Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows the opening titles and first scenes of a home movie filmed at Canadian Bay, Mount Eliza, Victoria, where the Hollywood movie On the Beach was being filmed in 1959. Hawaiian music and a voice-over in an Australian accent provide the background to images of people on the beach, boats and men carrying film equipment on the water, and the leading actors being escorted to waiting cars by local police.

Educational value points

• This home movie footage reveals some aspects of the making of a significant feature film in Australia. On the Beach (1959), director Stanley Kramer’s post-apocalyptic Hollywood film based on Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name, may have contributed to the growing antinuclear movement in the 1960s. While Shute’s book was a work of fiction, the possibility of a global nuclear war during the Cold War era was very real.

• Amateur films such as this one, usually made to entertain and inform family and friends, now attract attention from curators of film collections and are sought after as archival footage and used to construct history. This clip, for example, includes 'behind-the-scenes’ film information about the camera equipment used and how it was powered, and features candid shots of its stars, which were rare at the time.

• The footage included in home movies such as On the Beach presents an informal record of social history of the time. This clip offers a glimpse of the cars and fashions in the late 1950s in Australia, as well as the style of the police uniforms.

• The handwritten opening titles of this home movie, 'ON THE BEACH’, and the following 'disclaimer’, 'SIMILARITY TO ANY OTHER FILM IS ENTIRELY NONSENSICAL’, are playful comments by the home movie maker and draw attention to the contrast between his film and the making of the major feature film.

• The clip takes its title from the opening comment by the narrator, 'The first day was red hot, a real stinker’, who then links this comment to the behaviour of one of the leading actors. This may be a reference to the alleged quote by Ava Gardner: ‘On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.’ The then Sun-Herald writer Neil Jillett later claimed that he had written this, and that it misquoted Gardner.

• This behind-the-scenes footage of filmmakers at work illustrates how filmmaking is a logistical challenge involving the management of groups of people, including transporting them and caring for them on location. The art of feature filmmaking, partially captured here, is to hide any hint of this process from the audience of the finished product.

• The clip shows some of the difficulties of filmmaking prior to the technological revolution of the late-20th century. The heavy equipment seen has now been superseded by much smaller and lighter options, while the need for location filming has been minimised by using three-dimensional digital artwork to simulate real places, and blue screen technology.

• The novel and the film On the Beach were about an imagined post-nuclear end of the world set in the early 1960s, during the Cold War. The Cold War was a time of intense hostility and rivalry between the USA and the Soviet Union and their allies, and lasted from the 1950s to the 1990s. During that period, the two former Second World War allies faced serious conflict over ideologies, technological developments and defence issues, including the nuclear arms race.

• Novelist Nevil Shute (1899–1960) is best known for On the Beach (1957), partly because of its successful Hollywood film adaptation, and for A Town Like Alice (1950), which has been filmed several times for cinema and television. Shute was born in the UK and emigrated to Australia at the end of the Second World War.

• The clip includes candid glimpses of major Hollywood stars. Gregory Peck (1916–2003) was one of the world’s most popular film stars and won an Academy Award for his role in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Ava Gardner (1922–90) starred in more than 60 movies in a career spanning almost 50 years. Anthony Perkins (1932–92) was on the brink of international stardom in Psycho (1960). Musical star Fred Astaire (1899–1987) played his first serious role in On the Beach.