An On the Beach shifted to inland California. Although smaller in human scope than its predecessor -- the effect of nuclear holocaust on the nuclear family -- it widens the scope in another direction. It starts before that other, which is to say, before the bomb falls, and goes on quite a ways further, after the fallout falls. In between, it faces wide-open opportunities, in both the imaginative and informative veins, to enact things we know, or ought to know, but have perhaps not fully visualized for ourselves: the gaslines, the foodlines, the loss of electricity and of contact with whatever outside world is still out there, the resulting sense of isolation and helplessness -- all that. But the moviemaker, Lynne Littman, soon abdicates this role, perhaps in eagerness to cover her tracks as a former documentarian and to establish herself anew as a fictionist, and she steers quite determinedly toward what can be called "touching" moments: a little boy burying his toy animals in the cemetery, an adolescent girl asking her mother what making love is like, etc. The deaths of the children, one by one, are certainly touching (without quotation marks) to a degree, but something must be subtracted here for what is too easily, or not quite honestly, earned. And for all its scrupulous avoidance of violence, a storyline so heavily weighted toward slow death and body disposal can be indicted for brutality of another type. Jane Alexander, William Devane. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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