Today in Supreme Court History: August 29, 1967

8/29/1967: Justice Neil Gorsuch's birthday.

Justice Neil Gorsuch

 

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, 396 U.S. 1215 (decided August 29, 1969): Brennan vacates Circuit Court’s stay of desegregation plan; Circuit Court’s rationale was to allow time to build public support for plan, but that is not a good enough reason (Denver went through years of litigation with various plans, finally ending in 1991)

[Dan Schiavetta]

today's movie review: On the Beach, 1959

After a nuclear war a spreading radioactive cloud is killing all of humanity. Southern Australia (here, Melbourne) is the only place not yet affected, and they all know they only have weeks to live.

No freakouts (well, almost none). People going about their usual business until the last moment. Gregory Peck (commander of an American submarine which happened to be in the area) window-shopping and buying Christmas gifts for the wife and kids in Connecticut whom he knows are dead.

People lining up quietly to receive government-issued cynanide pills.

The men's club servant after the club closes for good, pouring a drink from the "good stuff" as he contemplates the pool table in front of him.

The secretary finally telling her boss that she loves him.

Salvation Army rallies with the banner (directed at us as well as sinners): "There is still time . . . brother!" Attendance growing sparser as the final days approach.

Peck's sub goes to San Francisco to track down what turns out to be a random telegraph signal (in hazmat suits they find that the key was being pressed by a pop bottle that got tangled up in a window shade). A crewman jumps ship and swims to shore to be in his home town. As the sub is about to leave, Peck speaks over the loudspeaker to him as he fishes from the dock where he fished as a child, telling him of the symptoms he can expect to feel in a few days.

Peck breaking down to his necessarily temporary lover Ava Gardner: "Anyone in the service knows that he might die and leave his family without a father. But I never thought that I would be left alive . . . and they . . . would be dead!"

No mention is made of how this (what we used to call) nuclear holocaust happened. At lunch in the submarine someone asks who caused it. Fred Astaire, as an old doctor in his first non-dancing, serious role, says, "Albert Einstein." Later he participates in the 1964 (i.e., warning! this could happen in the near future!) Australian Grand Prix. With their lives over anyway, the drivers are very fast and reckless, with some spectacular crashes. Astaire wins and, after affixing the medal to his racing car, closes the garage door and all the windows and starts the motor. Probably a painless death.

Anthony Perkins, before his career was ruined by Psycho, was noted for portraying confined anxiety. Here as a young Australian naval officer he tries to comfort his young wife (Donna Anderson) as he convinces her to take the cyanide, after mixing some into their baby's formula. "Most of our years are being taken away . . . and all of Jennifer's."

Why Australians have embraced "Waltzing Matilda", a silly song about a cattle thief, is an ongoing mystery. Anyway here it's played about 100 times. It is devastating in the last scene, where a lonely trumpet plays it over shots of a desert downtown with motionless trolley cars. The film crew had to shoot this at daybreak when no one was on the street and nothing was moving.

The movie was based on Nevil Shute's book of the same name. It impressed Churchill, who in his last days in office was disturbed by the newly-developed hydrogen bomb, far more destructive than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He sent a copy to President Eisenhower. Whether Ike fully appreciated the danger of nuclear war is a matter of historical debate; at times he seemed to regard nuclear weapons as simply another tool of conventional warfare. There had been studies of "broken-backed" warfare, namely how to fight on after both sides are debilitated by the A-bomb but not extinguished, but with the H-bomb that all became moot.

This was the first film to deal with nuclear apocalypse. It was given the old-style Hollywood treatment, with a star-studded premiere. The premiere was in Australia where they were glad to see this film get publicized, pissed off as they were at the nuclear testing that was going on near them.

I also read the book, which necessarily has more in it. I was struck by how well old people handled the upcoming extinction, which is not surprising when you think about it.

The direct descendant of this film was the influential 1983 movie "The Day After", but that's for another post.

[Frank Drackman]

"Night of the Living Dead" did this in a much more entertaining way.

[Magister]

Night of the Living Dead did not present the end of all human life; or even the collapse of human civilization, unlike many zombie apocalypse movies.

[David Nieporent]

Other than the fact that The Day After also dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war, I don't think it had a whole lot in common with OTB.

[Dan Schiavetta]

An odd comment.

“Other than the fact that this film was almost the only other film on the same topic and dealt with it in almost the same way, it didn’t have a lot in common with it.”

[Magister]

Decades since i saw The Day After, but "No freakouts (well, almost none). People going about their usual business until the last moment." does not seem consistent with my recollection of it.

[SRG2]

I read the book and saw the film as a boy, and I have only a few memories of both. I particularly remember the motor-racing scene.

I note that Ava Gardner was one of those actresses who, as a boy, I did not "get" at all. I grew up.

[Bob from Ohio]

"spreading radioactive cloud is killing all of humanity. "

A "cloud" unaffected by wind or rain. High enough to "spread" but low enough to kill all life. Moving southwest over thousands of miles of ocean over several months but still 100% lethal.

Early example of left scientific ignorance.

[Magister]

Sure, they'd all be killed in a nuclear winter or the Earth would be thrown out of its orbit or whatever; it's not like people then were certain how likely human extinction was in a nuclear war. The idea that nuclear war would be no big deal is an early example of right wing iniquity.

If it makes you happier, it's an imaginary nuclear weapon which both sides developed and didn't expect the other side to develop in immense quantities, which kills every human by some relatively slow mechanism. The point of the movie is the known inevitability of death for everyone, with the opportunity for those not yet dead to choose how to spend the short remainder of their lives (in the presence of intact infrastructure), with a side order of the (uncontroversial for most people) message that nuclear war would be bad.

Compare Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012); no commentary on war there, just a failure to stop an asteroid from hitting the Earth and destroying all life, and how people deal with only a few weeks of life remaining to the entire planet. Or consider Ida and Isidor Straus embracing each other as water fills their stateroom in Titanic (1997), but writ large for all humanity. Or just stop being the jerk who jumps up and yells "Stop the movie! Stop the movie! Explosions don't make any sound in outer space!"

[Magister]

Reading between the lines, and I could be way off base, but it appears that Annette Funicello was not in this movie, which would explain why it failed commercially with an important demographic and did not have any sequels.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Those thinking this movie was about her and her bikinied friends bouncing around at Malibu were disappointed. Though there is a beach scene with (modest) two-pieces worn by Anderson and Gardner.

You should see Annette with Frankie Avalon in Back to the Beach, 1987, where they relive their beach blanket movies in middle age. It’s a hoot.

[Magister]

I did see Back to the Beach, at a theater that had placed hot tubs close to the screen, which was an awesome movie going experience. (I remember Pee Wee Herman, "the bird is the word", from that viewing, but I did not recall O.J. Simpson, who fails to run through the airport.)

There was probably little confusion, as the beach party movies started in the 1960s.

[Syd Henderson]

I'm really fond of that movie including the out-of-nowhere Peewee Herman cameo. That movie must have been a lot of fun to make.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"Anthony Perkins, before his career was ruined by Psycho"

Was he driven into poverty?

[Dan Schiavetta]

He got typecast as a crazy person.

[Ridgeway]

There is a story about how a young Victoria Principal unsuccessfully tried to get him to, uuuh, switch teams. If that doesn't show the futility of conversion therapy, I don't know what will.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

A beach movie!

Just kidding.

I didn't see it, but I saw The Day After.

Quite a downer.

On the other hand, here's Epictetus:

"But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many men and cities. And what great matter is this? Is it nothing?—But what great matter is the death of many oxen, and many sheep, and many nests of swallows or storks being burnt or destroyed? Are these things then like those? Very like. Bodies of men are destroyed, and the bodies of oxen and sheep; the dwellings of men are burnt, and the nests of storks. What is there in this great or dreadful? Or show me what is the difference between a man's house and a stork's nest, as far as each is a dwelling; except that man builds his little houses of beams and tiles and bricks, and the stork builds them of sticks and mud. Are a stork and a man then like things? What say you?—In body they are very much alike.

"Does a man then differ in no respect from a stork? Don't suppose that I say so; but there is no difference in these matters (which I have mentioned). In what then is the difference? Seek and you will find that there is a difference in another matter. See whether it is not in a man the understanding of what he does, see if it is not in social community, in fidelity, in modesty, in steadfastness, in intelligence. Where then is the great good and evil in men? It is where the difference is. If the difference is preserved and remains fenced round, and neither modesty is destroyed, nor fidelity, nor intelligence, then the man also is preserved; but if any of these things is destroyed and stormed like a city, then the man too perishes; and in this consist the great things."

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0236%3Atext%3Ddisc%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3D28

[loki13]

Today in "People Who Play Stupid Games Get Stupid Prizes," aka, What Is The 5th Circuit Up To .... Ho Edition, I present ...

https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-60743-CV0.pdf

Texas v. NRC. What's the worst thing about this opinion? How about ... all of it? That said, the very ending, with the cursory "major questions doctrine" might be the worst part. Why? Because it's the proof of what everyone has realized ... that the adoption of the MQD by the Supreme Court has granted a license for the lower courts ... aw, heck, not all the lower courts, but the 5th Circuit, to just do whatever they want to, on any grounds they want to. Good times!

Do you know what is truly special about this case ... it came on review because ... wait for it .... the NRC prevailed on a MOTION TO DISMISS. Not only did the 5th Cir. elide that by not recounting the procedural history, it denied the motion to dismiss, and just went ahead and vacated the license. Despite the fact that multiple other circuits have precedent directly in conflict.

The 5th Circuit ... if you think an opinion is the worst ever, just wait a day!

[Dan Schiavetta]

There are real-life depressing things that one has to face. Many people didn't want to treat the danger of nuclear war seriously, or even think about it, even though it almost happened a couple of times. It's possible to be concerned about it (and do something about it) and still have a good time in the other parts of your life. In a later era, 1982, I would work on nuclear freeze issues and then have a blast seeing Victor Victoria.

On the Beach was one of Stanley Kramer's "message" films and was part of the reason this particular message got through, at least to some extent, part of the movement (Aldermaston marches, Linus Pauling, Robert Oppenheimer, etc.) that culminated in the treaty signed by Kennedy and Krushchev in 1963 which prohibited above-ground nuclear testing (which produces fallout, which is what killed the characters in this movie). More remotely we saw the relaxed tensions of "detente" from roughly 1966 - 1979.

[Krayt]

And the above ground testing let scientists tell how long cells last sort of like carbon dating. There was the old idea your body is replaced every 7 years, this let them time out different cell types and organs. This era is wrapping up though as so little of that radiation is left they cannot measure with it any more.

https://radiolab.org/podcast/carbon

[Frank Drackman]

Actually the "Test Ban Treaty" is more accurately described as the "Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" as it doesn't ban underground testing, and those French A-holes and Chinese didn't go along (sound familiar?)

Frank

[Dan Schiavetta]

Nuclear testing messed up carbon dating because it altered the Carbon-14 ratio both in the ground and in the atmosphere.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Understood!

I think it’s mostly generational, in that people of my age group were greatly affected by being under the shadow of The Bomb.