The threat of nuclear destruction, implicit in the newspaper headlines of the day, naturally leached into popular culture.
Sixty years ago, as the Cold War intensified, the end of the world seemed much too close for comfort. Of On the Beach he once wrote, “Its subject was as serious and compelling as any ever attempted in a motion picture-the very destruction of mankind and the entire planet.” Kramer died in 2001, but as the Iran nuclear agreement, renewed US-Russian nuclear tensions, and the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings make headlines, his Eisenhower-era movie retains an unfortunate relevance.Ī different time-or maybe not so different. Stanley Kramer was well-known for releasing such “message” films as Judgment at Nuremberg, Inherit the Wind, and Ship of Fools. She is renowned for warning, “It could happen tonight by accident,” and with the onset of nuclear winter, “We’ll all freeze to death in the dark.”īut what about the book itself and the 1959 movie made from it? Recently, after watching a 2013 documentary called Fallout (produced by Rough Trade Pictures in association with Screen Australia and Film Victoria) that ponders these questions, I sat down with Karen Sharpe Kramer, widow of the producer-director of On the Beach. She went on to become both a pediatrician and a feisty anti-nuclear activist, an inspiration to others in the non-proliferation community and in the nuclear humanitarian initiative. The story’s effect on Caldicott, then a 19-year-old Melbourne medical student who’d just learned about genetics and radiation, was profound. On the Beach, first a best-selling novel and then a major Hollywood film, confronts the viewer with a number of questions: How would you behave if-in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse-you knew you only have a few weeks or months left to live? Would you carouse riotously, knowing the end is near? Deny that the entire thing is happening? Hope against all logic for a miraculous reprieve? Try to maintain a core of decency in the face of imminent death? Wish that you had done something long ago to prevent nuclear war in the first place? These words mark the reaction of a young Australian named Helen Caldicott to a story of the aftermath of mistaken nuclear war, in which those who never even took sides were faced with the slow advance of deadly nuclear radiation on their shores.
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