"We all wear black,or a lot of us do,"says Johnston,speculating on how the gloom of the film might relate to Melbourne's broader sense of itself."There's a cliche about Melbourne being far more serious,and maybe that's because we're colder and wintry. But we are at the bottom of the earth and we're an out-of-the-way place,literally."
That,of course,is the point of the most famous thing ever said about the film,a comment attributed to Gardner during the shoot:"On the Beach is a story about the end of the world,and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it."While the quote was allegedly fabricated by the journalist Neil Jillett,some room for doubt remains:by his own account,Kramer himself took for granted that it was authentic,insisting to Australian journalists that he did not share Gardner's views.
Ultimately,as Johnston points out,it's a good enough line that it hardly matters where it came from:"A version of it is true to some degree."Whatever Gardner may or may not have said,it is clear that she did not wholly enjoy being stuck in a backwater like Melbourne for the three months of the shoot,her freedom of movement further restricted by the inevitable press storm around her.
"A woman like Ava Gardner at the time was completely frowned upon because she was beautiful,glamorous,but also she lived her life like a man,"Johnston says."That she drank,that she caroused,made her a prime target for the media. But of course on the other side they loved a goody-two-shoes like Gregory Peck."
With their access to Gardner strictly limited,reporters turned their attention to Kramer's discovery Donna Anderson – a 19-year-old dancer from Colorado who had never acted prior to taking on the demanding role of Mary Holmes,wife to a young Australian naval lieutenant played by a pre-Psycho Anthony Perkins.
A woman like Ava Gardner at the time was completely frowned upon because she was beautiful,glamorous,but also she lived her life like a man.
Lawrence Johnston
The last surviving star of the film,Anderson today recalls the experience as overwhelming but rewarding."The Australians were just incredibly nice and it was a big deal for them,"she says."So being a big deal for them was a huge deal for me."
Still,she admits that many aspects of Australia were unlike anything in her experience:the heat,the flies,the sheep being herded through the streets,the drunks appearing in hordes when the pubs closed at 6pm.
Given thatOn the Beach is technically science fiction,how much does it have to tell us about the actual Melbourne of 1959?"One of the things the film hits on is the social mores of the time,"Johnston says."Particularly the Britishness of the city and the pomp and circumstance ... the way that people have that stiff upper lip."
Anderson echoes this last point,noting that the theme of stoicism in the face of catastrophe comes directly from Shute,a conservative who regarded the possibility of apocalypse with more fatalism than fury."These people,kind of like on the Titanic,were civil and good to each other,"she says."They didn't go crazy because they were dying."
In fact,Anderson's character does"go crazy"in preference to facing the truth. Indeed the film's way of oscillating between restraint and hysteria is a key to why it remains so improbably moving.
Sickness and death are discussed in euphemisms,and visualised mostly via absences. Melbourne is both an"ordinary"city and an exotic location at the end of the earth. Hollywood legends are cut down to size,yet somehow keep their glamour – and a sense of the ordinary is maintained,even as we realise that nothing can ever be ordinary again.
These paradoxes mirror the behind-the-scenes tension between Shute and Kramer,strong personalities destined never to see eye to eye.Falloutchronicles the increasingly testy relationship between the pair,stemming less from their political differences than from their conflicting views on whether the steadfast hero played by Peck should stay true to his dead wife,as in the book,or allow himself to have sex with Gardner's character.
Here too,the film tells us something about mid-20th-century Australia,a nation hovering between two sets of values,typified by Shute's British sense of propriety and Kramer's American faith in vitality for its own sake.
"I'm really glad that an American did get the film rights,"Johnston says."I think if an Australian made the film at that time you'd have a very different film. You'd have a very twee film,I think."
Kramer had his own explanation for why Australians,from the federal government down,were so keen to get involved with the project:"They were painfully conscious of the fact that they were so far from the centres of world power and therefore had little to say about their own fate."
Patronising as his statement might sound,the Australian sense of helplessness in the global context – whichOn the Beach captures as powerfully as any film since – can hardly be said to have changed since 1959.
"I wouldn't call it a masterpiece,"Johnston says of the film,"but I would call it a classic."
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Sixty years on,amid simmering global tensions,the film offers a chilling reminder that the bottom of the world may not be not far enough.
On the Beach and Fallout screen at ACMI,February 2-7.