Australia during COVID is largely a nation in
lockdown, some States worse than others, with State borders closed to travel,
or exemptive paperwork checked as you cross. The national death toll has now
exceeded 700, and the State that has suffered most is Victoria. The comedian Ross
Noble has commented that Australia is currently like a Spice Girls reunion –
everyone’s trying really hard, but Victoria keeps letting us down. Ouch…
The capital of Victoria is Melbourne, the one Australian
city that rivals Sydney in size and appeal, and probably exceeds it in
cosmopolitanism. With the city under curfew, the newspapers daily feature
disturbing photographs of the streets standing empty and bleak. The images
suggest the end of the world, but Melbourne has already been there. In the
movies.
These same streets were rendered deserted once before …by
Hollywood…for the filming of Stanley Kramer’s apocalyptic movie “On the Beachâ€
in 1959. The contemporary newspaper shots bear a chilly resemblance to the
production stills from that film. Did Hollywood get it right again? Was Stanley
Kramer more prescient than he could ever have believed?
A final shot in the movie - again filmed in a
Melbourne Street, outside the Victorian Parliament House from where today the
Premier fights a valiant battle against COVID - features a Salvation Army banner
reading “THERE IS STILL TIME…BROTHERâ€; while the usual overblown publicity
called it “The Biggest Story of Our Timeâ€, warning that “If you never see
another motion picture in your life, you MUST see ‘On the Beach’.†For once,
was the hyperbole deserved? Double Nobel prize-winning scientist Linus Pauling
said: “It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that ‘On the
Beach’ is the movie that saved the worldâ€. That’s some commendation.
Kramer was big on messages: “High Noonâ€, “Judgement at
Nurembergâ€, “Inherit the Windâ€, “Ship of Foolsâ€, “The Defiant Onesâ€, “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner†– yes, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world. “On the Beachâ€
was another of Kramer’s warnings, a more than appropriate one at a time when
the Cuban Missile Crisis was just around the corner.
“On the Beach†is a movie depicting the last days of a
dying world; dying from fallout caused by a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere.
It seems that some “horrible misunderstanding†launched such a war. “Fail Safeâ€
and “Dr Strangelove†were still to come; horrible misunderstandings, it seems,
were to become de rigueur as a means of triggering an apocalypse. After all, how
else would a nuclear war begin? Life in the North has largely disappeared. The
Antipodes have been untouched by the actual war, but guess what, folks…the
radiation is on the way, and death is inevitable. Hence those damning empty
streets, once cleared for filming, now eerily empty for real.
“On the Beach†was based on a novel by Nevil Shute
published in 1957. Shute was a British engineer who worked on the first British
airship and helped the Royal Navy develop experimental weapons for D-Day.
Following the old story of the insider being the one to see the dangers, he
soon began to warn the post-war world of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The scientist in the movie…one Mr Fred Astaire…yes, that one…explains: “The
devices outgrew us. We couldn’t control them. I know. I helped build them, God
help me.†The novel is prefaced by the now-familiar T.S. Eliot quote: “This is
the way the world ends…not with a bang but a whimperâ€. The theme, it seems, was
self-evident after that.
Shute had started writing adventure novels at night,
and was extremely prolific. While his style was highly criticised, he was a
top-selling author for some decades, remembering this is the era of such
prosaic but successful authors as Alistair MacLean. “On the Beach†is said to
have sold over four million copies world-wide, and is reputed to have knocked
“Peyton Place†from Number One sales position in the U.S. How did that happen?
Critic Gideon Haigh claims that with this novel “Shute had published arguably
Australia’s most important novel…confronting (an) international audience to the
possibility of…thermonuclear extinctionâ€. So what’s the Australian connection?
Post-war, Nevil Shute had visited Australia and saw in
it a place of greater refuge perhaps than war-torn Europe. He moved with his family
to Melbourne and proceeded apace with his literary career. Another best-seller
of Shute’s was “A Town Like Aliceâ€, the town being Alice Springs in the
Northern Territory. This was filmed in 1956 starring Virginia McKenna and Aussie
Peter Finch, and re-made as a television mini-series in 1981 with Bryan Brown
and Helen Morse. Incidentally, Bryan Brown also starred, along with his wife Rachel
Ward and Armand Assante (in the lead role), in the 2000 television series of
“On the Beachâ€. Brown played the Fred Astaire role of the scientist!
Kramer had a number of problems getting “On the Beachâ€
to the screen, not the least of which was Nevil Shute who disowned the
soft-soaping of such an important theme, and the immorality of the screenplay
with its suggestion of adultery. United Artists also saw problems, requiring
the film to be tamed for wider public consumption. There was, after all,
explicit reference to euthanasia as a major plot element, and though radiation
was the killer here, the film certainly avoids anything like nasty blistering
and any other physical deformity. The U.S. Navy was in no mood to supply the
nuclear submarine required for the film. A British diesel sub, HMS Andrew, on
loan to the Australian Navy, was dressed up for the part, while the Australian
Navy had no problem with allowing filming on board the aircraft carrier HMAS
Melbourne.
Kramer’s far-sighted film-making was best exemplified,
however, in the fact that he brought the film to the actual location in
Melbourne. The story of the making of the film is supremely well-documented by
Philip Davey is his book and article “When Hollywood Came to Melbourne†(from
which much of the research for this article was taken), the documentary
“Fallout – Hollywood in Melbourne†(Rough Trade Films 2013), and Gideon Haigh’s
50th anniversary review of the novel titled “Shute the Messengerâ€.
Despite the fact that “On the Beach†is a character
and situation-driven story with no heroics or last-minute rescues (how would
you save the world from radiation poison?)
this was no B-grade production. Gregory Peck, already
a Hollywood icon and just years away from the action-heroics of “The Guns of
Navarone†and the saintliness of Atticus Finch, played the commander of a
nuclear submarine fleeing the North. He ends up in Melbourne and then must
return to the “hot†world to check the survival situation, particularly the haunting
echo of a repetitive human message. Anthony Perkins is his Navy liaison man in
Melbourne. Ava Gardner, speaking of icons, was Peck’s romantic interest, though
he is meant to be unsure if his wife and family have survived. Shute’s sense of
morality, you see. The scientist role, as mentioned, was an entirely dramatic
role for Fred Astaire. Interesting that Gardner (“Earthquakeâ€) and Astaire (“The
Towering Infernoâ€) would still be lending their iconic status to Hollywood
during the disaster movie cycle of the Sevenites. It should also be noted that
Perkins, and Astaire, and Gardner were all playing Aussies. Ah, well. It was
normal at the time and still is today.
There was a host of Australian parts to go around, of
course, going to stalwarts like John Meillon and Grant Taylor, and Guy Doleman
who became Count Lippe in “Thunderballâ€. As a side-note, when a stand-in was
needed for Peck’s swimming scenes, an Australian swimmer called Bill Hunter was
recruited. Reputedly, after he’d seen one of the Hollywood stars require 27
takes on one particular scene, he figured “I can do better than thatâ€. Hunter
became that Aussie screen icon known particularly as the Dad in “Muriel’s
Wedding†and the husband of a ping-pong proponent in “Priscilla Queen of the
Desertâ€. Both films have acquired cult status and have since become Stage
Musicals, “Priscilla†going international, including Broadway.
Even today when Hollywood comes to the Antipodes, the
media explodes. Does anyone in the world not know the names of the dogs Johnny
Depp and Amber Heard smuggled into Australia without quarantine? Does anyone
not know that Tom Hanks was out here filming for Luhrman’s new Elvis movie when
we gave him and his wife a dose of COVID and had them hospitalised? So in 1957,
you can imagine the fuss, especially when inner Melbourne had to be evacuated
for a day.
Legends of the film-making are detailed in the book
and film mentioned above. One of them involved Fred Astaire arriving at
Frankston Station for location shooting, and, on being urged from the crowd to
“show us a danceâ€, is said to have obliged by deftly dancing the length of the
platform. The bigger legend belongs to Ava Gardner who was the victim of a
troll, when such things were still only known as the subject matter of classical
Norwegian music. Gardner was widely reported as saying that “Melbourne was the
perfect place to make a film about the end of the worldâ€. The headlines flared.
The story persists to this day. In actual fact, a reporter seeking controversy
mangled a statement about Melbourne being a perfect place and a stated synopsis
of the film’s storyline about the end of the world, but reported it (completely
falsely and fabricated) as a single, direct quote. The reporter confessed in
print some decades later, but what’s that old adage about the legend and the
truth?
The modus operandi of filming major feature films in
Australia continues to this day, no matter what the actual setting. Production
company offshore. Import the stars. Exploit the locations. Except today, there
are film studios: Warner Brothers on the Gold Coast and Fox in Sydney. When you
see Dwayne Johnston searching for his family in the streets of San Francisco in
“San Andreasâ€, that’s Sunday afternoon in the CBD of Brisbane in Queensland.
The same city street on another Sunday afternoon is where Thor and Loki go nose
to toe in NYC. Amazing what a few prop New York cabs can do. (Chris Hemsworth lives
down the road at Byron Bay, by the way.) The seascapes behind Johnny Depp in
“Dead Men Tell No Tales†and the Narnia cast in “Voyage of the Dawn Treaderâ€
are Moreton Bay, just beyond the Brisbane suburbs. The war scenes in “Unbrokenâ€
and “Hacksaw Ridge†are in the rainforest and other locations in the Gold Coast
hinterland. That fancy Metropolitan Museum foyer where Billy Zane takes on the
villains in “The Phantom†is the Brisbane City Hall. In “Fool’s Goldâ€, Matthew
McConaughey and Kate Hudson have a major stoush in the Brisbane Botanical
Gardens while heading for diving stunts on the Great Barrier Reef. “The Matrixâ€
and “The Great Gatsbyâ€, “Star Wars†II and III, and “Mission Impossible II†were
all filmed in Sydney. Hence all the background Aussies in those casts, speaking
“Americanâ€. The difference today is that many of the directors of the day – Baz
Luhrman, Phillip Noyce, Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Mel Gibson, Taika Waititi
– are actually from the Antipodes. (Peter Jackson stays home in New Zealand
whose Tourist Commission once displayed billboard shots of location scenery
used in the “Rings†trilogy with the caption: “We haven’t dismantled the sets
yetâ€!) And who could forget Meryl Streep’s infamous “The dingo stole my baby!â€?
The pattern began when Hollywood came to Melbourne for “On the Beachâ€.
In a 50th Anniversary estimation of the
novel, Gideon Haigh judged: “If a paper plague was about to descend upon the
world…but with time still remaining to devise some means of preservation…then
Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel ‘On the Beach’should be among the first Australian books preserved.†Plagues and
preservation sound uncomfortably like catch-cries for the world of 2020.
Bosley Crowther in a review of the film “On the Beachâ€
in 1959 wrote: “Mr Kramer and his assistants have most forcibly emphasised this
point: Life is a beautiful treasure and man should do all he can to save it
from annihilation, while there is still time.†Perhaps that comparison of the
deserted Melbourne streets, once for fictitious nuclear threat and once for real
pandemic, will induce a similar surge of humanity. Certainly the world of 2020
needs it.
That banner at Parliament House in the film’s
conclusion was endorsed by the Salvation Army. They lent their name to it
because they had faith in the sentiment. THERE IS STILL TIME BROTHER. Thank
you, Mister Kramer. Melbourne will be back!
(Bruce
Clark is the author of the Saxony Knight thrillers“Paradise for Beginners†and “Outback for Novices†(Strategic Book
Publishing) available on Amazon and elsewhere.)
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