Stanley Kramer directs Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins in this staid apocalyptic romance about the citizens of Melbourne waiting for the deadly radiation from a nuclear war that has wiped out the rest of the planet to reach them. 

I’m getting old. Some kid at work has nicknamed me “Grandpa” and another asked me what the biggest change I have seen in my lifetime was. And the answer I gave was I grew up thinking at any moment nuclear war would begin and that would be that. I grew up on Mad Max, The Terminator, Threads and When the Wind Blows. And then after the Berlin Wall fell… that mindset… that the only possible future would be dictated by the thermonuclear loaded gun our governments had created… seemingly disappeared. The weapons haven’t gone anywhere, just the appetite, I guess? We’d much rather the slow gnaw of environmental breakdown than the spectacular immediate burnout of a man made extinction level event. This film rather calmly explores the fallout of this. But rather than hordes of marauding mutants racing the wasteland for another arseholes to fuck and then eat, we follow a group of sailors and civil servants going about their romances and admin in the face of timetabled approaching doom. It is a well made but bleak film, troubling yet quaint. If it wasn’t for the annoying repetition of Waltzing Matilda, I would probably reward its classy stoic pessimism with a higher mark. As a collection of haunting dramatic ironies it has weathered the storm well enough.

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