Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

On the Beach Blu-ray Movie Review

Are these characters all taking sand to the beach?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 24, 2014

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river...
This is the way the world ends—
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

T.S. Eliot’s chilling assessment of what the “end of days” might be like found a near perfect novelistic analog in Nevil Shute’s big bestseller On the Beach, with one exception: while things in this post-Apocalyptic drama may indeed be winding down to a veritable whimper, there was indeed a bang, and a calamitous one at that. On the Beach deals with the devastating after effects of a nuclear holocaust which has wiped out the entire northern hemisphere. The only known survivors are in the southern hemisphere, including residents of Australia, who are waiting in various states of agony for a huge radioactive cloud to make its way to their isolated island, where it will certainly bring death and destruction. Shute’s novel was remarkable for its understated, almost stoic, approach toward this almost unimaginable fate, and it played into Cold War fears of untold nuclear catastrophes in a very visceral way. Stanley Kramer’s 1959 film based on the novel changes several salient elements of Shute’s original, but it maintains the same reserved, melancholic tone that infused the novel. There is a tamped down emotionalism running rampant throughout the film, as if the characters aren’t exactly in a state of denial, but have come to the conclusion that carrying on as best they can until the inevitable greets them is the best way to muddle through. The film has none of the special effects bells and whistles that would come to define the post-apocalyptic genre in subsequent years, and is instead a rather quiet, introspective character study of several people caught in a cataclysmic set of events which they all struggle to come to terms with in their own way. On the Beach doesn’t really celebrate the triumph of the human spirit, and in fact a lot of this film is relentlessly depressive, but there is a potent subtext of the (perhaps illogical) resilience of people who know they have limited time to live and who (for the most part, anyway) refuse to panic in the face of their imminent demise.

Stanley Kramer may be too often dismissed as the purveyor of middlebrow “message” pictures, but there’s one thing you can usually count on in virtually every Kramer film: the director’s economy of presentation. Even Kramer’s longest films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Judgment at Nuremberg waste little time in setting up their narrative. Kramer isn’t a fan of huge expository scenes, he wants to show the audience what’s happening. (There are some notable exceptions to this general rule, as I discussed in Blu-ray.com’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria Blu-ray review.) That proclivity is very much on display in the opening few minutes of On the Beach, where Kramer (with the help of scenarist John Paxton, of course) nimbly details the context of the film. There’s been a cataclysmic battle, no one seems to be alive in the northern hemisphere, and a sub’s crew is therefore making its way toward Australia to search for anyone living there.

The sub’s commander is Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), whose arrival in Australia is greeted first by Aussie Lt. Commander Peter Holmes (Tony Perkins) and, later, a pretty if hard drinking Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), to whom Holmes and his young wife Mary (Donna Anderson) introduce him. The Australian Navy has detected an intermittent signal that seems to be garbled Morse Code emanating from San Diego, where it had been thought all life had perished. The Aussies task Towers and his Sawfish submarine with taking the perilous journey northward to investigate.

In the meantime, Towers has come to realize that the Australians are dealing with their own impending mortality in radically different ways. It's only a matter of time until radioactive clouds reach the continent, and the government has already begun preparing its citizens for the worst. "Suicide kits" are available, though people like Mary, who has just given birth to a baby daughter, simply can't bring themselves to face that desperate inevitability. Holmes on the other hand feels it's absolutely necessary that Mary deal with the situation emotionally, for he, as the Sawfish's liaison officer, could well be on the sub when the decision needs to be made back home.

Moira drowns her sorrows in drink, while more erudite types like scientist and race car enthusiast Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire, Golden Globe nominated for this role) seem at least to be relatively consigned to their fate. Towers himself probably knows his own family perished in the nuclear holocaust, but he is in a state of denial, even as one last chance at romance with Moira is dangled in front of him. The fascinating thing about On the Beach is that, while there are traditional thriller or mystery elements like the mysterious radio signal at play in the plot, it’s the intense personal stories that actually provide the visceral intensity the film often displays.

What’s equally compelling about the film is how it shows the almost insanely sanguine quality of virtually everyone at least at one point. Holmes and Mary spend a day at the beach, and they’re surrounded by countless other Australians frolicking in the sun as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Towers and Moira finally have a bit of a fling, but for different reasons, and without the typical whiff of scandal which usually attends such affairs. Kramer is rather circumspect in the way he presents the inevitable demise of all these characters, and indeed Paxton’s screenplay averts some of the overt tragedies that await various characters in Shute’s novel. But there’s an unambiguous portent of ominous foreboding hanging over this film that’s kind of like the cinematic equivalent of a huge radioactive cloud lingering just beyond the horizon.

On the Beach Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

On the Beach is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber Studio Classics with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. While the elements here have typical age related wear and tear, overall things look rather good on this release. Contrast is strong (a couple of stock shots and some brief anomalies notwithstanding) and black levels are deep and convincing. Gray scale in nicely modulated, and grain is managed effectively, adding a natural organic appearance to the presentation. Fine detail is quite good in close-ups (see screenshot 1). There are no signs of digital sharpening and no issues with image instability.

On the Beach Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

On the Beach's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono mix offers excellent fidelity, but it is now the second Kino Lorber Studio Classics title I've reviewed which has synch issues. In this regard, On the Beach is even more out of synch than Cast a Giant Shadow, but it may portend an issue here that audiophiles will want to keep an eye (or ear, as the case may be) on. Ernest Gold's Academy Award nominated and Golden Globe winning score (which uses "Waltzing Matilda" ad infinitum) sounds fine, as does the dialogue—if you can just ignore the fact that the lips aren't matching what's being said.

On the Beach Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 4:47) is actually almost more of a newsreel, with scenes of the intercontinental premieres.

On the Beach Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Shute used that excerpt from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men quoted above as the epigraph for the first editions of his novel, and it sums up the fetid, decaying atmosphere that envelops On the Beach. This is a stifling, claustrophobic film that manages to be incredibly disturbing with absolutely no depictions of any carnage or destruction whatsoever. Life goes on, the philosopher says, until of course it doesn't. Or as a different kind of "philosopher", Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb, once wrote, "Life is what you do while you're waiting to die." On the Beach is a devastating examination of exactly how different people wait. Technical merits here are generally very good to excellent, and On the Beach comes Highly recommended.