User reviews

The Cold War aspects of this movie may be a bit dated, but for those of us of a certain age it is a reminder of the fears we lived under at that time. In retrospect, it may be that Julian was wrong: it may have indeed been the very presence of these terrible weapons that prevented a third world war.

In any case, that aspect of the story never overshadows the movie's underlying theme, which is, rather, how each of us views the sum of our lives as our mortal end approaches. Are we alone? Have we connected with anyone? Have we failed? Have we loved? Have we been loved?

Color would have been all wrong for this essentially b&w story. Superb performances from Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and the pre-Norman Bates Anthony Perkins. A fine bit as well by John Tate as the old admiral("to a blind, blind world").

A mere cold-war nuclear destruction movie would leave one merely frightened at the end. The fact that this movie leaves you with an almost unbearable feeling of terrible sadness is a testament to the human power of Nevil Shute's book, as well as to the fine script and Kramer's superb direction.

One of the most depressing movies ever made, but a truly great one.

The French title is "le dernier rivage"(the last shore)The intellectuals dismiss this movie in France and I've always thought they were wrong.Ava Gardner had never been better with the eventual exception of Huston's "night of the iguana".My favorite part is the central one:one of the soldiers tries to find the cause for the strange Morse signals.He crosses bleak dead San Francisco harbor (the camera takes prodigious high angle shots of him,making us share his loneliness and his hope against hope)Hope that was to be short-lived!What a symbol,this equivalent of a bottle thrown into the sea!So few special effects,ans so much emotion.Stanley Kramer's peak.

In 1974, my 6th grade teacher would go on and on about this movie. It only took 48 years to see it-- but I bet I've thought about his description at least once a month over the decades. Coincidentally, it was about the same time that I gained an interest in Australia, which has stuck with me to this day. Was not much of a movie buff until the pandemic hit almost 3 years ago, which has since gave me time to appreciate classic vintage film (thank you TCM). Stanley Kramer, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner... all these names mean something to me now, and I have perspective. The timing couldn't have been better to see the film December 2022, and I can fully appreciate it for everything that it's about. Great story, and the patience has paid off.

I was/am not an actor, but I was a Fulbright at the University of Melbourne 1958-1960. When the U.S. Navy and Stanley Kramer fell out, he needed bit players with an American accent. As a result, I was recruited to play the (nameless) part of the planesman ("Depth 45 feet, Sir" and other immortal lines).

It was great fun. I worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week (really -- though most of the time was spent playing poker -- made more money playing poker than I did for acting) for two weeks at the Melbourne Fair Grounds. Met and chatted with all the participants other than Ava Gardner, who had no truck with anyone other than her Spanish cameraman.

I was very impressed by Kramer and his writer. As to the others, it was clear that good brains do not make good actors (though all were nice people, particularly Fred Astaire who could have made millions as a salesman if he had not made them as a dancer/actor).

I have seen lots of times and think the best movie ever made (even better than "No Time for Sergeants", which I have seen even more times).

Would like to hear from Jack Boyer (the submarine medical corpsman) if he happens to read this.

In 1964, the nuclear submarine USS Sawfish arrives in Australia after the worldwide nuclear holocaust. Commander Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck) confirms that the world has been destroyed and the nuclear dust is coming to Australia. The widower Cmdr. Towers, who grieves the death of his wife and children, is befriended by Royal Australian Navy Lieutenant Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), who is a family man with wife and the newborn baby Jennifer. He has a lover affair with the local Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), a still beautiful alcoholic woman with a past, and she falls in love with him.

Cmdr. Towers and his crew invite the drunkard scientist Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire) to join them in their reconnaissance voyage to the further North and to the United States, and they return hopeless and aware that Australia and the rest of the mankind has very few days until the doomsday.

"On the Beach" is a powerful anti-war film released in the Cold War period. It is dated in the present days but I believe how scary this realistic film might have been in the climax of the Cold War in the 60's. The idea of people taking "sleeping pills" supplied by the government is one of the scariest things I have ever seen in a movie. When Lt. Peter Holmes explains to his housewife and mother, a typical woman of the 50's and 60's, what she should do with the baby and herself, her reaction probably reflects a great part of the female universe in this period. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Hora Final" ("The Final Hour")

I watched this movie in a USAF chow hall on the island of Makung in the China Strait with about 20 other airman. The year was 1960. We were stationed there on a missile site. Our targets were 7 Chinese missile sites. Their target was us.

I was 22 years old and immortal.

Until I watched this movie.

When the movie ended, I will never forget the fact that no one moved for perhaps 10 minutes. There was just the bright, blank screen and the sound of the end of the film going around and around. Thiketa-thicketa-thicketa................... No one ever said a word about what we had just seen.

We, or at least I, never forgot this movie. As said earlier, it was more than scary. It was sad.

It seems strange now, 40 some years later, to be telling people that you really should watch this film and watch the masters at work, with a script that is chilling. And you know what? We still haven't outlived the possibility...........

Still this one remains perhaps the most effective "end of the world as we know it" american films, cool-headed in frozen cold war times, with an unusually light touch by the Oliver Stone (but a tad more significant in my books) of those days. Not in the least pedantic, never dull (though a bit stretching at 134 minutes), at times almost elegiac and decidedly pessimistic, Kramer's On the Beach boasts a typically strong cast, crowned by a fantastic playing off each other of Peck and Gardner, with the latter being nothing sort of magnificent in her vulnerable first hour in the film. Premiered, among others, in Moscow 58 years ago this month. Peck, a life long supporter of nuclear disarmament, attended.

I made the mistake of watching this film at 11 pm, in a theater with only 4 other people. We were scattered about...and alone. I have seldom wanted to be in a group as much as I did that night. I almost got up and went to sit in a row with one of the 4. Directing? Brilliant. Cinematography? Brilliant. The cast? Exceptional. Ava Gardner (still beautiful), Gregory Peck, Fred Astair and Anthony Perkins are inspired. I have always wanted to go to Australia. Many years later I got the chance. As the coast of Sydney came into view I started to cry...and didn't know why? Then I realized, I was 'hearing' Waltzing Matilda and remembering.

This 1959 nuclear war film has a lot going for it. It does not rely on nuclear devastation such as burned out buildings and charred corpses for effect. Instead, it focuses on the struggles of the people who were outside the zone of immediate destruction, those who have to wait for the arrival of the fallout cloud. The performances in this film are excellent. Fred Astaire is good as a scientist who predicts the impending calamity and is haunted by his guilt as a scientist for the creation of nuclear weaponry. Anthony Perkins is convincing as a naval officer in one of his final roles before his performance in Psycho caused him to be type cast. Finally, Donna Anderson is good as Perkins's nervous wife who is in denial about the tragedy. It is a pity that she did not appear in more movies. The film has some flaws. Towards the end, there is a scene where it resorts to implausible tearjerking, and the tone tends to be overly propagandistic. Furthermore, the time table for the coming of the fallout cloud is scientifically implausible. Nevertheless, this is a classic film that should be on everyone's to watch list.

In an era (1959) and on a topic (nuclear war) that usually demands melodrama, "On the Beach" resists. In fact, the all-star principal cast and director Stanley Kramer seem to treat the topic as a stage play, focussing on the individual. And that is how such a story should be treated. Life on the northern hemisphere has been destroyed a defence mistake by one of the (then) two superpowers. Gregory Peck's nuclear-powered submarine was submerged at the time (they stayed under water for a hell of a long time in those days). The sub heads for Melbourne, Australia, which is one of the only places in the world not yet affected by radiation. But the radiation will come, and this is where the truth of the piece comes out.

The inhabitants of 'the end of the world' go through what you would expect: denial, anger, clinging to the thinnest hope, and finally, resignation. As I said at the start, this is clearly a story about the individual. Kramer knows this, and the cast of Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, John Meillon and Fred Astaire play it with a reality that is all too rare. Even recent films like Final Impact fail to deliver on this count. The real joy of the film is the pacing, which gives the cast the chance to play it like it should be played. Astaire proves he is an actor, and only once slips into his raised eyebrow 'top hat and tails' mode. It is a well thought out movie without the Hollywood ending, but such is the art of Kramer that the ending is a good resolution, not just a funeral. The camera work is exceptional throughout, starting with the continuous shots in Peck's submarine. I don't know about the Waltzing Matilda music at the start, however. But it does work later in the piece, and makes it worthy of the Academy Award nomination it received.

Nuclear war has devastated the planet. All life in the Northern hemisphere has been extinguished and the last remaining pockets of humanity gather in an idyllic community on the Australian coast to await the radioactive wind sweeping down to wring the last fragile gasps of breath from the world. Humanity is doomed. Finished. The nuclear arms race has reached a final, terrifying climax and do you know what the most startling thing about it is? Just how good an actor Fred Astaire really was...

In this adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel, Astaire throws off the dancing shoes, says "so long" to Ginger Rogers and plays a bewildered, aging scientist using the last days of mankind to live out his boyhood fantasies of life as a race car driver, while ruminating on the self-destructive tendency of our species that has finally driven us to extinction. Disillusioned, sad and yet maybe even revelling in the carefree abandon that imminent death offers, Astaire is undoubtedly the best thing about this movie, which is high praise considering some of the competition. Gregory Peck especially shines as Captain Dwight Towers, leader of an American submarine crew who find their way down under. Towers, forced to leave his wife and child behind in the USA has to face the growing realisation that they are dead and there is nothing he can do to save them. He is ably supported by Ava Gardner as a lonely alcoholic desperate to find love in what time she has left and Anthony Perkins as a committed family man, who must face up to the possibility that he will have to poison his own wife and baby in order to be a 'good father.'

As you can probably guess then, On the Beach is not a cheerful film. In fact, it's harder to imagine a grimmer opus of despair and you definitely have to be in a certain frame of mind in order to watch it. Bar one barnstorming stock car race which sees automobiles careening off the track recklessly, spinning around and exploding, it's a very slow paced movie, so it's a tremendous credit to the writers involved that two hours of people pondering the fragility of life and everything they did not accomplish doesn't get boring. It is still very much a product of the time though and more cynical audiences might find it difficult to believe that society will keep performing everyday functions right up until the end and not degenerate into a chaotic, panicking mess.

That said, On The Beach is still an immensely powerful film. The message resonates even today and in terms of capturing the paranoia and pessimism of the 1950s, it does so with far greater effect than any of the so-called metaphorical science fiction films filled with giant, radioactive ants and rampaging aliens that appeared in cinemas at the same time. The script is terrific and while the pacing may be a bit slow, the cast are all running on full steam throughout. The scene where Perkins explains the effects of radiation poisoning in particular is arguably the most harrowing anti-nuclear message that film has ever provided. And if it makes you shudder watching it in this day and age, imagine what it must have felt like back in 1959, when the shadow of the bomb loomed large overheard.

On The Beach was made in 1959 and it's still a fantastic movie some 46 years later. As great as all the performances are, the photography and the script are as out-standing.

The only drawback to this black & white classic is the hauntingly depressing nature of the film. Death is never easy to explore and it's done here tastefully, gritty, and realistically. Gregory Peck shines in this controversial role. Ava Gardner gives her finest performance. Fred Astaire is incredible in this serious role. However, the film was stolen by the pre-Psycho Anthoney Perkins and newcomer Donna Anderson as a doomed young couple with a new baby. The ending of On The Beach is one of the most depressing in screen history, still this is a must see for any fan of any of the actors or the legendary Stanly Kramer.

May I enter a minority report? I hate this film as much as Nevil Shute (author of the novel On the Beach) did.

Shute's biggest complaint was the film's distortion of the character of Commander Dwight Towers. In the novel, Towers' "coping mechanism" is an alternative reality: the conviction that "when all this blows over" he was going to return to his wife and family in Connecticut; he even buys them presents to take home. "You may think I'm nuts," he tells Moira, "but that's how I see it." Moira's greatest achievement is to enter into his alternative reality and to promise to visit him in Connecticut. Indeed, to Moira's sorrow, the two do not consummate their relationship; Towers will not, cannot, cheat on his wife. The mercenary Stanley Kramer would have none of this: the film, he decided, needed sex. Gregory Peck, to his credit, tried to argue Kramer out of this distortion, but Kramer wouldn't budge.

Like all Shute's novels, On the Beach is about ordinary people triumphing over an impossible situation. The characters in Shute's story talk of simple pleasures and go on with their lives, planting flowers and beautifying their homes, talking of "the situation" and "when it comes" in careful euphemisms, not in denial but quietly aware that soon and very soon they must make their plans about how they are going to spend the end. My favorite scene is in the furniture store, when Peter Holmes says "Can I pay with a checque?" The clerk answers in the affirmative, and they exchange their documents with dignity, like gentlemen, without bitter recriminations or snide end-of-the-world jokes and with no pathetic attempts to utter profundities. The movie, I fear, betrays the mood of the novel: in the movie, the characters do nothing from start to finish other than moping, moping and moping. This makes the film sentimental, corny and downright mushy. The novel has none of those qualities.

Kramer made the mistake of imagining this story to be about nuclear war, or the aftermath thereof. He's utterly wrong. The story is about the triumph of the human spirit over impossible odds.

"On The Beach", despite it's heavy subject of a nuclear holocaust wiping out all human life, succeeds because Stanley Kramer is mercifully more restrained and less pretentious than he would later be in "Inherit The Wind" and "Judgment At Nuremberg", which are memorable more for their polemics than their characters, in my opinion. Except for one minor speech by Fred Astaire at one point (which as the previous reviewer noted is somewhat ironic in light of the fact that the very thing Astaire rails against, the idea that large nuclear stockpiles could keep the peace, turned out to be absolutely true) the film is for the most part about people and how they react to the knowledge that their world and their lives will soon come to an end. This is what makes the film so compelling as far as I'm concerned. The cast is excellent, with fine performances by Astaire (his first non-musical part), Anthony Perkins and Gregory Peck. But the real strength of the movie is Ava Gardner's touching performance as the lonely, alcoholic Moira Davidson who manages for one brief moment before the end to find true love with Peck. Having read much about her life, there is something almost hauntingly autobiographic in Gardner's portrayal, and that only adds to the movie's overall poignance.

A coastal Australian population (and the US submarine coincidentally docked nearby) awaits the inevitable, weeks after the rest of the world was wiped out by a wave of nuclear-powered, mutually-assured destruction. There's an eerie sense of normalcy to the landscape, by far the film's greatest, most thought-provoking strength. The worker bees all go through their usual motions, as if a great big wall of radioactivity weren't looming off the coast, slowly creeping in to poison them all. It's enough to pull us out of the moment and consider how we might react in such a situation ourselves: when there's nothing to be done, isn't it better to ignore the inevitable, living out the rest of our days in a willfully-ignorant sense of unsteady bliss? Of course, there eventually comes a moment when such questions can't be dodged any longer, and the cast makes some bold, powerful decisions in the face of a long, grueling death by airborne toxin. Those uncomfortable choices, and the ethical quandaries that precede them, form a stiff backbone for the film. The slow, dry pacing of its superficial plot can be difficult to work through, though, and ultimately that's what keeps it from reaching its loftiest ambitions. As with many sci-fi commentaries of the era, you'll have to do a lot of reading between the lines to make the most of this one. It's smarter, but also far less accessible, than most of its modern counterparts.

One of the most potent movies I've ever seen. Chilling! Although appearance of movie is dated...it should be...filmed in 1956. The characters, situation, emotion are timeless. The date of the movie in no way weakens the strength of the story. Only slight weakness is the relationship between Peck and Gardner. Too much time spend on these two at times distracts from story. Still it does set up a moving ending in which devotion to duty, comrades, (in a situation where such devotion is meaningless) deepens our awareness of humanity. Not for the weak of heart. No happy endings here!! All the more powerful for its non hollywood approach, we need more of these movies. Instead of finishing the moving feeling good, we finish THINKING GOOD. Much more important goal of a movie if you ask me.

Is "under-wrought" a word? If so, this movie defines it. A great cast never seems like its acting in an all-too-realistic portrayal of the fifth Kubler-Ross phase of humanity. Past denial and anger, there is finally grim acceptance, replete with just the perfect sprinkling of gallows humour. The ultimate philosophical question is raised by author Nevil Chute,"What is truly important in life, if in the end, we're all dead?"

Released in 1959, the apocalypse of On the Beach allegedly took place in 1964. We missed it, but it sure doesn't mean it still can't happen. Maybe now more than ever. But probably not in the way it happens here.

That's one of the awful things about On the Beach, they don't know what happened. Scientists among the survivors in Australia speculate, but they don't really know. Interesting however that their speculations led to the future film scenarios in Failsafe and Doctor Strangelove. But as Ava Gardner said, she didn't do anything so why is she and all the rest still left south of the equator doomed.

Nuclear war has occurred and the result was total annihilation of life in the Northern Hemisphere. The nuclear powered submarine U.S.S. Sawfish was submerged and sailed south until land with people was found in Australia. Still people like Gregory Peck can't get it into their heads that everything they knew and loved is gone.

Still though he finds time for a romantic interlude with Ava Gardner as the Australians and those who made it to their shore size up the situation and it ain't good and no options for hope.

Nevil Shute's apocalyptic novel was filmed in Australia and it leaves a good ring of authenticity. Anthony Perkins gives an earnest portrayal of the young officer in the Royal Australian Navy though he does slip in and out of the Aussie accent.

Besides the message of On the Beach the main publicity about the film concerned Fred Astaire in his first straight dramatic part. He got rave reviews from astonished critics and deservedly so, playing a nuclear scientist who know amuses himself by indulging in a secret fantasy to become an auto racer.

This film was hated, still hated by right wing critics everywhere because of its total pessimism. The religious right particularly doesn't like this film because the apocalypse arrives and there's no divine intervention, even just to save God's Elect whomever they might be. It's just the end of life and the promise that future visitors to the planet might piece together the story of what happened as does the crew of the Starship Enterprise finding a devastated world or two on their mission to seek out life. Yes, it could happen to us.

I think that what Stanley Kramer was trying to tell us is that whatever created this universe left it in the hands of those who inhabit it to do what they could with it or any corner thereof. It's our responsibility to find a way to live together and respect each other and our differences or annihilate ourselves. It's not easy, but it's that simple.

Maybe we'll learn that lesson and On the Beach is a good teacher.

Stanley Kramer and John Paxton adapt from Nevil Shute's novel. Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson star, with music by Ernest Gold and cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno.

After a global nuclear war, the inhabitants of Australia realise that the radiation clouds are heading their way. A group of people try to come to terms with this fact.

A well regarded film by the critics, and lauded by the makers at the time as an important and potent piece of cinema, On the Beach is still a film that's not for everyone.

The star appeal holds weight, though much of the narrative is tired and weary, trite and cheesy. In fact Shute himself was less than happy with what Kramer made of his literary source, the director in his element with a message movie.

If it was Kramer's intent to make the viewers also feel like what it's like waiting for death? Then he achieved it, while Gold's overuse of Waltzing Matilda in his musical score also ends up boring the senses. 4/10

And the essence of our lives is expressed in the way we treat each other under the implacable threat of imminent mortality. As Ava Gardner's character says, at the penultimate moment of love's farewell, "It's been nice, Dwight Lionel. It's been everything." And what she says on her beach is true for every last one of us, on ours.

The primary power of this great movie to me is how well it conveys the idea that for us, on this beach, love and tender kindness are all that matter in the end, and the end is always near. The sheer kindness that Ava and Gregory's characters express for each other is surely the key element of their triumphant relationship.

The moment in which their relationship most completely triumphs, of course, occurs at the Narbethong Hotel. "On The Beach" achieves a cinematic moment of genius when the chorus singing "Waltzing Matilda" changes from a rowdy crowd of drunks to a magnificently harmonious group of fine male voices. As the sheer beauty of the music overwhelms us, it also overwhelms our characters, and we all unite together in a sublime moment of awareness that true love and kindness give us our only victory over imminent death. "You'll never take me alive," says the ghost.

The way Gregory Peck's character shifts from fumbling with the fire to turning toward Ava as the music inspires transcendence, and the way Ava smiles at him, make this scene unforgettably great.

Nearly as wonderful is the scene in which Ava's character learns that the Sawfish will be leaving, with her captain at the helm. She will have to face her death alone. She doesn't waste a moment in argument or recrimination, but expresses the fullness of her love for him and her great courage when she accepts his decision and thanks him: "..it's been everything." And then: "oh, I'm so frightened." This moment is one that I take to heart. It shows the love and courage I wish to have "when the time comes."

There is still time, brothers and sisters. But we are all on the beach.