Last night, Himself & I watched On The Beach (1959) with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Anthony Perkins.
I generally stay away from any sort of post-nuclear holocaust movies due to an overactive imagination, but I was fascinated by this movie and its story.
However, I do have a question for those who’ve seen it. At the very end, Gregory Peck’s character finally admits his love for Ava Gardner’s character, and then…he LEAVES. He sails off into the sunset in his submarine with the last of the US submariners who want to “try to go home.”
So, why didn’t he TAKE HER WITH HIM? They’re all going to die anyway, does it matter if she’s with him on the “male” submarine, or stays behind like a “good girl”? Everyone else got to be with the one they loved.
This perplexes me. I love old movies, so the stereotypes for gender roles don’t usually bother me, but this seemed out of place, even for the time period of the movie. Any thoughts?
Well, he had a wife “at home.” And it was his duty. And if he had taken his girl friend with him, then everyone else on the sub could have done so, too, right?
On the car racing thing, IIRC that was in the book on which the movie was based.
I don’t remember percisely how the movie ends, but in the book (which I recommend):
The crew take the submarine out to sink it, as US regulations prohibit the captain from leaving the sub in a foreign port. The point is that the captain holds to his duty to his country and remains faithful to his wife despite the fact that both have been wiped out. If the heroine went with him he’d be breaking navy regulations, destroying the whole point of his last voyage.
Personally I would’ve spend my last days boinking the girl and getting drunk on the Australian beach, but then that would’ve made for a less touching movie.
Also did anyone find the sound track kind of…loud and overdone in that film. I liked the movie but the music bothered me for some reason.
I thought everyone else on the planet was dead; therefore how is he cheating? And IIRC the other submariners who had girlfriends stayed in Australia, I thought.
However, based on the info in the spoiler box in Malodorous’s post, the regulations are a good point.
Well, I love the song “Waltzing Matilda” generally, but eventually Himself & I were wondering how many versions of it they could play, since it seemed to take up most of the soundtrack. :rolleyes:
And the ending was about as subtle as an anvil on my head, but that’s kind of the point of the movie.
Well, for their own sanity they were all pretending that their loved ones were waiting for them back home. Or, in a psychological/religious/spritual sense, they were going “home” – a.k.a. the hereafter – to be reunited.
One can still remain faithful to a spouse even if their dead. Also as MLS pointed out, the captain still tries to think of his wife and son as alive, for sanity reasons. As to the other submariners, I think the captain gives the crew a choice as to wheather they want to stay on shore or go on the final mission.
Yeah, that was it, I remembered something was really annoying about the sound track. They kept playing that same tune over and over again, and when I would try to ignore it, every once and a while it would swell up real loud, especially toward the end.
Yea, as someone once told me about the similar movie The Day After: “It’s not exactly subtle, but then neither is a nuclear war”.
It’s interesting to compare the 1959 film with the television version remade in 2000. Both have their strong points, but I think that Rachel Ward’s performance is considerably better than Ava Gardner’s in the role of the girlfriend, Moira.
But Armand Assante, typically, sucks as the captain.
(A historical sidenote: the submarine is named the Scorpion in the book and 1969 movie, IIRC, but is renamed the USS Charleston in the 2000 movie. Not so coincidentally, Assante played Lt. Dixon, commander of the Confederate submarine Hunley, in a TNT movie. The Hunley was lost in the Atlantic off… Charleston.)
To get back to the OP: I think the Navy captain was a by-the-book kind of guy. He didn’t let alcohol be served aboard his sub, for instance, because it was against Navy regs - even though the U.S. Navy had been reduced to just his sub. Having non-Navy personnel aboard for his sub’s final cruise would’ve been too much for his sensibilities.
I’ve seen the 2000 version and read the book but not seen the 1969 version. I thought the entire point was to look at how humanity coped with dealing with inevitable destruction and one coping method was to cling rigidly to meaningless formalism and ritual. Each person has their own way of dealing with the problem including the car racing and mindless sex (not depicted in the book but was depicted in the 2000 movie). I thought the book was brilliant and I would highly reccomend it to anyone. The movie was interesting but I was irrationally pissed off by the laptop that could be powered by a thumb sized solar panel.
