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One
source of movies worth watching has been the books of
English-born Australian Nevil Shute (1899-1960). The author
of more than 20 books, Shute created works that were both
popular and contemporary, filled with heroes and heroines
oriented to inspiring values.
As a
novelist, Shute was remarkable because writing was not his
primary career. An aviation engineer by trade, Shute owned a
successful aircraft company and during World War II worked
on secret aviation projects for the British government. His
stories rely heavily on strong characters, usually an
aviator, engineer or other professional, who find themselves
in circumstances which require them to take heroic steps to
meet.
Although
his early writing career focused on thriller-type stories,
his mature writing, which made a bigger impact on screen,
relies on human scale stories involving characters solving
problems particular to their career and background, No
Highway in the Sky and A Town Like Alice being
typical.
A Shute
character, it has been said, lives well. He or she is
engaged in purposeful work, has goals, may be married, and
has an unshakable sense of being in control and getting the
job done. “Work” is probably the single way in which a Shute
hero can best be defined. There is no envy in his soul. He
admires the competent and able.
Perhaps
because of this focus, there are few antagonists in Shute’s
worlds. Human conflict is rare, usually taking the form of
bureaucratic indifference or ignorance. More likely than
not, weather or the elements form the chief danger for man,
not other men. Even in On the Beach, which chronicles
the last days of human civilization after a nuclear war,
there are no overt antagonists. Blame is placed on
bureaucracy and the “vacuum tubes” of computers. A Town
Like Alice contains one of the few instances of a human
antagonist, the Japanese captain who crucifies Joe Harmon.
But he is incidental and gets his dose of justice.
Indeed,
Shute’s world is a just one. Everyone gets what they deserve
in one way or another, even if disappointment is involved.
His is not a Pollyanna world. Tragedy strikes,
disappointment occurs, but there is a sense that the
characters have lived as best they could.
This is
the background informing the three most popular film
incarnations of Shute’s books: A Town Like Alice
(1980 version), On the Beach (1959) and No Highway
in the Sky (1950). Each film has its strengths and
weaknesses, and like the books upon which they are based,
are among the few works by Shute readily available for
purchase or rental.
If there
is a character in the three films who epitomizes Shute’s
values it is Jean Paget, the heroine in A Town Like Alice.
Independent and self assured, Jean first survives a death
march across Malaya in World War II and then singlehandedly
revitalizes a town in the gulf country of Australia. She
falls in love with the hero, Joe Harmon, primarily because
of his value orientation and because he is good at his job.
Wherever she goes, she buoys her friends and inspires those
who hear about her. (Interestingly, this is the only Shute
novel based on a true incident—there was a group of women
who marched across Malaya in the way the book and film
depict.)
The film
version of A Town Like Alice follows the first three
quarters of the novel rather faithfully, detailing a
dedicated lawyer’s attempts to discover the whereabouts of
the heir of a large legacy. Discovering Jean Paget, the
lawyer learns about her background and how she met the
Australian prisoner Joe Harmon. The presentation is
straightforward and detailed, intercutting between the
jungle and dreary England of 1948. Jean, now a wealthy
woman, asks that she have some of her money and travel back
to the small village to pay her debt to the villagers by
building a well for them. It is during this time that she
discovers Joe did not die and is now home in Australia
managing a cattle station in the gulf country of northern
Australia. The dialogue in the film is crisp and clean,
showing the underlying value system of each character. Early
in the flashback sequence, a British Army captain who is in
love with Jean tells her (after she snubs him) that she’s
right and that she’s always practical. This summation is
proved throughout the film (originally a mini-series on
PBS). The film then transports Jean to Australia, where
through a series of circumstances she must wait for Joe to
return from England. The strength of the story is in this
section, showing how Jean adapts the small backwater to her,
making it a place where others would want to live, bringing
the virtual ghost town to life. By revitalizing the town,
she gives not only the others there but everyone she meets
along the way purpose in their own lives. (Unfortunately the
film presents this almost as an afterthought, not adequately
explaining why she is doing it other than to escape boredom
while waiting to marry Joe.) The final sequence in which she
helps save another rancher who was injured is done very
cinematically, using the soundtrack to flashback to
contemporary events—but the viewer should be warned that,
despite this technically adept presentation, the ending of
the film is somewhat flat. Having focused all of its energy
on the war sequences, the narrative seems to be exhausted by
the Australian setting. By contrast the book clearly shows
that Jean’s wartime feats are only a sample of what she can
do. Her productive abilities and focus are not a result of
extraordinary circumstances, but of who she is.
The
characters in On the Beach are examples of the best
Shute people in the worst of all scenarios: the end of the
world. The situation as Shute saw it in 1959 has since
become something stereotypical, trite, and overdone, in
addition to being terminally bleak—so it is all the more
surprising how much life there is in the story. In this
nightmare context, Shute shows people committed to
fulfilling their dreams and achieving values, even as a
radioactive cloud is approaching to end their lives.
The naval
officers look forward to their last mission with
expectation, prepared to fulfill it in the proper way. The
scientist Julian Osborn pursues his dream of being a race
car driver during the last Grand Prix on earth. But it is
Moira who sums up the Shute character’s acknowledgement of
the importance of values. In the film version, during this
last grim, deadly race she asks Towers why Osborn is taking
such risks.
“It isn’t
important,” she says.
“It is to
him,” Towers replies laconically, his eyes fixed to the
racetrack.
This is
the heart and soul of Shute. His characters do what is
important to them.
On the
Beach
is also the most artistic of the three films, with both the
camera work and soundtrack adding to and underscoring the
theme. In an early scene, Towers and Moira are talking on a
porch after a party. The discussion is biographical in
nature, Moira is asking Towers about his family and
background. But the camera tilts slightly, indicating that
this normal scene is a bit “askew.” The soundtrack
underscores dramatic moments. When for example the
Sawfish, Towers’ submarine, investigates a mysterious
radio signal coming from radioactive
San Diego
and a crew member is sent ashore at great hazard, the
soundtrack takes up the musical refrain of the radio wave’s
dots and dashes until the truth is discovered.
There are
no debates or speeches, just people trying to live out the
last moments of their lives on their terms. The book is
slightly superior to the film in that it details much more
clearly how, even in the face of the end, all the characters
in the last bastion of humanity look to the future,
unwilling to buckle while they confront annihilation in
their individual ways.
Shute’s
style downplays the horrors. There are no scatological
details about the effects of radiation sickness. The
narrative says that they are dying, they begin acting sick,
and they die. What’s most important to Shute is how the
protagonists live. Death is met on their terms, most
cheating the inevitable fact of the radioactivity to die as
well as they lived. It is important to note that justice is
granted by the author to these protagonists, every one of
whom achieves their values.
The only
major plot difference between the film and the book is that
Moira and Towers consummate their relationship. In the book,
more ink is given to the idea that Towers is literally
haunted (in a psychological sense) by his dead family, and
that he feels he’ll be disloyal to his wife if he “cheats”
with Moira. The only serious (but quite forgivable) flaw
with the film is the hamfisted last shot, now very dated,
warning the audience that there is “still time… brother.”
Time
is a major factor to Theodore Honey in No Highway in the
Sky. This film, perhaps one of the most popular of
Shute’s film adaptations, is based on his book No Highway
(1948) and is not only the weakest of the three, but the
most loosely adapted. It is enjoyable and captures the
overall theme of Honey’s rediscovery of values, but it has
an overall comic tone, presenting Honey (played by James
Stewart) as an eccentric character instead of a brilliant,
hurt one. In the book Honey is described as exceedingly
ugly, but Stewart with his mid-western good looks has to
play off Honey’s peculiarities.
In both
book and film, Honey is sent to discover the reason for the
crash of a new type of airliner on a mountain in
Newfoundland. He theorizes that a flaw in the plane’s
metallic structure will cause the tail to fall off after a
particular number of hours of service time. Realizing that
he is on one of the doomed planes and has only hours before
disaster, Honey does what he thinks is best to save
everyone. The results are dramatic, and the scenes of the
flight are close to the book and just as strong. The rest of
the film, however, shows Honey as a bumbling Falstaff, not
taken seriously even when he is being serious. While the
characters in the other films are strongly silent and live
well, Honey gesticulates and raves. In this regard, the
filmmakers miss the point of the book entirely both on the
importance of values and the fact that Honey is taking “no
highway” in a literal sense—that his work does not follow
the set parameters, and leads him into new territories. This
is not uncommon in Shute’s other works and would not have
been missed by a more careful director.
Many of
Shute’s books and even some of the films based on them are
no longer available—which is puzzling, considering the
popularity of A Town Like Alice, a continuing
bestseller both in its film and print versions. On the
Beach is routinely placed on school reading lists
because of its anti-nuclear war theme. Several of Shute’s
other books have been made into films and are available
sporadically. These include: Pied Piper, The Far
Country, Landfall, and Scotland Yard Commands
(Lonely
Road).
Yet there is something curious about the film treatments of
Shute, which perhaps explains why so much of his work is now
unknown. Even though worth watching for their many virtues
(especially in contrast to today’s largely shallow film
offerings), they all seem to misuse Shute, to some degree,
by looking away from his core values to some other genre.
They almost seem like works by different authors. A Town
Like Alice is presented in film as a wartime melodrama
and lacks enthusiasm for Jean Paget’s entrepreneurial energy
and vision. On the Beach, faithful to the letter of
Shute’s work, nevertheless gets classed by filmmakers and
audiences as a kind of horror story and does not fully
capture the loyalty his characters feel to their values.
No Highway
lapses into comedy and loses its point. The essential unity
of Shute’s world seems to hover just outside each film’s
focus.
Still
despite these flaws, those seeking heroes in the world of
work have ample reason to seek out Shute. Indeed, given
seven films and twenty novels all filled with the Shute
spirit, we are in a similar position to his heroes and
heroines—with much to cherish and little to regret.
Christopher A. Wolski is a journalist whose
work has appeared in various publications, including
Atlantis and The Atlantean Press.
Copyright
© Christopher Wolski. All rights reserved. |
