American submarine commander Gregory Peck brings his boat to harbor in Melbourne after the northern hemisphere is wiped out by nuclear war. But the Australian refuge is only temporary, as winds are expected to sweep lethal radioactive dust across every part of the globe within five months. While ashore, Gregory Peck strikes up a friendship with lonely party girl Ava Gardner -- but memories of his wife and family cause him to reject her romantic advances.
Meanwhile, the remnants of the military command send the submarine on a last-ditch mission to investigate wireless signals broadcasting from the vicinity of San Diego. Young Aussie lieutenant Anthony Perkins and scientist Fred Astaire accompany the submarine’s crew on the mission -- but all the while time slips by and hope dwindles, and the crew feels the pangs of being separated by duty from the rest of humanity during their last months.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
No movie that stars both Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire can be all bad. And Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins (looking his gangliest and most baby-faced) are no slouches in the acting department either. The story and dialogue sometimes drift into maudlin and formulaic territory, and the movie is quite a bit longer than your average sci-fi flick. But the actors are mostly terrific, the characters are interesting, and the premise is so grim that I only occasionally got restless. The movie is not exactly your average sci-fi movie and not exactly your average Hollywood romance -- and even though it won’t win any prizes in either category, the mixture is unique enough to be interesting.
ON THE BEACH is also one of those restrained and dignified science fiction movies where characters barely seem to want to mention the fantastic elements. Fred Astaire talks a little about the nuclear war that brought the world to the brink of destruction, but always in vague terms. In fact, nobody in Australia is even really sure who started the war or why, and it’s never explained exactly what kind of weapon poisoned the air. The movie is also only intermittently interested in how an entire nation would react to its own impending destruction. There’s some occasional speculative flashes -- most notably, the government plans to hand out suicide pills so people can spare themselves the horrors of radiation sickness. But otherwise, the movie seems to think that people would just go on doing the same things they’ve always done, only more grimly and sardonically.
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The effects of radiation sickness are also never really shown. The symptoms are described, but there aren’t any scenes of hospital wards full of the afflicted. Nor do we ever see any dead bodies -- though, to be fair, there’s no reason for there to be any corpses in Australia yet, and a crew member who goes ashore in San Francisco does describe what he sees. But primarily the movie is concerned with only a handful of personal reactions to the coming catastrophe: Gregory Peck is duty-bound, Ava Gardner is heartbroken, Fred Astaire is fatalistic, Anthony Perkins is soulful. It’s all more or less what you’d expect, but it’s a good enough movie (and, in places, a dark enough one) to be worth watching. It’s also unusual in the sense that there aren’t too many movies from the 1950s that had both all-star casts and sci-fi themes.
Finally, I’d say something about the Australian location, but I can’t really comment on its authenticity. I can report that there aren’t any Crocodile Dundee caricatures -- the Aussies all seem fairly normal and civilized. In fact, they greet the coming eradication of life on their continent with admirable reserve, stoicism, and a lack of looting.
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What else happened this year?
-- 4D MAN is a pretty great little sci-fi potboiler about two brothers who develop a process that allows people to walk through walls. As in Universal's version of THE INVISIBLE MAN, amazing powers inevitably bring out insanity and cruelty in those who acquire them.
-- William Castle’s THE TINGLER is worth seeing for a handful of memorable scenes -- among them one in which Vincent Price becomes the first person in a movie to drop acid, and another in which the titular monster famously breaks the fourth wall and goes after the audience.
-- This was also a banner year for horrible movies. The most well-known is no doubt Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, but many others almost equally incompetent were also released the same year.
-- Although many of the B-movies of 1959 would drive anybody to despair, TEENAGERS FROM OUTER SPACE will please people who appreciate such things.
-- THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL puts Harry Belafonte in Will Smith’s I AM LEGEND shoes in one of the earliest movies about lone survivors in an empty world. There are no zombies or vampires, but there are unconventional racial and sexual politics (for 1959 at least, and possibly even for today as well).
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1959...
Though it's not the best movie ever made, I think the one from this year that I'd most like to see again is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL.
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