Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

leethomas-11621 An apocalyptic movie without any special effects! Relies for its drama on how characters face the inevitable nuclear contamination, a silent invisible killer. Stars make everything work. Anthony Perkins especially good. Movie's final shots are very effective. (viewed 1/17)

tomsview "On the Beach" is beautifully restrained. The way the last survivors of Earth await the arrival of the radioactive fallout is nothing less than stoic. They are like those gentlemen on the Titanic who knew there wasn't room in the boats and continued with their card games or smoked a last cigar as the ship went down.I first saw this film in 1960, but it has held up well. Stanley Kramer ditched novelist Nevil Shute's scenario about how the war started involving Albania and Egypt etc. In the movie, no one really knows; someone, somewhere made a mistake - it's still relevant. The film avoids the obvious. Some filmmakers would have shown atomic explosions under the opening titles to bring the audience up to speed, but there is none of that. The film focuses on a small number of people and their reactions to their impending doom. Apart from anything else, it was fascinating to see Australia on the screen in a big Hollywood movie even if we all die at the end. American stars played the main characters although only Gregory Peck played an American. Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins played Australians with varying degrees of success with the accent. Ava's character is an Australian version of her Lady Brett Ashley from "The Sun Also Rises", but pre-"Psycho" Tony Perkins along with Donna Anderson as a young married couple bring the tragedy home. Donna Anderson is so convincing that for a long time I thought she was Australian, but she is indeed American and features in "Fallout" a brilliant 2013 documentary about the making of the film.At the time, Waltzing Matilda was almost the unofficial anthem of Australia. Composer Ernest Gold latched onto it for his score for the film and virtually created a "Symphony on the Theme of Waltzing Matilda". He gave the tune shadings that go from light and jaunty to triumphant and finally mournful. The song may have been overdone in a scene with drunken fishermen, but Gold's score remains as emotive as ever.Every time I see the film, that ending as Fred steps on the gas in his garage and Ava watches Greg sail away followed by shots of deserted Melbourne streets never fails to put a lump in my throat.

elvircorhodzic ON THE BEACH is a post-apocalyptic science fiction drama about total „annihilation" of the human race. Film was based on the 1957 novel of the same name by Nevil Shute.After the World War III, one of the world's superpowers has activated, by mistake, a nuclear weapon. Life on the Northern Hemisphere was completely destroyed. Deadly radiation has, carried by air currents, polluted almost the entire Earth's atmosphere. Australia, as one of the last colonies of mankind, was exposed to a deadly danger. In that madness one submarine captain will not accept that his wife and children are dead. A young Australian naval lieutenant and his wife will review their relationship and marriage. An unhappy and lonely woman will try to find a true love. Time is running out...Life is the greatest miracle. However, it is easy to destroy. This film, in the absence of special effects and scenes of destruction, examines persistence, courage and emotions of a small group of people. People were resigned to their fate. They have, in the absence of hysteria, devoted all attention to love and family. The story is simple, sad and a quite unconvincing. Culprits, conflicts and possibly evil are not essential. This approach is not bad, but the holes in the story are more than obvious. The protagonists have faced depression and fears in different ways. They have accepted a fatal situation. However, emotional sparks constantly smolder.Typically, different characters were exposed to the same conditions.Gregory Peck as Commander Dwight Lionel Towers is a character who leads a quiet and touching monologue with himself. Ava Gardner as Moira Davidson is an unfortunate woman and an alcoholic who, with a smile and flirt, skilfully hides her loneliness. Fred Astaire as Julian Osborn is a scientist who, probably better than anyone, understands what is happening. His character is torn between remorse and ironic views on the rest of this life. Anthony Perkins (Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes) and Donna Anderson (Mary Holmes) are a sort of a personification of a broken family, youth and love.Together and with love against fear of an inevitable fate.

Sean Lamberger 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.