Watch On the Beach For Free

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

An apocalyptic movie without any special effects! Relies for its drama on how characters face the inevitable nuclear contamination, a silent invisible killer. Stars make everything work. Anthony Perkins especially good. Movie's final shots are very effective. (viewed 1/17)

"On the Beach" is beautifully restrained. The way the last survivors of Earth await the arrival of the radioactive fallout is nothing less than stoic. They are like those gentlemen on the Titanic who knew there wasn't room in the boats and continued with their card games or smoked a last cigar as the ship went down.I first saw this film in 1960, but it has held up well. Stanley Kramer ditched novelist Nevil Shute's scenario about how the war started involving Albania and Egypt etc. In the movie, no one really knows; someone, somewhere made a mistake - it's still relevant. The film avoids the obvious. Some filmmakers would have shown atomic explosions under the opening titles to bring the audience up to speed, but there is none of that. The film focuses on a small number of people and their reactions to their impending doom. Apart from anything else, it was fascinating to see Australia on the screen in a big Hollywood movie even if we all die at the end. American stars played the main characters although only Gregory Peck played an American. Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins played Australians with varying degrees of success with the accent. Ava's character is an Australian version of her Lady Brett Ashley from "The Sun Also Rises", but pre-"Psycho" Tony Perkins along with Donna Anderson as a young married couple bring the tragedy home. Donna Anderson is so convincing that for a long time I thought she was Australian, but she is indeed American and features in "Fallout" a brilliant 2013 documentary about the making of the film.At the time, Waltzing Matilda was almost the unofficial anthem of Australia. Composer Ernest Gold latched onto it for his score for the film and virtually created a "Symphony on the Theme of Waltzing Matilda". He gave the tune shadings that go from light and jaunty to triumphant and finally mournful. The song may have been overdone in a scene with drunken fishermen, but Gold's score remains as emotive as ever.Every time I see the film, that ending as Fred steps on the gas in his garage and Ava watches Greg sail away followed by shots of deserted Melbourne streets never fails to put a lump in my throat.

If you don't read the plot synopsis, it'll take you 25 minutes to figure out what this movie is about, so I'll save you some time. On the Beach takes place in a fictional nuclear fallout. It's one of those "We've been nuked and we're all gonna die" movies. I can't watch these movies; they're just too upsetting. So, as a disclaimer, I'll admit that I didn't watch the entire movie. I fast forwarded large chunks of it until I finally made it to the end.Anthony Perkins and his emotional wife Donna Anderson must come to terms that their newborn baby won't see her first birthday. Gregory Peck is separated from his wife and children and will never see them again. Ava Gardner doesn't want to die alone. And Fred Astaire is the man who designed the nuclear bomb, and he drowns his guilt in alcohol. While Fred was nominated for an Oscar for the first time in 1975, I'm surprised he wasn't nominated for this dark, non-singing, non-dancing, dramatic role. Hollywood rewards actors who go against type sometimes, but Fred would have to wait 15 more years before his chance at a competitive Oscar.I'm sure there are people who like these types of movies, like Testament and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, but I am definitely not one of them. I absolutely hate them. I find them scarier than horror movies.

A coastal Australian population (and the US submarine coincidentally docked nearby) awaits the inevitable, weeks after the rest of the world was wiped out by a wave of nuclear-powered, mutually-assured destruction. There's an eerie sense of normalcy to the landscape, by far the film's greatest, most thought-provoking strength. The worker bees all go through their usual motions, as if a great big wall of radioactivity weren't looming off the coast, slowly creeping in to poison them all. It's enough to pull us out of the moment and consider how we might react in such a situation ourselves: when there's nothing to be done, isn't it better to ignore the inevitable, living out the rest of our days in a willfully-ignorant sense of unsteady bliss? Of course, there eventually comes a moment when such questions can't be dodged any longer, and the cast makes some bold, powerful decisions in the face of a long, grueling death by airborne toxin. Those uncomfortable choices, and the ethical quandaries that precede them, form a stiff backbone for the film. The slow, dry pacing of its superficial plot can be difficult to work through, though, and ultimately that's what keeps it from reaching its loftiest ambitions. As with many sci-fi commentaries of the era, you'll have to do a lot of reading between the lines to make the most of this one. It's smarter, but also far less accessible, than most of its modern counterparts.