Hacker Cinema
On the Beach
1959 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Stanley Kramer
In 1964, atomic war wipes out humanity in the northern hemisphere; one American submarine finds temporary safe haven in Australia, where life-as-usual covers growing despair. In denial about the loss of his wife and children in the holocaust, American Captain Towers meets careworn but gorgeous Moira Davidson, who begins to fall for him. The sub returns after reconnaissance a month (or less) before the end; will Towers and Moira find comfort with each other?
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14 comments on Hacker News
Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in the Sky after the title of the film based on it), which actually deals with aircraft engineering and the problems involved in designing early jet airliners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevil_Shute
I watched it a year ago. The imagery sticks with you - you sigh a lot. It’s subtle and bleak with little to no “modern movie drama” (gasps, pop outs by bad guys, scares) other than a few run of the mill drawn out pregnancies. Watch it alone so you can digest it without the distractions of audible sighs (or crying) from people near you. I recommend it, much like On The Beach (the book or the movie).
But we didn’t blow ourselves back to the stone age in the 50s and 60s. This fate turned out to be not quite as inevitable as “A Canticle” would seem to suggest.
Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a retaliatory barrage when the radar gave a false positive for an incoming attack. Proxy wars. Opaque succession plans in the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Sabre-rattling and standoffs all over the world.
In elementary school in the 1970s we didn't have to do "Duck and Cover" but we did have drills involving classes marching in a line down to the basement which had signs marking it as a "Fallout Shelter." Sometimes I still see them. (History: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-those-fallout-shelter-signs-actually-mean)
When I got a little older, I can't tell you how unsettling it was to see serious looking people talking on the nightly news about some incident on the North Korean border, or a power struggle in Moscow after Brezhnev died, or how many thousands of ICBMs each side had pointing at each other. How fucked up is it that 15 year old me understood concepts like MIRV (https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targetable-reentry-vehicle-mirv/) or the U.S. maintaining a bunch of B-52s loaded with nukes in the air at all times?
The news we saw and read was reinforced through pop culture that drove home the idea that we would blow ourselves to bits. In high school in the mid-1980s we were assigned Canticle as well as Neville Shute's On The Beach, which follows a similarly depressing narrative (northern hemisphere covered by radiation, southern slowly dying off, what people do as the inevitable gets closer). Red Dawn. Firefox. Reruns of Dr. Strangelove. Or the TV series The Day After.
We couldn't believe it when crowds climbed on the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That's when people were able to rub their eyes and think just maybe we weren't going to kill ourselves.
I can't wait for this to go up on Youtube. GDC post mortems are amazing, especially the ones on Diablo[0] and Fallout[1]. I've loved Fallout since I was 12 and it really got me into post-apocalypse fiction. I ended up watching and reading all the media that Tim cites in his presentation and discovered some wonderful things like On the Beach (the book by Nevil Shute AND the movie), A Canticle for Leibowitz, etc
[0] https://youtu.be/Mlrrc_vy79E
[1] https://youtu.be/T2OxO-4YLRk
There's also On the Beach: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
Great book, great movie.
> They went to the origin of the signal, only to find a computer turning on and off because of its solar panel, sending messages at every boot.
In the original film [0] and book, the signal is caused by a soda-bottle being knocked by a window-blind against a Morse-code telegraph key.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(1959_film)
"In class, I’ve shown students movies from the nuclear age, hoping that Gregory Peck’s stoicism about the death of the world in On the Beach or Charlton Heston’s damnation of all mankind in the final moments of The Planet of the Apes might make them understand some of the smothering fear of living in a world on the edge of instant oblivion. I make them watch The Day After and read Fail-Safe and Warday. To younger people, these films and books now seem like relics from some lost civilization, full of mysterious, apocalyptic texts and angry cinematic gods."
He should have shown them Threads.
have you read (or seen) on the beach[0] by nevil shute? slow-moving, impending, nuclear winter and the heartrending choices the characters make in the face of it. really left its mark when i read it in high school (haven't seen the films though).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
Just like, I imagine, most HN readers were exposed to what happened with Apollo XIII or at Dunkirk through the eponymous movies.
But I think there should be a stronger criterion than that before saying that the lack of common knowledge of the effectiveness of DIY civil defense shelters is in part due to how nuclear hazards have been portrayed by Hollywood.
It could be because they aren't effective against the type of nuclear exchange expected during the Cold War.
Most US policy makers, including Eisenhower, were convinced that there was no good civil defense against an all-out nuclear war. This lead to MAD, and the policy of MAD demands that a country not be able to protect its citizens. This was the US policy for most of the Cold War. Which means those Hollywood films reflect US policy.
A problem is, MAD requires an effective nuclear response force, with the expectation that most citizens will die. How do you convince the citizens to fund MAD? One way is to convince them that shelters are effective, even if the high-level planners know that it isn't. This was possible early on because of the secrecy about the nuclear bomb project.
The problem is, civil defense, unlike just about all other aspects of the Cold War, requires convincing the public of its effectiveness. And the government attempts were not convincing. This helped promote anti-proliferation efforts.
Which is why I don't accept your implication that because something is "informed by ... anti-proliferation sentiments" it means that we should ignore it. Those sentiments may have a reasonable basis.
Others believed in NUTS, with the possibility of a limited nuclear exchange, which is survivable for a large country like the US. NUTS played a bigger role during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, which is why there was more government promotion of civil defense shelters then.
I'm almost certain that Teller would be in the NUTS camp. He certainly had Reagan's ear when he oversold SDI. Even if not, there were plenty of people who were, and those are the sorts of people who would (perhaps optimistically, perhaps reasonably) push that people have a nuclear bomb shelter. Teller's support of civil defense shelters was informed by his full-nuclear-response sentiments, which also "affected public perception in a particular way."
That said, the Cold War context, the idea of having a nationwide civil defense was that, after the few weeks are over and the all-clear signal given, we would help clean up and be able to return to a life that was little different than what we had before.
The reality is that, sure, perhaps a shelter could help millions more people survive the war, but come out to what sort of reality?
And it's not just Hollywood. Even before Dr. Strangelove, there were some widely read fiction books on the topic. The ones I've know are "On the Beach" (1957), "Alas, Babylon" (1959), and "Fail-Safe" (1962). (And a shout-out to "Malevil" (1972), which was the first 'modern' (post-Verne) French science fiction story I read.)
Again, the question isn't if they affected public perception "in a particular way", but rather if they lead to a more complete understanding of the topic.
And I don't think Hollywood's portrayal was much different than what was already well-known at the high policy levels, which is why I don't think it's right to single them out.
Yes, the book On the Beach is from the 1950s not long after H-bombs were invented - it is mentioned in the book that a lot of weapons used in the war it describes were salted with cobalt to create large amounts of long lived fallout. This is perfectly possible but fortunately was never actually done - I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons.
I can't remember if the cobalt bomb element is mentioned in the film versions but was definitely mentioned in the book.
on the beach is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I'd strongly recommend the book over the film, as the film doesn't hold up at all. The book, on the other hand, has an intro that sounds eerily similar to our current geo-political situation and does a great job of painting an emotional spectrum for the people awaiting their inevitable doom.
You do realise that On the Beach is a completely fictional account of the aftermath of a nuclear war? Fortunately nobody ever stockpiled cobalt salted H-bombs.
Mind you On the Beach is excellent, but not as a documentary on what might happen after a global war.
I highly recommend "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute, as an exploration of exactly this scenario. The movie was decent too, but the book should not be missed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
Some famous ones I enjoyed are 'Dr Strangelove', 'WarGames', and 'The Day After'.
I also enjoyed the lesser-known 'Miracle Mile' and 'Matinee (1993)'.
Haven't seen 'On the Beach', but it's an early (1959) well-reviewed film on the topic. Haven't seen 'Thirteen Days', but it covers the Cuban missile crisis -- perhaps the closest the world came to using nuclear weapons after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.