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

I think you're right about one thing. The movie has little relevancy today in that the ridiculous terror threat the government raises every time they want to remove another civil liberty pales in comparison to having 9,000 nuclear weapons aimed at you. I first watched it with my mother after my first year at university in 1969. I then read the book. Honestly, I haven't seen it twice but not because it's boring (I happen to like Greg Peck, Fed Astaire, and Ava Gardner and could watch them anytime in almost any film) but because it as so depressing real. I can't think of any film with a sadder or more poignant ending but if you didn't experience it then it seems unreal... only it wasn't unreal. People living today and who were not alive 50 years ago have no comprehension of what terror really means.

Interesting reading the other replies of the film being boring.

I saw this on TV in the mid 60s, and again a few years later. It was a very moving film then, and has some application today, though the immediacy of the nuclear threat is nowhere in the same universe as during the cold war.

A few "duck and cover" routines a year in school were enough to keep us at least anxious back then. Now extinction events and near-extinction events come on film every other year.

Not offended that I was moved and many of your bored, btw. We all have our tastes.

One aspect of the movie that tugged at me was that there was this high pitch of dignity and decorum on top of this low level drumming of impending doom. We know we're all going to die, all of us, now what?

The title of the book comes from TS Eliot poem The Hollow Men:

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river.

Of which the last lines of the poem is the famous:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

There weren't any apocolyptic films or books of note then, so it was interesting
that OTB seized a POV that would be different than what we would expect - a
heroic battle of good vs evil, with somehow the few remaining good ppl would find some way to survive.

The fishing scene was immensely moving to me. The raucous overly repetitive howling of "Waltzing Matilda" was annoying and boring, but set up the scene where the baritone sings the beautiful last refrain with the four part harmony. This is classic Kramer, the repetitive use of a popular tune to get a particular idea or conclusion, while threading it throughout a film.

Kramer, of course, didn't use the TS Eliot poem in his film. It puzzled me, then, how he expected the title of the film to fit in with his film.

He had a dialogue between Mary and Peter toward the end. Mary had been aloof and crazy throughout the film, then came to a moment of clarity.

Peter: You remember when we first met? It was on the beach. I thought you were everything I'd always wanted

Mary: I thought you were so underfed

The rest of the dialogue was how the next day and the next day he waited and she didn't come.

Then she finally showed up again, the dialogue afterward, she agreed to the suicide pills.

Throughout the film, I found Mary to be quite tiresome, demanding, and *beep* to watch. That scene established who she really was, who Peter got to know and love, and we got to see the two of them together in a fashion that wasn't uncomfortable.

I don't know if it was Kramer's intent in the screenplay, but I always juxtaposed those two scenes in my head, always had, the final beautiful stanza on the edge of the billabong, and the loving story "on the beach" where they
first met.

And his ghost may be heard as your ride beside the billabong, you'll never catch me alive cried he.

Having seen Kramer's films, this was no accident. Kramer employs the same device with Judgement at Nuremberg with Lilli Marlene.

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This movie reminded me a lot of the foreign films of the 50s and 60s - Antonioni's and Ozu's mostly. Personally, I find all their films boring except for 1-2.

But maybe of the subject matter and the language, I felt I understood the complexities each of the characters in On The Beach are facing. Kramer did a very good job expressing the characters in this film, and I felt each scene had a purpose (unlike Antonioni's and Ozu's - which really seem to drag one just too much) and evoked the appropriate feelings of outward doom and uncertainty and introspection with questions such as 'what is my purpose in the world?', 'what keeps me going even though I know death is imminent', 'why is life worth living'? From the audience's perspective, I think it shows our lives all have the potential to be beautiful, which is ironic as the subject matter is certain death.

I suppose I ask myself these questions everyday, so it was easy to connect with the film and the subject matter. But certainly I have felt bored with a lot of highly rated movies, so I understand sometimes I just do not follow or care to follow what's going on.