1959 science fiction, dir. Stanley Kramer, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner:
IMDb. The bombs have dropped;
airborne fallout is poisoning the world, gradually drifting south.
What do we do now?
And that clean-cut young Royal Australian Navy officer is Anthony
Perkins, the year before Psycho. This was the biggest-budget
production of any of the post-apocalyptic films I've been looking at
recently, but while Nevil Shute had been paid to help with the
adaptation of his book he got irked and walked out when it became
clear that the crew simply weren't going to listen.
The film was made in and around Melbourne, as were many foreign
productions in at about this time; I assume there were tax breaks. But
the Royal Australian Navy cooperated (where the US Navy wouldn't), so
we get the actual carrier HMAS Melbourne riefly on screen, before her
unfortunate blue-on-blue incidents. The US nuclear submarine that's
the focus of much of the film is, however, played by HMS Andrew, an
Amphion-class diesel-electric attack boat, and you can see the
exhaust laying down a smokescreen in the opening shots.
Many of the high points of the book are here, such as the voyage to
see whether the fallout is being washed out of the air fast enough to
allow for some hope of survival, and to investigate a nonsensical
Morse signal being transmitted from the west coast of the USA.
But I can't help sympathising with Shute, as the film
comprehensively misses the point of the book. In the book, Towers
and Moira don't have the affair that they're shown to have here, not
because he's pining after his family, not because he can't come to
terms with their deaths (things presented here as obstacles that he
can overcome to have a last bit of fun before the end), but because
staying loyal to his wife (even while knowing full well that she is
dead) is the right thing to do. And Moira knows it too. In other
words, the highest standard of morality is what you do because you
know it's right, rather than because other people will look at you
funny if you don't.
I'm not surprised the film gets this wrong: I don't think anyone who
understood honour and morality would last long in the business. But
it's a shame, because the thing is very well-made in most other
respects; if it weren't trying to be an adaptation of a book, it could
stand quite well on its own.
The Waltzing Matilda motif is quite effective. The first time. But
every bit of incidental music uses it, and one starts to wonder
whether the composer knew any other tunes.
There's a fine small part for Kevin Brennan as a Navy doctor. He has
done the necessary thinking, he's come to terms with it, now take your
bad news like a big boy and get out of my surgery, I have other people
to make comfortable while I still can.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.