‘On the Beach’ Still Hits Home

Those who thought that Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger signified the end of civilization as we know it may be surprised to learn that Britisher Nevil Shute made an even brawnier statement about our potential for self-destruction in his novel “On the Beach.”

Now it’s a sinewy TV movie.

Published in 1957 and made into a credible theatrical feature two years later, “On the Beach” gives us humanity in a noose of its own making, with clouds of radioactive fallout and gloom drifting across coughing, wheezing Australia after nuclear war has erased life in the Northern Hemisphere. Yet even as Armageddon slowly embraces them, romance blooms fleetingly in Melbourne between a free-spirited Aussie woman and a U.S. submarine commander whose wife and children were blasted away in America.

Meanwhile, in this atrophying metropolis where looting, chaos and melancholia now coexist, many people go about living their lives as normally as possible, knowing that in two months they’ll be dead.

How at least some of them carry on with dignity represents the great strength of humankind, how they came under this death sentence is humankind’s epic shortcoming.

The absence of a Cold War makes Shute’s message no less acute in today’s combustible mingling of nuclear arsenals and global alliances than it was when he delivered it in an era that also produced the remarkable “Dr. Strangelove,” as well as that other doomsday film, the tingly “Fail Safe,” which CBS reworked this season as a live TV drama. Just as the early ‘80s brought quietly powerful “Testament,” which also portrayed our capacity for civility in the face of nuclear doom, and “The Day After,” ABC’s splashy disaster movie that had missiles obliterating Lawrence, Kan.

This unease about science and technology careening toward possible catastrophe is expressed vividly and movingly in Showtime’s new “On the Beach,” a work of quality and substance directed by Russell Mulcahy and betrayed only by occasional lapses into schmaltz. The last of these slightly alters Shute’s original ending but not the indelibly sad outcome that leaves you tearful and disturbed.

How timely and ironic that “On the Beach” is arriving following fierce congressional battles regarding normalizing U.S. trade relations with a China that continues to growl at Taiwan. Conflict between China and the Soviet Union touches off the nuclear war in Shute’s novel. And Showtime’s teleplay by David Williamson and Bill Kerby flashes forward to 2006, when a Chinese blockade of Taiwan initiates a missile exchange with the United States in a clash whose fallout goes global.

“All they had to do is come--come to the tables, break a little bread,” angrily protests U.S. Navy Cmdr. Dwight Towers (Armand Assante), now under the Australian military after surviving the war with his sub, the USS Charlestown, and crew, and assigned to take them “up north” in search of radiation levels low enough for human survival. Meanwhile, hopes are raised by a mysterious, but reassuring electronic message from near Anchorage that says, “Don’t despair.”

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Before embarking on his mission, Dwight meets and falls for cheeky Moira Davidson (Rachel Ward) at the house of her sister, Mary (Jacqueline McKenzie), whose husband, Peter (Grant Bowler), is an Australian naval officer assigned to accompany Dwight on the Charlestown’s critical mission. Her ex-flame, meanwhile, happens to be Julian Osborn (Ward’s husband, Bryan Brown), a brilliant but cynical Ferarri-racing scientist whose skills are needed aboard the Charlestown to interpret those radiation levels,

Although the grieving Dwight still speaks of his family in the present tense, soon he and Moira are close mates. Silhouetted against the twilight at her isolated place at the seashore, the smitten lovers dance joyously to Glenn Miller and “In the Mood,” seemingly without care, before diving into bed like two subs in the night.

This fling before the final act is the emotional soul of “On the Beach,” along with its characters’ attempts to give meaning to their last days and confront what’s coming in their own individual ways, including living on the wild side in some cases. As someone says, “What the hell, we’re all gonna be gone in a few months.”

For those who don’t want to await the inevitable nausea and other agonizing effects, the government will be handing out lethal pills.

Occasional grunts and mumbles aside, Assante is seethingly on target as a tough man tormented by visions of his family’s demise, and Ward is persuasive as the earthily sensual Moira. But it’s hard buying Brown’s immature lug of a Julian as the brain he’s supposed to be.

Running three hours plus an intermission, “On the Beach” has the look of a production that was designed as a miniseries. Without a doubt it’s long and it’s bleak. But not too long or bleak, perhaps, for a story that memorializes the death of humanity.

* “On the Beach” airs Sunday at 8 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.