I recently watched a 3 hour movie based on the book. It starred Armand Assante and Rachel Ward. It originally aired as a mini series but they stitched it together into a movie format. I wasn't aware of that before I watched it. Much to my surprise the version I watched was a remake of a movie starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire. I would like to see the original version of the movie if I can locate a place to watch it. The version I watched was very well done and according to IMDB it won a lot of awards. It kept my attention from start to end and I found myself invested in the characters, rooting for a positive outcome even though I knew it wasn't going to happen.

For anyone not familiar with the movie, this ain't no musical. There are mass suicides and the movie basically ends with every human on the planet dead. It revolves around a nuclear war. I must say that after reading the recent book Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen the movie basically arrives at the same conclusion as Annie Jacobsen. If there is a full scale nuclear exchange, it's literally over for everybody.

"On The Beach" available from Amazon.

Free to stream on Tubi, but the quality sufferers a bit.

https://tubitv.com/movies/100016119/on-the-beach

I read the book, kind of depressing. That and Level Seven.

Another Cold War Doomsday book:
Alas, Babylon.

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I read the book, kind of depressing.

Kind of depressing? I think after I finished that, to get the taste out of my mouth, I read A Writer at War, about Vasily Grossman's experience with the Red Army on the Eastern Front.

On the Beach and Level Seven are both great books, bur depressing as all balls, that's for true.

Kind of depressing?

I seriously would not recommend the movie (or I assume the book which I haven't read) to anyone with serious mental or depression issues. I'm serious about that. I am generally an upbeat and positive person, but it did take me a day or two after watching the movie to turn my generally positive outlook around and back to factory reset. I did think it was a good piece of movie making. It made me think. I am considering whether I want to read the book or not.

I agree with the above post. I only saw part of the original film and thought it was a very depressing/downer film (took me awhile to get over it as well; watching Fred Astaire's character kill himself; no!); don't care how well it was made, don't want to see the complete original film and definitely don't want to see an extended 3 hour version!

Watch Dr. Strangelove, Failsafe, then On the Beach.

A very disturbing book and movie. I first read the book while in the service, 1966, then the movie when I got back to the states. I reread the book at some point, very well written.

Note that the version on Amazon and Tubi is the later miniseries remake movie, NOT the original 1959 movie.

I just watched the original again the other night. I think that the 1959 version is much better than the remake, and also more depressing. But again, just my opinion.

It used to be available on some of the streaming channels, but the only place I could find it the other day was on YouTube. And be ready to hum Waltzing Matilda for days.

The original movie was GREAT!
Love the song Waltzing Matilda,it made the movie unforgettable.

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Originally posted by armored:
The original movie was GREAT!
Love the song Waltzing Matilda,it made the movie unforgettable.

It was so perfect, kind of an anthem and a dirge.

The shadow of nuclear war was my generation's "climate crisis", except it was real.
Thank God for Ronald Reagan.

Agree the original movie was better. The remake tried hard to continue being positive and hopeful as long as possible, but anyone who had either read the book or seen the original already knew how it had to end. It was also excessively long.

Read the book and watched the movies. I enjoyed the follow up movie better Mad Max The Road Warrior. LOL

A great movie that is usually overlooked is the Day After.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085404/?ref_=ls_t_3

I love watching these old movies from the perspective of an historian. Meaning, trying to figure out what I can learn about the era/culture that produced the movie.

For example, I saw, for the first (and only time) in my life, Gone With The Wind. After watching that, it made me wish General Sherman had nukes. . . But, of course, the era in which that movie was made was far different than ours, and I did learn a great deal (Scarlett slapping a scared teen slave, threatening to sell her, Rhett outright raping Scarlett, Scarlett screwing (literally and figuratively) anybody and everybody in order to get what she wanted. . .).


Now, On The Beach (the original; never read the book nor saw the re-make) is extremely depressing. It's a fine movie, and it really points out the very legitimate fears people lived under during the height of the Cold War.

There were quite a few of these 'doomsday' movies. The Day After (saw it in 1983 as a teen) literally changed my life, and I concluded that I would NOT want to survive a full-scale nuclear war.

It's easy, in this day and age, to forget what it was like living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Knowing, that any second, I could die because some Ruskie pushed a button a half-hour ago. Knowing that nukes could be in the air at any moment, and I would never know it until the fireballs lit up the horizon (we lived in the sticks, so we could only be directly threatened by nukes that missed their real targets).

These movies reflected the times in which they were made. I agree, too, that one should avoid such movies if bothered by depression. These are NOT uplifting happy ending movies. SPOILER ALERT: The premise of the movie is WWIII happened. In Australia, the continent is more or less untouched, but radiation is gradually working its way southward, so that everybody on the entire planet will soon die one way or the other. THe govt hands out suicide pills so people can die without suffering radiation poisoning. The main theme was accepting fate and learning to accept just die, I guess. Anthony Perkins' wife was fragile and couldn't accept her imminent death, until right at the end. She finally comes to accept the inevitable (character development, I guess?). She and Perkins then took their suicide pills together (as in the background, their baby (who cried constantly in every scene with this family) was no longer crying, meaning Perkins had already poisoned the child).

I have never watched Schindler's List for the same reason. I know it would depress me too much.

IMO the British movie Threads trumps all of these movies because of the realistic documentary style in which it was done and just the rawness and the realization that it's exactly how it would go for us.

It got overshadowed by the American-made The Day After but it's still the far superior movie to me.