasy where mutant creatures/humans are running around surrounded by chaos. But you are absolutely right, Jacinto-- in the aftermath of an actual nuclear holocaust, I believe any remnants of mankind would be regressing to a violent, very barbaric state.

I'm open minded about depictions of how people might react post apocalypse. One thing we learnt from the current pandemic is that very few of the movies dealing with that scenario got it even close to how it actually panned out.

And I don't object to the 'intimate' focus in On The Beach either, tho it wouldn't be my preferred route for such a story. It just wasn't done very well. A lot of the scenes are overlong and with stilted dialogue. It's one thing to have doubts about the prominence of romance in this sort of story, but when it is also poorly done... I mean, Gardner and Peck were two of the most beautiful people on the planet at the time, but their scenes together are about as romantic as a brother and sister dancing together at a hillbilly hoedown. And as for the Astaire and Gardner characters having once been lovers, even by Hollywood standards that idea is outrageous.