Watched On the Beach, due to current events and curious how it held up some 55 years after its premiere.
The film is stiff and clunky in places, but it has its thought-provoking moments. The Rube Goldberg thing with the window shade and coke bottle was ridiculous but I have to give credit for a sort of existential joke there, as in we're all looking for signals of civilization in what can be random beeps. Ava Gardner, as always, mesmerizing, here as a hot mess who struggles with self loathing and Peck's shell of denial that his family is gone. Peck seems to have trouble, as an actor, hitting his marks, and somehow never fully grapples with the awfulness of what is coming down. Also, why must Australia must be represented by one song that is surely one that even tavern drunks have grown tired of? I would have enjoyed a scene where a bunch of roughnecks set upon the trout fishing crew that keep drinking and singing it endlessly.
Astaire's acting is underwhelming, though he does offer some ruminations on the folly of humankind and our penchant for wars that nobody really wants...his words still seem applicable. The Grand Prix race is rather hokey, and we are supposed to believe an egghead professor, if dropped into a well-tuned Ferrari, will emerge victorious. It's oddly dull and would have done no harm to the film if left in the cutting room. The film raises so many interesting possibilities of what people might do at the end of the world which are mostly unexplored. Maybe, in a sad way, that's the point: most opt for meekness and denial.
