There’s nothing overtly impressive about On the Beach (1959), but there’s something eerily topical about watching it in 2025. Based on a novel by Nevil Shute, the film takes place in Australia in the wake of total nuclear war, which has irradiated most of the planet. Commander Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) brings his submarine into port in Melbourne, where life continues as normal — for now. The radiation is creeping towards them, months away, and everyone knows they are ultimately doomed. In the meantime, though, life goes on, and Towers is introduced by Australian naval lieutenant Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins) to Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), an attractive, pleasant woman who is drowning her anxieties in drink. Moira seizes on Towers as a potential partner for the end times, but Towers is in denial, still entertaining visions of his wife and family back in the decimated United States. Their potential romance is disrupted by a naval mission to investigate one last sliver of hope for humanity.
The trappings of On the Beach are so dated as to render the science fictional setting almost nominal, and director Stanley Kramer executes with such quiet patience that it’s difficult to see much shape the story. One can imagine the atmosphere of nuclear dread feeling more subtly ominous in the mid-twentieth century. That said, it still resonates here in the nightmare timeline, as a stand-in for the environmental and political collapse hovering on the horizon. There are parallels in the denial, expressed most strongly through Peter’s wife Mary (Donna Anderson), who insulates herself within a bubble of reality-ignoring normality. And there is an overlong metaphor involving a melancholy scientist (Fred Astaire) participating in a destructive car race, heedless of the consequences. In many respects, though, the SFnal explorations are rooted in the psychology of the characters, and as such it succeeds more in its wistful romantic strains than in its quiet-apocalypse scenario. Hardly riveting, in the end, but an interesting watch.
