Autumn is not quite here fully yet, the trees are still mostly leafed in greenery, but more and more gold and brown leaves are showing, the pavements have more fallen leaves creating a crunching carpet underfoot. It may not be quite here yet, but autumn is knocking on summer’s door. I don’t mind – autumn in our northern kingdom, on a nice day, creates the most glorious colours, illuminated by a sunlight that is stretched out now to a soft, golden copper. Gorgeous.
The Fringe after dark…
Coming out of a Fringe show at the Teviot (the student union building for Edinburgh Uni, which resembles the Edinburgh branch of Hogwarts), I took some time to walk around Bristo Square and nearby George Square after dark, the area busy and lit up with food stalls and vans and housing temporary performance venues for many Fringe shows.
(above: “Hiya, Pals!” – Fringe banner hanging off Teviot at night during the festival. Below: McEwan Hall, where my graduation ceremony took place a lifetime ago, lit up during the festival)
EIFF 2026 – First Zone (De Eerste Zone),
Directed by Thom Lunshof,
Starring Hadewych Minis, Violet Braeckman, Oona De Kok, Aus Greidanus Jr.
Fenna (Hadewych Minis) is living alone, in what looks like an industrial cathedral, which actually turns out to be an enormous offshore wind turbine, one of the few structures still above the waters in this post-climate change world. The Netherlands has always had a precarious relationship with the sea – historically a powerful maritime nation through much of European history, the sea has brought this small nation riches and trading links and influence across the globe. But with so much of the Netherlands lying below sea level, it is also enormously vulnerable to rising sea levels, with even the ingenious systems of dykes, damns, land reclaimed from the seas and more in a constant battle against nature.
In Lunshof’s First Zone, that battle has finally been lost – climate change and higher sea levels have finally overwhelmed the country, leaving a number of “zones” in various stages of flooding, where the small remaining population tries to survive.
Fenna is in Zone 1, entirely alone in her wind turbine castle – there’s an early scene during a storm where we hear someone banging on the steel door to the turbine and begging for help, but she just stand warily on the inside, doing nothing. It’s never entirely clear if there really was someone outside, or if the noises and voices were all in her head, , hallucinations from PTSD and survivor’s guilt (outside there is nothing except more sea and the odd other turbine, so perhaps the voices were imaginary?). Even if not real, it does serve to demonstrate how isolated from humanity Fenna has become. Silent for the most part, she’s simply in survival mode at any cost, no-one else counts.
Of course, she wasn’t always this way. We see her periodically open a hatch and descend into a flooded part of the turbine structure, just floating there, like an isolation tank, sometimes stroking a small box she wears on a chain around her neck, and there are flashbacks to the pre-flood world, a normal home, children, happiness. When something goes wrong with the hatch during a storm, she is forced out of the underwater exit, directly into the raging sea, and taken far from her isolated home, waking up to find she has been fished from the sea by a family group with numerous children, living on a large boat.
This is the start of Fenna’s travels, as she tries to traverse the various zones to head back to her home. She is still quiet, rarely speaking, and very wary and distrustful of any person she meets (she has been alone a long time), no matter how much they try to help her or how friendly they seem to be. On this journey she encounters numerous people, some kind, some hostile, but the one she spends the most time with is Ive (Violet Braeckman), who is the opposite of the stoic, suspicious Fenna, being open, cheerful and friendly, and, as you might imagine in this kind of story, the unusual partnership starts to have an affect of Fenna (although this is no sugar-coated, sweet tale, this is still a fierce, hard fight for survival for all of them in a world changed forever).
While the story may become slightly repetitive as Fenna encounters one group, leaves, heads to the next zone and meets more, repeat, I think that’s actually part of the point: there is no big scene or sudden action or revelation here, it is a slow-paced hard battle to remain alive in this world. Cinematographer Sami El Hassani fills the screen with some amazing visuals, from the industrial Gothic of the part submerged turbine to wide landscape/seascape vistas, all shot using real-world Dutch locations, which adds some verisimilitude to the scenario.
(director Thom Lunshof (right), with actors Hadewych Minis (left) and Violet Braeckman (centre) at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival, talking with the Filmhouse audience. Images from my Flickr, click on the pics for the larger versions)
It isn’t all just seascapes either, there are little plots of low-lying land still just above the water, where some eke out a living, and then shallows, barely waist-deep, filled with water-based foliage, traversed by wooden walkways (reminiscent of the Fens in the UK). Nico Maas’s superb, low-fi soundtrack – slightly reminiscent of slide-guitar king Ry Cooder, especially his Paris, Texas music – fits El Hassani’s visuals perfectly. Combining these visuals and soundscape with solid performances from Minis and Braeckman, and you have a slow-burn but compelling tale, in a setting that’s dangerously close to being real and not just fantasy. A tale not just of survival, but of what we can easily lose – our shared humanity – if survival becomes our only goal, because survival is not the same as living.
First Zone was a World Premiere at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
EIFF 2026 – Hungry
Directed by James Nunn,
Starring Madison Davenport, Tracey Bonner, Joaquim de Almeida, Michel Curiel, Samantha Coughlan, Olivia Bernstone, Jim Meskimen, River Codack
This was part of the Midnight Madness where, as the film festival organisers put it, we watch “f**ked up movies”, and the “Hungry” is, as some of you will have guessed, is as in the old family game “Hungry Hungry Hippos”, but of course they can’t use that title for their movie (which does indeed feature ravenous hippos!), so hence “Hungry”. We’ve had sharks, giant snakes, crocs and gators and piranhas, but this time, down in the deepest bayou country, there are feral hippopotami!!
Yes, angry, feral hippos – local legend in the swamplands around New Orleans holds that in the early twentieth century, there was a problem with cattle, so someone had the bright idea to import hippopotami from Africa, with an idea they’d be better suited to the conditions in the state, then breed them for slaughter. But that’s just a legend, right? Right?
Sistine (Madison Davenport) is trying to have a break with her bestie, Hannah (Olivia Bernstone) in New Orleans. Struggling to look after her ill mother, pay the mounting medical bills and hold down a job with a jerk employer (who phones her for work during her holiday, yes, he is that big a swine). Hannah meets Rodrigo (Michel Curiel) and his boss Walker (veteran actor Joaquim de Almeda), who runs swamp tours, with guaranteed views of the state’s alligators, and she decides to book the pair of them on the tour to distract Sistine (who isn’t keen on it, but is talked into it).
Next morning, hungover, they join the tour, alongside a family group and a lone businesswoman, Dionne (Tracey Bonner). Unknown to all aboard, Dionne has promised her kids a photo of the biggest alligator in the swamps, but this means going off the usual routes for tour boats, so she covertly bribes Rodrigo, who is in charge of the boat, to take them to a likely site. Luckily for them the biggest alligator is geo-tagged, so they can focus in easily on his location… Except he isn’t there. What they don’t know, but we do because it was in the opening sequence, was we saw a giant gator hunting in the swamps, only to be ambushed by something bigger and more powerful…
They soon find their gator – well, bits of it. And they are understandably worried about what the hell could take down such an enormous apex predator in its own environment? And, well, I’m pretty sure that those of you who, like me, enjoy a fun creature feature will guess what happens next – there’s an attack by a largely unseen something, they are stranded, the fact they are well off the normal tour boat route so not likely to be spotted easily comes out among recriminations, and people start being picked off…
Like I said, I think most of us know how this is going to go, the numbers are going to be reduced, one by one, there will be sudden threats and the equally sudden relief of that tension when they survive, at least until the next incident. Plans to help themselves if no rescue turn up are formulated, ideas exchanged, and meanwhile they know they are in constant mortal danger. The game now becomes who will make it through and who is going to be chomped??
There’s the usual roster of characters, the ones you like and root for to survive, the ones you suspect will die in some sort of heroic attempt to save them all, and of course there are ones you think deserve to be chomped up. Walker a hunter as well as tour guide, is an obvious stand-in for Quint from Jaws, and delights in telling them that hippos are mostly vegetarian, and they’re not trying to eat you for food, like most predators, they are doing it for fun!
So no, other than being hippos, there isn’t a lot new in this creature feature, but it’s not trying to pretend it is rewriting the sub-genre, it’s rolling with it, and it is inviting us to roll with it too. This is made by people who clearly love a good monster movie, know the rules, know what we expect, and are happy to serve it up. It may not break any moulds, but it knows what it is doing, and who its audience is – this is one to watch, late evening, with your friends and some pizza and food and just laugh and shriek, and enjoy it. I think my only surprise here was, that despite a number of kills, the gore level is fairly low, but then it does feel like they’re going for an uncomplicated, fun beast feature.
Hungry will appear on Sky Cinema in September
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
Bokeh is a photographic terms for an object caught in a sharp focus and light, while the background is in soft focus. I was working to try and achieve that with this flower, the contrasting colours of the flower and background, and the strong, beautiful sunlight that day all helped.
EIFF 2026 – The Peril at Pincer Point,
Directed by Jake Kuhn, Noah Stratton-Twine,
Starring Alyth Ross, Dashiell Upton, Isobel Laidler, Jack Redmayne, Jason Hogan, Mat Wright, Mike Mackenzie, Oliver Woolf, Os Leanse
Now here we a delightful wee oddity – and I use the word “oddity” as a positive one. Peril is one of that small but hugely fun trend of really independent movies, the type made by a bunch of friends working together, using whatever money they can scrape together and whatever resources and locations they can get a hold of. Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) is a sound designer with problems – he’s a bit shallow but desperate to make his mark in “the industry” (he loves telling everyone he meets he’s “in the industry”), but his colleagues are giving him a rough time over his work so far, which falls short of what the legendary director PW (Os Leanse), is looking for.
Oh, and despite living in the upper levels of a multi-storey flat in London, he finds a crab lurking under his sofa. Which gives him a nasty nip.
After a stormy meeting with Jim’s colleagues, PW sees him and declares he’s the man he need – to the surprise of the same colleagues who had been telling him how bad his earlier efforts were. But PW thinks he sees a kindred soul, someone who will go that extra mile to help him realise his vision. And what’s his vision? Well he wants some sort of sound that’s never been heard before. Oh sure, that’s easy to find and record…
PW also wants the voice of the “sandwich girl” from a previous production, and so Jim is dispatched with his recording equipment to the tiny island of Pincer Point, to find this vague sound PW craves and to find the girl and persuade her to be recorded too. Easy, right?? Except the girl has vanished, and the island is populated by a range of bizarre, oddball characters – imagine some of the odder background characters from Spaced or the village in Hot Fuzz, and the girl, Marina (Alyth Ross) has vanished. And the man, Hollis (co-director Stratton-Twine), who is renting him a place to stay on the island turns out to be the brother of the missing girl.
Not that many seem that bothered about her being missing – in fact Hollis, the town drunk, seems more put out that Jim came to record his sister and not him (“I can do a woman” he complains). In time-honoured tradition he finds out bits and pieces from local characters, such as an old sea dog in the pub, or from Hollis. They all point to an old legend, of Sye Telson, who selects certain people to join his crew for ten thousand years, taking their very souls. And apparently Jim is just the type the captain likes…
This was such a good-natured hoot – funny and warm, making the most from its tiny budget, indeed often making something inventive and great out of the lack of big resources. In many ways it reminded me of other Indie flicks I have really enjoyed in recent years, like the fabulous Hundreds of Beavers. And like that film, on hearing the cast and crew talking about it after the screening, you get the impression they had as much fun making this as we had watching it, and that permeates this tiny budget, British indie flick. This is one to watch with a bunch of friends.
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
EIFF 2026 – The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman,
Directed by Bart Simpson,
Featuring Adele Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Arnold Roth, Art Spiegelman, Denis Kitchen, Gareth Gaudin, James Warren, Karen Green, Matt Groening, Meredith Kurtzman, Nellie Kurtzman, Pete Poplaski, Robert Crumb, Sarah Downs, Sergio Aragones, Terry Gilliam, William Stout
I usually find some interesting documentary work to watch during the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and this year I found one which dovetailed rather nicely with my own passions – comics. A film about a gifted and influential comics creator. That’s two of my favourite things in one, so of course I booked tickets to this Canadian-Scottish production.
For those unfamiliar with his name, Kurtzman was an incredibly inventive comics artist and writer and publisher. Some of his early work would involve a lot of research (despite the fairly fast and cheap nature of the medium at the time) to get details and ideas correct, especially for his war comics. These were not like most other rah-rah, here are our boys, the Good Guys, valiantly facing and vanquishing the Nasty Enemy. For starters these were aimed at much older readers, not kids, and Kurtzman managed to work in an anti-war sensibility while delivering the story, the sort of remarkable trick Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun would pull off decades later with the influential Charley’s War; no honour and glory antics here, this was war as hell and the effect is had on those who made it back.
Kurtzman started convincing the iconic EC Comics to start looking at new directions, not just their war, crime and horror titles, and his incredibly inventive sense of humour, combined with his distaste for those in authority, would really start to manifest (although some who knew him said this was already apparent when he drew cartoons even at high school). The road to the now-iconic MAD magazine was laid, and entire generations of creative talents would grow up influenced by this.
(restored version of the first MAD Magazine cover)
Simpson assembles some terrific talking heads scenes with people who knew Kurtzman, not least his youngest daughter, Nellie, who is a frequent “anchor” figure through the film, often talking with an old friend of her father’s, and a well-known name in comics circles in his own right, Denis Kitchen, who has carefully archived so much of Kurtzman’s work, and as they go through this material – from published work to personal notes and letters, we get more insight into Kurtzman’s varied output across the decades, while an animation studio took some of the artwork and brought it to a simple but effective form of life, to make it more visually engaging than simply showing a number of static images.
Another framing device used to structure the film is an old Canadian talk-show broadcast with Harvey, which, as director Simpson explained, allowed Harvey, gone now for some decades, to speak for himself about his work and his motivations. Around this and Nellie and Kitchen, we get quite the array of others who knew or worked with Kurtzman, including names from succeeding generations of creatives who would go on to become huge, influential names themselves, such as Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, not to mention Terry Gilliam and Matt Groening.
(cover for Help! Magazine number 1, with comedian Sid Caesar on the cover, the first of a string of famous figures who would gladly grace the pages)
Gilliam particularly is full of praise, and not just for the encouragement and work Harvey gave him when he was starting out, in Help! Magazine, but the connections – for a while they were playing with the photo-comic idea, but giving it their own subversive twist. One of the young actors used in such a strip, a man who falls for his daughter’s Barbie doll, was played by a very young John Cleese. As Gilliam notes, if he hadn’t had this comics connection to Cleese through working with Kurtzman, would he have travelled to the UK to become part of Monty Python? Would he have had the film career he had afterwards?
For me one of the warmest parts of this film wasn’t just those who knew or worked with Kurtzman reminiscing about him, it was about the influence, that ineffable effect where someone often doesn’t even know they are doing it, but they are passing on influences to a new generation, who take it and run with it, doing their own new things, which in turn influence more that come after them. With the run on Help! Magazine publishing early works from the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, who would go on to be pivotal figures in the emerging underground comics scene and the wider counter culture (as indeed did Kurtzman’s work). Or his teaching spell, alongside the equally legendary Will Eisner, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, frequently bringing in established creators as guests to his class.
There’s even a nice segment of Kurtzman in Europe, where his approach to comics and satire for adult readers inspired many in the Franco-Belgian comics scene. It was especially interesting to me as today in English-language countries, although the comics form is treated better than before, most comics creators here envy the way the medium is treated as a proper part of the arts scene in the Franco-Belgian world, so it was interesting to hear of a time when that influence was coming the other way and inspiring creators like Gotlib and Moebius.
(Director Bart Simpson talking with the Edinburgh film fest crowd in the Cameo, after the screening of the Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, pic from my Flick)
And the nice thing about that influence is that, long after we lose the artist – or for Nellie and her family, they lost a loving father and husband, and too early – is that the influence remains, streamed into newer generations of creators, who in turn influence other, younger, newer creators, and so it goes on, a living influence. A warm-hearted look at not just a great comics creator and humorist, but a creator who genuinely influenced the popular and then the counter cultures (there’s a reason Steven Spielberg paid top dollar for a framed early MAD cover by Kurtzman, now, ironically, worth far more than he ever got paid in his own lifetime); today one of the major comics industry awards is named for Kurtzman, another way his legacy continues.
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
EIFF 2026 – The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight,
Directed by Theodore Schaefer,
Starring Constance Shulman, Daniel Zolghadri, Gus Birney, Jack Haven, John Early, Roberta Colindrez
The 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival – the oldest, continually running film festival on the planet – kicked off late this week, as Edinburgh embraces its traditional August festival frenzy (the International Festival and Fringe are already going, the Book Festival opens this weekend, it’s insane how many shows and events there are in our compact city in August). Late last night was my first screening for the 2026 edition of the EIFF, and it was a world premiere, no less! Theodore Schaefer brought us a hugely enjoyable Indie flick, with a very long title: The Arrow at Rest at Every Instant of its Flight.
That mouthful of a title likely refers to one of Zeno’s paradoxes (recorded by Aristotle), which considered the flight of an arrow, something seemingly swift, but, he argued, at any given instant that arrow occupies a fixed space and therefore, within that instant it is not really moving. Given Arrow’s Raymond Carver-style series of individual short narratives, which then start to overlap, this seems appropriate, as, through the various characters and their individual narratives we are seeing individual slices of time, moments offered up for observation, but also, of course, able by the end to see an entire tale, like stepping back from a close look at a detail on a tapestry to take in the entire thing.
(director Theodore Schaefer, co-writer Patrick Lawler, and actor Jack Haven, talking with the film fest crowd after the screening, pic from my Flickr, click for the larger versions on my Flick stream)
There are three main stories here, at first seemingly not connected, although eventually we will see the threads pulling them together. The woman with a suitcase (Constance Schulman), is possibly the closest to the philosophical arrow of Zeno, in that we glimpse her repeatedly throughout the film, starting with confusing glimpses of her in various spots around the city. Sitting on a bench, by the river, passing a building. Each time, to her shock she sees someone else – passing in a car, leaning out of an apartment window – who looks exactly like her. These form the opening, intercut with rapid scene changes, interspersed with fast-moving glimpses of New York, set to a jazz score, mirroring the Suitcase Woman’s own confusion at what is going on, and reinforcing the central idea that what we interpret as a grander narrative is really made up of frozen moments of time (not unlike analogue film itself, single frames, each capturing a split second of time, then run at speed to create what we see as a moving image).
In the main strands we see a pair of younger people, including Violet (Gus Birney), bored with their lack of prospects, working in an arcade, dreaming of some way out, even if it involves committing a crime, while in another, we see a woman, Sinopia (Gus Birney again), a professor, in the middle of an affair, but questioning her life and her choices, especially of her committing to her fiancée for a possible wedding. The final main strand sees Jade (Birney again, really earning her pay here!), this time a hustler, a gambler and a pickpocket, but one with a conscience – after picking some wallets in a busy bar she finds one with a suicide note in it, and follows the person she lifted it from, in an attempt to help.
Arrow is one of those films where summarising some of the plot really doesn’t do it justice, however. This is one of those little jewels that Indie cinema sometimes offers up to movie lovers, it’s a film to experience. Not that the overlapping structure of the stories isn’t important, but it’s more about experiencing it and the way the different angles of the different stories keep changing our expectations and our notion of what is happening, which I found very satisfying (I’m sure some might find it annoying, but it worked beautifully for me).
Director Schaefer, co-writer Patrick Lawler and actor Jack Haven (who you may recall from the excellent I Saw the TV Glow, which I reviewed here previously), were on hand to chat to the audience after the premiere, and their talk reinforced the impression I had from the film itself, that this was a labour of love. Shot on 16mm film stock, giving it a grainy edge with its black and white film, and the jazz score, the fast-moving intercut scenes of the city between events, it reminded me very much of a lot of avant-garde films from the 1960s and 70s, when film-makers were playing with what you could do with the medium.
And indeed at the after-film talk, Schaefer confirmed that they were very much inspired by those older films from the 60s and 70s US indie scene, French New Wave and especially some from Eastern Europe, such as the Czech New Wave, while the choice of analogue 16mm, black and white film with the jazz score just suits the New York location perfectly. An absolute delight for Indie film fans.
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
I’m not much of one for a selfie, I generally prefer to stay on the other side of the camera lens, although I noticed I have taken more in recent months while going through my cancer treatment (no idea why, just have). I did like this one though – Stephanie and I were enjoying the annual West End Craft Fair, which is in the burial ground of Saint John’s Church (buy some nice, handmade earrings next to the tomb of Ebeneezer McCurdie, died 1838!).
Stephanie realised she had bought something from this crafter the year before, and they were chatting away. I noticed the oval mirror hanging to the side and just thought we could get a double mirror selfie with that. I couldn’t really see the camera screen properly and look at the mirror at the same time, so the framing is a bit off, but nonetheless, I like this pic.
On the Beach,
Directed by Stanley Kramer,
Starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins, Donna Anderson, John Tate
“Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you’ll come a waltzing, Matilda, with me...”
When I was a teen, back in the 1980s, the Doomsday genre was pretty well-established, from works like the BBC’s unbelievably powerful and bleak Threads dramatisation of a nuclear attack on a UK city to the Apocalypse War in the pages of Judge Dredd in the venerable (still going and approach its fiftieth anniversary!) 2000 AD comic. But, arguably, Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of Neville Shute’s acclaimed novel is the godfather of the genre. While the style screams the period (1950s), the story, message and, importantly, the refusal to sugar-coat any possible ending is remarkably unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film from 1959.
For those not familiar with the book or the film, it is an early depiction of World War III – not one that takes in combat scenes or the sight of nuclear weapons being dropped by bombers on cities, though. No, On the Beach is set in the aftermath – as far as anyone knows, the entire northern hemisphere has been destroyed, everyone annihilated. Entire nations are simply gone, thousands of years of human civilisation vanished into the blinding light of the atomic age.
Australia is one of the last safe havens, and even that is temporary – scientists and the military plot the clouds and winds carrying radioactive particles, and realise that it is a matter of weeks until they blow across the oceans to that massive island continent. There is no defence, nothing that can be done, no last minute, desperate plan that might just work. No, instead the government is making ready large supplies of painless suicide pills for the entire population, as the only alternative to a slow, lingering, painful death by radiation poisoning. Yes, it truly is that hopeless.
Into this we have the USS Sawfish, one of the last surviving vessels – ironically one of the new nuclear powered subs – which only escaped obliteration because she was submerged at the time. Captain Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck) is her skipper, trying to maintain a calm, thoughtful demeanour befitting a captain, to reassure his men, while internally grappling with the realisation at the large scale that his entire nation, and soon the world, is gone, and on the personal level, that his wife and children are gone too. There’s a lot of the attempting the stiff upper lip approach by both Towers and many of the other characters, especially the naval personnel (a young Anthony Perkins as an Aussie officer Peter Homes, assigned to be liaison to the Sawfish also tries to maintain that keep calm and carry on approach, which makes the odd sudden and very understandable outburst of emotion all the more powerful).
Knowing the end is approaching, some take a desperate, almost carnival approach of parties, drink and even dangerous pursuits – tired, often drunk atomic scientist Julian Osborn (Hollywood royalty, Fred Astaire, here playing a very dramatic and serious role very distant from his famous song and dance work) is restoring a beautiful Ferrari racing car, which he enters into a road racing competition, where it s clear both he and the other drivers are going beyond reckless. Why bother about any danger by pushing it as far as you can? You’re going to die slowly in a few weeks anyway, why not crash and burn now, as many of the drivers do.
Against this,two events offer a slender hope – a Morse code signal coming from the West Coast of the US; gibberish, but constantly broadcasting, in a place where they thought nobody could still be alive, requires investigating. And some scientists theorise the winds and rains may disperse the radioactive clouds into the ocean before they cross into the southern hemisphere, meaning perhaps Australia, or at least Antarctica may be spared (no mention of New Zealand, curiously!).
As a nuclear sub, only Sawfish has the range to make this trip safely (although an Australian submarine was used in the film, the US Navy reluctant to help in a film with this topic), so Peter and Julian are both seconded to the submarine for the voyage. Peter worries that the cloud could reach Australia before he returns, and desperately tries to get the suicide pills early, for his wife and baby daughter, just in case. Later scenes when the pills are made generally available, closer to the end, depict patient queues of Australians lined up at government facilities, giving their names and family member’s names to receive a box of the pills; no screaming, no histrionics, it’s more reminiscent of the queues of patiently resigned folk lining up for their rations during the previous war, which of course would still be fresh in the memory of much of the original audience back then.
Spoiler warning: yes, I know this is from 1959. but I have to assume a few people have not seen it and have never read about the ending, so if that’s you and you don’t want to know more before seeing it, skip to the final paragraph.
When the submarine reaches the frozen north and takes samples, it finds that the radiation is actually higher – the theory it may disperse is wrong. The last hope that Australia at least may be spared is gone, the men know now that the end is coming and there is nothing anyone can do against it. That leaves the signal. The sub stops off the coast of San Franciso, Towers peering through the periscope at a city still standing, but entirely devoid of people. In an eerie scene he allows his men, one by one, to take a look through the periscope, their last view of their homeland. Each looks silently, lost in their own thoughts before pushing up the handles of the scope with a bell-like clang, again and again. It is simple, but powerful.
Tracking the signal to a refinery near San Diego, one crewman goes ashore in a radiation suit, but finds nobody. Hydroelectric power means the electricity is still running, the machines ticking over for now, but not a single person there. He eventually finds the radio room, and a Morse key – the drawstring of a window blind has caught in it, and an empty Coke bottle has landed on the key. When the wind blows, the blind moves, the string lifts the key, then the weight of the bottle makes it go back down, sending a gibberish signal. No, there isn’t some desperate survivor, just this accidental happen-stance.
As I said, this is a story which eschews the idea of a last minute ray of hope or plan that can save someone or anyone, it is resolutely bleak about the prospect, and indeed so it should be. By the 1970s and 80s the peace movements like CND and others had exposed the utter lunacy of the two superpower blocks facing off with weapons which would leave no winner, only annihilate our entire species (and much of the other species of animal and plant life with it), and those of us growing up in that era were well aware that the sound of an air raid siren could mean nuclear annihilation in a few minute. But this is one of the first major media productions to grapple with that idea, and it is powerful, despite also being very of its time (not the modernity of the more optimistic 60s, some of it closer to the 1940s wartime movies in many ways, just with a terrifying new weapon, a legacy of the last days of that conflict).
Towers, when ashore, has been introduced to Moira, another Hollywood legend, Ava Gardner. Ava pretends to be a lush, the older but still single party girl, but Gardner gives her more humanity, a woman who has reached her forties in that era but not married, no children, now finding there is almost no time left for love, or anything. Her flirtations with Towers go nowhere at first, understandably – he has only just lost his family after all. But slowly the two of them find that talking to one another rather than drunken seduction brings them closer, and they start to fall for one another, even although they know how little time is left (again shades of those classic WWII movies, the desperate making the most of the moment because you never knew when your number might be up, except here everyone knows it).
Which makes the final scenes all the more quietly heartbreaking. With little duty left to perform in the final weeks, Towers tells his crew to choose what they want to do. Some will stay for the end in Australia but most vote to sail back to the US. They know they are all going to die regardless of where they are, but they would rather do it back home. Towers understands – he would dearly love to stay to the bitter end with Moira, but he is the skipper, and he simply cannot abandon his men on a final voyage, so he goes with her. A last scene of Moira, standing on the coast, watching the Sawfish sail out for the final time is bitterly sad, and, as it does throughout the film, the unofficial Aussie anthem of Waltzing Matilda plays over one of the saddest, bleakest endings in cinema.
Kramer was never the flashiest of directors, and this is often fairly staid, but actually that is to its advantage – that quieter, stiller approach adds to the power in the way that more mobile camerawork and more histrionic behaviour by the characters just wouldn’t (and this is, like the previous war era, still a time when you were expected to button it up, keep a brave face on, stiff upper lip and all that). But he was a master of social commentary – this is the man who directed The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind and Judgement at Nuremberg, among others – and this comes through here, A world just really starting to understand the implications of the awesome power that had been unleashed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but now vastly more powerful and in numbers enough to devastate the entire planet, entering the era of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), where each side stockpiled more and more powerful nuclear weapons to scare the other side into hopefully not daring to use their stockpile in fear of retaliation.
It’s quiet but incredibly powerful, and as I indicated earlier, it’s pretty remarkable for the period it was made, a window into a dawning global consciousness of the rising threat of atomic annihilation, and it is an absolute classic that deserves its place in cinematic history. I’m glad to see it getting this shiny new, high-res BFI release, complete with a slew of extras, including a choice of two commentaries, some rare 8mm film footage from behind the scenes, interviews, and short film Operation Hurricane (1952), which documents the British push to develop its own nuclear weapons alongside the Soviets and Americans. I apologise for the longer than usual review, but it’s a classic, and an important part of film history, and it deserves it.
“Who would ever have believed that human beings would be stupid enough to blow themselves off the face of the Earth?”
This new high-def release of On the Beach is available from the BFI now.
This review was originally penned for Live For Films
Exit Party,
Emily St John Mandel,
Picador
Hardback, 320 Pages
ISBN: 9781035081288
Toronto Book Award and Arthur C Clarke Award winner, Emily St John Mandel returns, following her excellent Sea of Tranquillity (reviewed here), with a new novel Exit Party. As with Tranquillity, this narrative takes in different places and times, with different characters who are connected. Indeed the times, places and people are more connected than they can know at the start.
It’s the very near-future, and Ari has just been released from a long prison sentence, sharing an apartment in LA with her friend, Gloria. A civil war has just finished, and the US no longer really exists, having broken up into a series of competing regions, states and even city-states, with warring militias everywhere. Ari and Gloria are celebrating the end of the curfew and the removal of the last peacekeeper troops from the streets of the Californian Republic.
It’s at a party hosted by Kareem, a friend of Gloria’s, that Ari first starts to notice strange things – she’s always had a knack, an intuition of sorts for when something is about to happen or something peculiar is about, even when others don’t notice at first. In this case she observes a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress, then later the same woman, now dressed down. At first she assumes she changed – perhaps she spilled something on her dress? But then she sees both women at the same time, something unusual happens to Gloria, and then Kareem vanishes. She sees him, goes to talk to him, but he’s gone from the room he entered, and she can’t see how he could have exited without her seeing him.
What begins as a gentle tug at her senses that something peculiar happened starts to build slowly, bit by bit, over the narrative. Ari’s intuition tells her when to move to another location to escape possible danger, and in this fragmented former US, danger is everywhere. She meets Nico in another city, who was also at that party, except she knew this woman under another name, but yes, this is the same person. Or is it? They talk warily and eventually Nico confesses she too saw odd things at the party, and confirms Kareem has never been seen since, and she confirms the double sightings of others, almost like there were two, slightly different versions of the same people. In fact Nico calls Ari “Ibari” when she first meets her, not a version of her name that Ari goes by, so she is puzzled how Nico would even know it.
As with Tranquillity, we move through different character perspectives, including “Ibari”, who is a federal officer, a kind of not so secret police officer in a US that didn’t disintegrate like Ari’s, but which is now a totalitarian regime, where children inform on their own parents (but hey, crime is low and the trains run on time!), a total opposite from Ari’s fractured, disintegrating US. We move through the characters and through the years, and as with her previous book, Mandel rather deftly takes all of these pieces of the puzzle, and arranged them, facet by facet, until we have the whole jewel, bringing all the connections together, each illuminating the other strands.
I don’t want to go into it any further because of possible spoilers, but suffice to say that as with Sea of Tranquillity, I found this not only an interesting narrative, but a beautiful bit of writing craft, to float various characters and spaces and times, then slowly bring them together; as with that previous book I found this highly satisfying.
Exit Party is published in Hardback by Picador/Macmillan on the 17th of September; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity
If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)
It’s nearly August once more, and in Edinburgh that means the insane frenzy of the festivals: the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, joining the Arts Festival and the already-running Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival.
It’s unbelievably busy – Edinburgh, as you might expect, is pretty full of visitors year-round, and especially in the spring and summer months, but then add the festival season on top of it, and it bursts at the seams. Simple things like trying to get across town becomes an exercise in frustration for locals trying to get to appointments or work, because the sheer numbers slow the bus service to a slow treacle trickle in the city centre, adding hugely to journey times. When you are off and can enjoy the sheer energy of the festivals, it’s amazing, when you live here and are trying to get to work or to a hospital appointment and it takes twice as long, that’s a bit different!
I was walking home from my book group the other evening, through Bristo Square at Edinburgh University. Normally an open space (often filled with skateboarders as well as students and tourists), it was now being set up for the Fringe with temporary venues for food, drink and box offices, while nearby George Square Gardens is filled with temporary theatre structures. It was a rare rainy night – after a lot more hot, sunny weather than we normally get in Scotland, this was a dreich evening of dark, grey clouds and rain. But as I passed the illuminated Fringe show posters, the rain made the lights and colours reflect on the wet pavement, and it was begging for a few photos, so of course I stopped and stood there in the rain to take some pics.
