On the beach

A few years before Stanley Kubrick made the first black comedy about the nuclear nightmare with Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), producer-director Stanley Kramer made the deadly serious On the Beach in which Armageddon takes place as early as 1964. Relentlessly slammed at the time, this forgotten classic still stands firm today thanks to its incredibly controlled low-key approach to an otherwise overheated subject matter. On the Beach is set on the Australian coast, the only place on earth momentarily spared from the effects of radioactive fallout after a nuclear war thanks to favourable winds. Kramer refuses to show any horror of the ‘day after’: not a single image of physical deterioration, of rotting and burnt bodies, chaos or panic. On the contrary, he modestly shows how the survivors try to spend their last days as meaningfully as possible.