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13 Remembering On the Beach Before World War II, Hollywood scared people to death with mad scientists and monsters. During World War II the industry specialized in strutting Nazis and villainous Japs. After the war political subversives mixed with space creatures, and vice versa; as important, in what had come to be called the nuclear age, a whole new category of fear film centered on atomic mutants: Them, Godzilla, Attack of the Crab Monsters, It Came from Beneath the Sea. More directly, Invasion U.S.A. (1952) combined fear of nuclear attack with communist takeover, helping to usher in the new cold war genre of Soviet/U.S. atomic-mass-destruction movies culminating in such boomer classics as Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, both issued in 1964. Less frequently remembered, perhaps because slightly older—albeit now decidedly more interesting for its emphasis on the human depiction of nuclear aftermath than on the Pentagon-Kremlin mechanics of initiating wars of mutual annihilation—is the film that first got the attention of popular audiences on the subject. That would be On the Beach (1959), Stanley Kramer’s elegiac representation of the dying remnant of a world in the wake of global atomic warfare. In the golden age of Technicolor and CinemaScope—and to this degree anticipating its betterknown successors—it was a black-and-white film of stark, muted, austere genius, featuring career performances from a number of important actors: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, a pre-Psycho Anthony Perkins, and Fred Astaire, in his first purely dramatic role. In all these respects it be- Remembering On the Beach / 207 came a movie that challenged people who saw it never to look at the world in the same way again. As was characteristic of the times, the origins of the film lay in a moderately popular, Book-of-the-Month-Club or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books sort of book: a novel of the same title by a prolific, but relatively uncelebrated , Anglo Australian writer named Nevil Shute, that had showed up two years earlier and had gained a certain cachet of intellectual discussion . The author, whose full name was Nevil Shute Norway, by birth Anglo Irish, had served as a teenage stretcher-bearer during the 1916 Irish Rising and then been conscripted to brief World War I service in the British Army. After a university education at Oxford, he had trained as an aeronautical engineer and then had again returned to military service during World War II as a Royal Navy Reserve officer working with secret weaponry. In the meantime he wrote substantial amounts of fiction . A postwar emigrant to Australia, today he remains something of a cult figure, though with no single book remembered to most readers save On the Beach. At the time, a lot of people seem to have bought it—with sales of a quarter million, it ranked number eight on the 1957 best-seller list for fiction. One wonders how many read it. I certainly did, although it is hard to say just when, looking back on events fifty years ago. Whether I came to the book before or after the film, I’m not sure. I have certainly never forgotten it. At the same time, even as a post–global conflict, end-of-the-world text, it wasn’t unique. Most American public-school students, for instance , would likely have remembered Stephen Vincent Benet’s “By the Waters of Babylon,” a pre–World War II fable about a postapocalyptic New York City, which seems to have been standard curricular fare during the era. Those of more advanced predilections might also have been aware of a sequence of mid-1950s stories by popular science-fiction writer Walter Miller about a postnuclear landscape, eventually assembled into the 1960 cult novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. Like these in many ways, in the fable dimension at least, I can see now that On the Beach was not a particularly good novel—workmanlike is the best one can say, at least until toward the end, with a lot of rather stilted dialogue, quasi-scientific exposition, backstory, plot rigging, and typecast major characterizations. The American submarine captain, Dwight Towers, having brought his 208 / Chapter 13 command south by submerged route from the contaminated Northern Hemisphere, is U.S. Navy by-the-book and relentlessly faithful to a wife two years dead,in sum a rather wooden,if sententious prig.Moira Davidson ,the unmarried Australian woman with whom he falls in love,and...

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