MovieChat Forums > On the Beach (1959) Discussion > Without the looming annihilation of the ...

Without the looming annihilation of the cold war..........this is boring

posted 15 years ago by uscmd
29 replies | jump to latest

Without the looming annihilation of the cold war..........this is boring self indulgence at its worst.

This movie requires the all encompassing terror of MAD, the original MAD. It requires a cuban missile crisis reality, to appreciate just how close we came to living this. For people to young to remember that reality it might just as well be a movie about 3 heroine addicts stoned out of their gourds sitting in an opium den exchanging their fantasies about what the end of mankind will be like.

I can remember going to the premiere, Gregory Peck, captain of a nuclear sub, in a Stanley Kramer movie about a nuclear war. I expected action. My eyes rolled back in my head just before I nodded off. I hated it then, and it snot, (a typo, but telling.....should have been its not) improved with time.

Trust me, use the 2 hours elsewhere. Get a root canal, or a rectal tonsillectomy, you'll prefer it.

[–] Niversas 15 years ago

Agree, this movie was horribly boring.

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Movies are Art and Art is Personal Interpretation

[–] oldmotem 15 years ago

A tonsilrectomy? OUCH. I'd rather watch the movie.

[–] cingramaol 15 years ago

It's only boring if you want graphic violence, explosions, corpses, and zombies.

C.

[–] Alien_Zombie 15 years ago

I like random zombies every now and then. But I don't find this movie boring at all.

Science Fiction Horror

[–] curlew-2 13 years ago

Your comment on "random zombies" made me have a mental image of a scene in a film (like, say, PRETTY WOMAN or SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE) where the main characters go to an elevator. Then . . . all of a sudden . . . A ZOMBIE!

I really have to stop looking at comment boards early in the morning.

"I'm not reckless . . . I'm skillful!"

[–] Tchoutoye 15 years ago

For a film about nuclear destruction it focuses way to much on romance. You'd think people had other things on their mind.

[–] DrusillaN 15 years ago

I like the fact that it focuses on people and how they behave and what they want when they know the end is comming. different from the more action-packed way movies about the end of the world are made now.

[–] hairybro2000 15 years ago

I so agree with Drusilla. This is an excellent mvoie dealing with the human aspect of the end of the world. Don't get me wrong I love "The Day After Tomorrow" and the other doomsday films with fantastic special effects but also love character driven drama such as this film and Testament.

[–] zuzupetal_99 14 years ago

I have to agree w/ the OP - this movie was Boring. I watch tons of old movies b/c I love Old Hollywood and this movie had a barrage of GREAT stars. And they were beautiful in B&W. But I've never been a fan of doomsday films - old OR new, and this was no exception. The story was very difficult to pay attention to for 2 hours, and maybe that's why sometimes I found myself wondering what the hell was going on!

I thought Tony Perkins stole the show from veteran legendary stars, Peck & Astaire. Even at such a young age, Perkins could really act & emote realistically on screen. As much as I love Peck, I didn't think he acted much in this film - his performance seemed very wooden & forced to me; especially next to Ava, Fred, and Tony who all turned in great performances in a less-than-great movie.

"Are you going to your grave with unlived lives in your veins?" ~ The Good Girl

[–] Mehki_Girl 14 years ago

I'm with you...I love old films, but this one bored me to tears...I thought they would never get on with the business of dying. Perkins was great. His wife was annoying. I wanted him to smack her. When he called her an idiot, I said "finally". When she got her act together at the end, I decided I would stop wishing he would hit her with the hairbrush. Ava Gardner looked tired. Gregory Peck (whom I adore) was wooden. Perkins and Astaire stole the show. No, wait the old drunken broad who said to Peck at the first party, I used to be married to an American. We traveled all over the world and my husband would tell everyone, I'm an American, I'm an American, until someone from one of those Eastern countries shot him. Now SHE stole the show.

It seemed like a string of unrelated tiresome vignettes, with long boring pauses, with awful (and corny) "dramatic" overdone music. The movie should have ended at the party with the drunken revelers singing in the background. It was a perfect shot, Ava knew Peck cared about her and I could have used my imagination about the inevitable end. Maybe the book was better, but the movie was just plain silly. I give it one thing (but really it was the author of the book), it didn't try some stupid Hollywood ending where the wind shifts and everyone lives happily ever after.

[–] RodneyVervegard 12 years ago

> it didn't try some stupid Hollywood ending where the wind shifts and everyone lives happily ever after.

SPOILERS BELOW

I agree. I found myself thinking a number of things that I liked about it because of what it DIDN'T do.

1. The aforementioned stupid Hollywood wind shifting happy ending. The movie started with a doomed premise. I think the characters took reasonable actions to confirm their worst fears. They were. Sometimes there is no miraculous escape. Sometimes, they can't find a guy who has been building a device that will burrow to the center of the earth so you can detonate explosives that will get the earth spinning again.

2. I like that the hysteria was kept below the riot point. Having 5 months sort of put them in a no man's land of 'should i begin panicking now? should I quit my job and go off on a looting spree?' I liked that 'society' seemed to be functioning 'normally' while adjusting to shortages - sort of a 'war time normal'. I liked that they behaved as if there was still a glimmer of hope and weren't ready to become savages yet.

3. I liked the fact that there was no opening montage summarizing what had happened before with a narration outlining the doom (a la Terminator, Southland Tales, Road Warrior, etc.). We got the point just by picking up pieces of dialog until the more direct exposition by Fred Astaire at the party.

4. I like that Fred Astaire got drunk at a party and made the hostess upset and then apologized. He didn't have to be beaten up and thrown out and then have an over the top rationalization.

5. I liked the scene where the guy explores the power plant. There was no dramatic device that put him in ridiculous peril. I.e. he didn't rip his suit, he didn't get his leg caught in a gear and run the risk of staying too long, they didn't have to send a panicky search party for him, he didn't make it back 'just in the nick of time'. That's not what the movie was about and I'm glad there wasn't any Hollywood gimmicry involved.

6. I liked that, in general, people treated each other respectfully. Yes, that is boring. They could easily have had some US-Aussie tensions, blaming the US for all the world's misery, etc. Fred Astaire could have been hateful towards Ava Gardner, Perkins towards Fred Astaire, etc. The arguments were resolved in a relatively mature fashion.

7. In that same fashion, I thought the somewhat surreal conversation between the fishing Yeoman and the submarine (captain's voice) was rational. No berating of the Yeoman, no threatening to get back on the ship, no 'shoot that deserter', no NAVY seals shooting out of torpedo tubes to retrieve him while he was swimming away. The Captain spoke to him as if he actually respected him and vice versa.

8. I was confused by the purpose of the repeated banging of the handles on the periscope. It seemed like an artistic device (like the shrill telephone effect in Fail Safe) that seemed out of place. It was effective, but seemed a little high brow for a SciFi Soap Opera Human Drama.

In short, I liked the maturity of the movie. Maybe my opinion was improved because I was dragged to see 'Olympus Has Fallen' earlier in the weekend and this movie was so much more rational in comparison. I also like the fact that I began the 10th paragraph of this review with 'in short'.

I had other criticisms of the movie. It was too long and Waltzing Matilda was overplayed. I was annoyed by the '50s 'helpless woman' behavior. It seemed to try to do too many things. And, yes, there were some boring parts. But in the end, life is mostly boring and I like the fact that they avoided at least some of the temptations to 'Hollywood it up'.

[–] jaystarstar 11 years ago

Anybody who thinks the threat of nuclear war is completely gone is really really naive.

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4) You ever seen Superman $#$# his pants? Case closed.

[–] genevaporter 11 years ago

Thumbs up for this comment.

That was the focus of the movie: How would you spend your last days on Earth?

Seeking a Friend At The End of the World had a similar concept, only a bit more comical than On The Beach. People making the best of what little time they have left, and figuring out what means the most to them.

[–] timlin-4 14 years ago

It could have been a boring but interesting film, but they made it about an hour longer with pauses and empty scenes. When a picture falling crooked is a highlight of your movie, something has gone terribly wrong.

[–] screenman 14 years ago

There was supposed to be a sequel called `On The Beach 2' where - on account of an evil megalomaniac at the pharmacy - half those people who thought they'd committed suicide had only taken sleeping pills, and woke-up again to find that everyone else had turned into fleash-eating zombies. It would be a race against time to locate an especially-gifted overweight nerd with bad table manners and a backward-pointing baseball cap, who would invent computers. This would enable them to generate implausible special-effects and escape to Mars.

But for some reason Kramer didn't take it up. Never new a good thing when he was onto it, that bloke.

[–] jayhn1111 13 years ago

I'm glad other people posted this because I thought I"d be the only one. I found this movie to be mind numbingly boring and depressing. I"m not saying I expected a feel good upbeat movie because it was never supposed to be, but I just didn't see any redeeming qualities about this bore of a movie. It really was the all star cast that prompted me to watch this.

[–] franzkabuki 13 years ago

As far as pre-apocalyptic visions go, this one indeed tends to be pretty bland, tame and unimaginative. No idea why, with a script as uneventful as this, the thing needed to be dragged out to 134 minutes - most of it devoted to the soap operatic and dull Peck/Gardner shenanigans and pointless stuff like Fred Astaire racing cars. Kramer´s direction is flat and by-the-numbers, severely lacking in atmospherics so even the stronger scenes such as the shore leave in San Francisco, coke bottle in San Diego & final days of Australia kind of get lost in the general gray mass of uninvolving mediocrity. Not totally without interest, but quite underwhelming in its almost utter failure to capture the extinction of the human race in an aesthetically compelling manner. Instead, what we´ve got here is just a fairly average melodrama. 6/10.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] JJC-3 13 years ago

It really gets to the point where I have become 100% convinced that the young folks out there wouldn't know a classic movie, for the most part, there ARE always exceptions, if it rose up and bit them in the proverbial buttocks!!!!!

"OTB" is NOT about Nuclear War it is about the aftermath of such a war and how people who are already condemned to die handle the last remaining days of their lives. What is boring to you little kiddies is that you need to actually open up that stuff that is between your ears and THINK a little as you watch a movie!!!!

And as far as the different scenarios in the movie being unnecessary, well again you need to engage that brain box if you wish to understand.

Now please go back to your Harry Potter movies and you will be back in your better element, where you can close the old brain down and veg out for a couple of hours!!!!!!!

[–] screenman 13 years ago

I think you had to actually live through the cold war - especially at its height during the Cuban missile crisis - to fully understand the terror and tragedy portrayed in this movie and Shute's novel. And that of course gives some indication of one's age.

I have this movie, as well as `Dr Strangelove', `Fail Safe', & `The Bedford Incident'. They're fading nostalgia now, an age almost forgotten, yet every time I watch any of them, I feel that prickle of dread which I and many others endured in our youth.

[–] moonstruck4 11 years ago

Agreed. This is a beautiful movie. About love, fragility of life and how absolutely gorgeous ava gardener was.

[–] dmike5000 11 years ago

You hit the nail on the head, I'm pushing 60 now and work with younger people who will not even watch a black and white film. I tell them they're missing a lot, but what do I know?

[–] wlp325 13 years ago

For many of us growing up in the ‘50’s, this movie was anything but boring. You can’t just take a picture like this, take it out of context, and call it boring. Without the context (the threat of nuclear annihilation), it never would have been made.

When I grew up in the late ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, the threat of nuclear attack was on many people’s minds. When our family went to the L.A. County Fair in 1960, the most popular exhibit was on underground home bomb shelters, lead-lined (to protect against radiation fallout) with a 2-year supply of food and water. In school we used to discuss what it would be like to live in a small confined place for up to 2 years. Most of the exhibited shelters had less than 500 sq. ft. of living space.

With the execution and release of OTB preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis (with 500-1000 nuclear missiles, each carrying a hydrogen bomb, aimed at the Soviet Union and 300-500 nuclear missiles within the Soviet Union aimed at the United States, and no technology available to shoot down any of those missiles), the timing and subject matter could not have been more relevant – no one in my “sphere” called it boring.

"At a time when cynicism masquerades as sophistication, [AWTR's] theme is worth touching upon."