A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .

 

 

IN MY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD MIND, it was all tied together: a movie I didn’t see for forty years, and its theme song; a movie everyone saw; and a song by an Italo-American lounge lizard. By the time you finish this article, it’ll all be inseparable in your mind, too. Or, maybe, my confusion will have been made more real and logical-like to you, and I will get to live out my rapidly approaching “golden years” without benefit of tastefully barred windows and supervised outings to the therapeutic trout pond . . .

The short version: The movie I didn’t see (till last night) was A Summer Place. It was 1959 and you could not go anywhere without “Theme from A Summer Place” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra playing; on the radio, at the municipal swimming pool, every prom and party, every jukebox (the record sold nine jillion—give or take a bazillion—copies).

The movie me and everyone saw was On the Beach: I had my first date to see it (Linda Rodden, where are you now?). Among other things, it showed the world would end in 1964. . . . (“Welcome to the future, kid” as Gahan Wilson would later say in the comic strip Nuts.)

The other song that played everywhere that year when “Theme from A Summer Place” wasn’t playing and poking melodic holes in the air was Bobby Darin’s version of “Beyond the Sea.”

Stick with me: I lived it; you only have to read about it.

 

* * *

 

A Summer Place. A movie with Richard Egan, Dorothy McGuire, Arthur Kennedy, Troy Donahue, and Sandra Dee. Everybody was talking about it (over the theme music played everywhere), I mean everybody. It was adapted and directed by Delmer Daves from a Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit) middlebrow novel. The movie is jam-packed with adultery, alcoholism, passion, premarital sex and teen pregnancy, divorce scandal, repression, and a Frank Lloyd Wright house—in other words, 1959 in a nutshell. Plus, it had a swell Max Steiner score, with the aforementioned theme. (Steiner went from King Kong—which figures heavily in a dialogue section of A Summer Place—to Casablanca to this in only twenty-six years. . . .)

All my friends went with their older brothers and sisters and their girlfriends and boyfriends to see it at the drive-in. Me, my parents worked two jobs each all the time; the Arlington Theater wouldn’t let kids in UNLESS they paid the full adult price (and sixty-five cents was more money than I saw in three weeks, unless it was summer—it wasn’t—and I was mowing 100' x 200' yards for a buck-fifty a pop . . .). So, as was my wont, I grilled all my friends (and some pretty much total strangers at school) for details. They made it sound a lot hotter than it seemed to be as I watched it on tape last night. (Although, for 1959, it’s cranked pretty high, you do not, as my friends implied, Get To See The Whole Thing. . . .)

So, it was the year of “Theme from A Summer Place,” also On the Beach (more later).

And “Beyond the Sea.”

 

* * *

 

The Bobby Darin song had, to me, the same haunting melancholy as Nevil Shute’s novel, and Stanley Kramer’s movie made from it. (Give me a break, I was a kid. Or guy. Mannish boy. Teenager in love. With death, and the atomic bomb, at least. Joe Dante’s film Matinee, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, has some of that same fatalistic melancholy feel, and is at the same time hilarious, and has some deep insight into the times . . . his time, my time.)

In “Beyond the Sea,” there’s this guy, looking out toward the ocean, singing about the love he knows is there, but has left. Over the horizon, but close, and on the way. I saw Darin staring out into that same irradiated air of the West Coast of the U.S. from On the Beach. Darin sings of his love, across the ocean, knowing, just knowing, they’ll meet again . . .

I mean, this is the Bobby Darin of the Ed Sullivan Show/Vegas days, before his “If I Was a Carpenter”-relevant days . . .

It’s all tied together, the movies and the songs.

I’ve had the words to “Waltzing Matilda” (the theme song adapted for On the Beach) in every wallet I’ve owned from the time I was thirteen, clipped out of a magazine article (Life) about the Kramer film.

The words are by A. B. (Banjo) Paterson, the unofficial poet laureate of the Land Down Under (most of his work reads like a mix of Rudyard Kipling and Robert W. Service . . .). I was in Perth, Australia, in January of 1997, as guest-of-honor at Swancon, a science fiction convention, on Australia Day. I was on a panel at 2:00 P.M. when suddenly, everybody at the convention came into the room and they all sang “Waltzing Matilda” to me. I was moved beyond tears.

The words and music to “Beyond the Sea” are by a Frenchman, Charles Trenet (its original title is La Mer); the English words are by Jack Lawrence. Though it became a big hit in 1959, the year of A Summer Place and On the Beach, it was written in 1945, the year of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . .

And it wasn’t just me, evidently, caught up in this swirling maelstrom of aural and visual emotion, connections and resonance. A year later, Bobby Darin of “Beyond the Sea” married Sandra Dee of A Summer Place.

I started early, being the avatar of the Zeitgeist. . . .

 

* * *

 

On the Beach was released late in 1959.

There’s been either WWIII or some accident that led to the mutual exchange of atomic and hydrogen bombs, and the Northern Hemisphere is devoid of life. The radioactive cloud is drifting south, across the equatorial calms, and Australia and the rest of the Southern Hemisphere await their turn.

The movie opens with the USS Sawfish nuclear submarine entering an Australian harbor—it’s been heading southward since whatever happened, and it’s commanded by Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck). We meet the rest of the cast of characters—there’s Anthony Perkins playing an Aussie naval lieutenant; Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner) as a good-time woman who knows and feels a lot more than she lets on; Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire), an embittered nuclear physicist whose hobby is racing dangerous cars (there’s a lot more about this character in the novel than the movie); there’s Donna Anderson as Perkins’ young wife—and they’ve just had a baby. There are lots of finely realized character bits—two old guys at a stuffy club trying to drink up all the fine wines before they’re wasted on the dead; an Australian admiral and his aide; a really good bit by an actor, playing a doctor, late in the movie as the first symptoms of radiation sickness show up.

These people await the end of life on Earth in the bright Australian sun; what they do with the time left makes up the movie.

Halfway through, the Sawfish goes back to the West Coast of the U.S. There’s a theory some of the radioactivity may have been washed from the air by winter rains, which proves to be wrong, and there have been messages, received in Australia, on the shortwave in Morse code, mostly gibberish, from somewhere near San Diego, that may indicate survivors, possibly children.

The only full words that have come through so far are “water” and “connect.” (Shades of E.M. Forster. The title of Shute’s novel and the movie are from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” the one that ends “not with a bang but a whimper.”)

The messages, it turns out when a sailor in a CIMP suit leaves the sub to explore—it’s at a refinery, the generators are still going—are caused by a Coke bottle, caught in the pull-ring of a window shade blowing in the wind—the neck of the bottle occasionally touches a live telegraph key.

It’s a swell scene. It was in 1959; it still is.

Just a little earlier, one of the crewmen had deserted when the sub was off his hometown, San Francisco. (In one of those bits of reverse casting: as A. Perkins plays an Australian, Aussie John Meillon is the Californian—he’s Mick’s pal in the Crocodile Dundee movies made in the 1980s). There’s a scene where the sub rises to conning-tower depth and Peck talks to him through the loudspeaker next morning, while he’s fishing—all the fish are dead by this time, too—it’s too late to take him back in; he’ll be dead in a few days. They have a conversation that says much of what the movie was trying to say—it all comes down to people.

There are things wrong with the movie—it was, after all, A Stanley Kramer film. Everybody’s stiff-upper-lip, even though these are supposed to be 1964 Aussies and Americans. There are no riots, no Ghost Dances in the streets, no bonfires of money and vanities. The closest we get is the Grand Prix of Australia, where there are crashes galore; it doesn’t matter—they’re all going to be dead in a few weeks anyway—that Julian, the Astaire character, wins. Everything’s keyed so low that Donna Anderson’s breakdown (packing for a trip to the England that no longer exists, instead of facing the inevitability of death, or suicide by Government Prescription #24768, which she’ll also have to give the baby with its milk) seems out of place, as if the character is pitched too high for the movie she’s in.

There’s a great deal of quiet heartbreak in the film; instead of Dwight sliding it into Moira at first invitation, he holds out some hope that his family is still alive in Mystic, Connecticut. (He’s got a BB gun on the sub for his son, which would have been a belated Christmas present, if the duty tour had not been interrupted by WWIII.)

Dwight and Moira start the big kiss and become lovers, in a mountain resort, among drunken revelers at a disastrous early-opening trout season, in a rainstorm. Drunks are singing in other rooms, at the pub downstairs, everywhere. The scene is a great one (despite what Bill Warren, a man I admire inordinately, says in his entry on the movie in Keep Watching the Skies!). The drunks are singing “Waltzing Matilda” endlessly and off-key; a window blows open, rain comes in; the couple jump up to close it, touch, and, as they kiss, and the camera (which has been still as a stump for most of the movie) swirls around them in a 360° circle, the voices downstairs turn into a single smooth baritone, which sings the final verse of the song perfectly, with its lines “you’ll never catch me alive, says he. . . .”

The things which work in the movie really work—cheerful resignation, small grumblings about how nuclear war plays hell with the cricket and fishing seasons; people going through motions they always have (when Dwight returns from the futile Coke bottle-telegraph mission, he comes across a field Moira and her father are plowing, sowing a crop that will never be harvested). Julian, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb, only wants to live long enough to run in the Grand Prix of Australia; when it is time for everyone to die, he closes up his garage, climbs behind the wheel of the machine and guns the motor, thick clouds of exhaust (and carbon monoxide) rising around him—he’s made a very personal choice of how he wants to go.

There are endless lines of people waiting to receive the suicide pills, like people getting swine flu shots or the polio vaccine, while the Salvation Army, under the giant banner “There Is Still Time, Brother.” plays endlessly to thinner and thinner crowds.

The butler at the gentlemen’s club, all gentlemen gone forever, brings himself a drink and starts to play billiards. The lights go out. We assume nobody’s running them anymore, either.

After the Perkins, Anderson, Astaire characters are gone, the only actors left are Gardner and Peck. She, Moira, already fevered and throwing up, on the beach, watching the Sawfish sail away, scarf blowing in the wind, beside her car she’s taken out for the last time; he, Towers, takes one last sighting of the noon sun and goes down the hatch; the Sawfish submerges (a reverse of the opening) on its last trip back to America so the crew can die there. There’s a cut to all the major cities of the world—deserted, a few newspapers blowing in the streets, no movement anywhere except that from the radioactive wind. The movie ends with three close-ups of the Salvation Army banner in Australia.

 

* * *

 

What all this has to do with is the same feeling Darin got in “Beyond the Sea.” It’s like, in the old French phrase, nostalgia for the future. In this case, a future closed off to all the possibilities. An imagined future, without anyone around to imagine it, like thoughts hanging in the air.

On the Beach can almost make you see and feel and yearn for it; for the story to go on after everyone’s gone.

I had my first date to go see On the Beach; this was the future waiting for me, for everyone my age, for everyone everywhere. Only five years away, maybe, said the movie. Or less . . .

Or more. It’s forty years later now; we’re still here, lots of us.

It was a future we didn’t have to live, because someone imagined it for us; had shown us the face of extinction (without mutants, without showing a single bomb going off, without fights with someone over a can of beans, without fuss and bother, not with a bang; but not exactly a whimper, either).

And the music tied it all together. ’59/’60 was the year of “Theme from A Summer Place” and “Waltzing Matilda.” And as Bobby Darin married Sandra Dee, so were alpha and omega linked: a movie about the end of the world AND a song written at the very start of the Atomic Age.

 

* * *

 

Now, it all doesn’t seem so dumb, does it?