which is something I don't do very often. As it happens, I was flipping through 250 channels of nothing much when I landed on TCM, which was running On the Beach.
For whatever reason, I'd never seen it. I had seen the other two movies of the classic Global Thermonuclear War trifecta, Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe.
It's an interesting enough concept, but I simply don't believe that there would be a nuclear war with that much fallout that left San Francisco and San Diego (both major naval ports) essentially untouched, unless the war was fought with neutron bombs, or the Soviets had touched off a doomsday device -- but that didn't seem to be the issue, or at least nobody was talking about it in those terms.
I also don't believe that real people would abandon themselves to fate the way the people did in this film. There are too many independent libertarian types out there who would have built shelters with air filters and so forth and could have outlived the worst of the fallout simply by staying in their shelters. Most of the "survive nuclear war" things I've read in my life suggest that if you aren't caught by the bomb itself, and are well-supplied with necessities, the best thing you can do is minimize your exposure for several months. That can be done by wearing proper clothing if you have to venture outside, and by sealing your living spaces and filtering the air that enters them. Yet the movie claims that there was nearly a year of lead time before the fallout got to Australia -- and in all that time, nothing seems to have been done to even attempt to survive it. The whole attitude of "there's nothing we can do" really grated on me. There didn't seem to be a real self-reliant man in the bunch, anywhere. (Frankly, I expected better from Gregory Peck.)
(And to nitpick from another angle, I don't believe that the full measure of fallout would hang in the atmosphere that long, either...it's called "fallout" for a reason. By the time the air currents in the southern hemisphere became contaminated, most of the fallout would have, hmm, fallen out, either because of rain and snow, or because the stuff is just plain heavier than air.)
On the other hand, you have to consider the hysteria of the time; everybody thought they were just before being blown to atoms.
I think to be honest that if this identical movie were made today, it would fail badly, and not just because the Soviet Union is gone and its successor state is unlikely to lob missiles at us.
Comments? Discussion?
