New Picture

On the Beach (Stanley Kramer; United Artists) is a Hollywood vision of the end of the world. It is trumpeted as "the biggest story . . . The single most important film of our time." Last week it had a "Global Premiere," i.e., a simultaneous opening in 17 cities from Melbourne to Moscow. Alas, the version of the Nevil Shute chiller (TIME, Aug. 19, 1957) that Stanley (The Defiant Ones) Kramer has produced and directed turns out to be a sentimental sort of radiation romance, in which the customers are considerately spared any scenes of realistic horror, and are asked instead to accept the movie notion of what is really horrible about the end of the world: boy (Gregory Peck) does not get girl (Ava Gardner).

The story begins in Melbourne, Australia, some time in 1964, four months after life in the Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out by a brief atomic war, and five months before the drift of radioactivity is expected to blight the Southern Hemisphere. Outwardly at least, the survivors keep a stiff upper lip about what is going to happen. They go to work in the morning, beach in the afternoon, pub at night. Soon, the drinking begins to get a bit heavier, the sex a bit out of hand.

In this atmosphere, an Australian girl (Gardner) and a U.S. submarine captain (Peck) fall in love. But Greg cannot let himself go with Ava because, even though he knows his wife and kiddies are dead along with everybody else in North America, "I can't accept it." Ava runs off to find consolation with a scientist fellow (Fred Astaire). "I have nobody," she sobs. "I'm afraid."

The end is near. People start dropping like flies, or so the spectator gathers. Actually, only one case of radiation sickness is shown, and the only symptom indicated is a thermometer in the fellow's mouth. Presently the government passes out some lethal pills, and the populace meekly lies down to die--off-screen.

Aside from its sentimentality, the worst of the film's offenses is its unreality. Though Kramer & Co. predict that On the Beach will act "as a deterrent to further nuclear armaments," the picture actually manages for most of its length to make the most dangerous conceivable situation in human history seem rather silly and science-fictional. The players look half dead long before the fallout gets them. But what could any actors make of a script that imagines the world's end as a scene in which Ava Gardner stands and wistfully waves goodbye as Gregory Peck sails sadly into the contaminated dawn.

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