It was very unrealistic to show San Francisco without a single dead body to be seen.Where did all the bodies go? Nothing graphic was necessary, just a few human shapes on the ground here and there would have added realism.
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You dont die immediately -- you get sick then sicker -- then VERY sick. Most people probably go home to "recuperate" -
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True and all that is shown of San Francisco is a empty Golden Gate bridge and empty streets trough the sub's periscope. There is a scene where the sailor, who had jumped ship, describes conditions in city and finding the bodies of his family, talking into a microphone on the subs conning tower, but that's about it.
Later a crew member, in a radiation suit, goes ashore in San Diego to investigate the source of a radio signal. In the novel there are description of him finding decomposing bodies; not likely because radiation would kill all bacteria that would cause decomposition. For this reason, or more likely not to gross out the audience, no bodies are in evidence in the movie.
TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.
I wondered why there weren't cars on the roads. People obviously would go inside when they were feeling sick. It wouldn't be like people would instantaneously drop dead in the streets, but it was peculiar that there were no cars out.
I suppose there was some warning siren or emergency signal or something for people to clear the roads before the bombs hit.
They Said everyone went home to die ✓ Cars take you home so no bodies on the roads or in stow why stay at work??
shareIt's a 1950s movie. From the past. The past is another country, they do things differently there.
C'mon, audiences just weren't as discerning as now, they didn't expect realism in movies. And they probably didn't think things through either. So movies got away with showing lots of silly, unrealistic things and nobody complained cause they didn't expect any better.
i thought the GGB would be littered with a few cars as people drove out to the middle of the bridge to jump off when they got really sick
shareGee, it really seems no one here has seen or paid attention to this film.
Whoever said there were no cars in the streets obviously wasn't looking at the movie. Through the periscope you can see hundreds of cars -- all neatly parked along the curbs. This upholds the idea that when everyone was about to die they went home.
In fact -- and once again, it seems no one on this thread was listening to the film either -- a conversation about this very subject occurs in the submarine. Someone says they keep expecting to see bodies, to which another officer replies that when dogs are about to die they crawl away to do it in private, and that maybe people do the same thing -- go home to bed.
This also answers the rather lame post about how people didn't think things through in 1959 or expect realism in movies (yeah, right, totally unlike today). The very issues raised here were addressed in the film -- if you watched and listened. It's all a bit lame and convenient, but nevertheless, the subject is discussed and explained. That poster obviously wasn't around in '59 and knows nothing about it.
Realistically, you might expect a few cars on the Golden Gate Bridge. I doubt anyone would have gone there to jump (maybe someone) but it might be a nice place to die in your car, with a breathtaking sight of the Bay on one side and the Pacific on the other. However, cinematically, the sight of it absolutely empty works far better. I think they had something like 90 seconds to get those shots before traffic resumed.
You could also see through the periscope no stopped cable cars either (the tracks were quite visible).
shareI think there was at least one shot where it looked like there was a car in an intersection -- but it looked like a freeze-frame, and that the car was actually in motion. Now, in most shots of the streets we also see the bay, and the waves are breaking on the shore, so those are not still photos. But when they flip the periscope image to close-ups a couple of times, we don't see the bay, and that's where I recall seeing the intersection car, which could well be a still shot. And I didn't see the car in the preceding long shot.
Maybe the workers took the cable cars back to the car barn before going home to die.
Go watch THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL, another 1959 film about nuclear holocaust. It takes place in the U.S. and Harry Belafonte confronts an empty (so he thinks) New York City. There are plenty of abandoned motor vehicles, but no corpses. You were not going to see corpses in a movie of that era.
May I bone your kipper, Mademoiselle?
TWTFATD never explains the lack of corpses. It's one thing to be looking through a periscope at a distant sight, anther to be right there in the midst of what should be mountains of dead people. I recall once hearing some talk that the particular form of radiation that killed everyone off in TWTFATD caused the bodies to disintegrate (which, however, would not explain the absence of empty clothes), but there is no such reference in the film. For a sci-fi film it would have been easy enough to create that rationale for no bodies, no matter how implausible it is.
You're right, you weren't going to see millions of corpses in a film of that era (just creating a convincing photographic effect would be difficult), but they still should have explained where they are. (As they did, lamely, in OTB.)
Almost all the abandoned motor cars Belafonte finds are stacked up in that great montage shot on the George Washington Bridge. Few seem to be left in Manhattan itself, except his pickup and Inger Stevens's convertible!
Haven't watched WORLD in many moons. Have to find it (no, my DVDs aren't in alphabetical order, so it might be next to THE MUSIC MAN) and watch it again.
May I bone your kipper, Mademoiselle?
As in 1959, it holds up pretty well until Mel Ferrer arrives, after which it chickens out conventionally and absurdly. Nothing beats its first 15 or 20 minutes.
shareIt was "realistic" in terms of what the director intended. Instead of seared, blasted cities the sub's crew find only two cities and they've been wasted by radiation poisoning.
In the book, the city visited, and from which the signal was coming, was Seattle. The book explains that, although an airburst hit the Olympic Peninsula and broke windows in Seattle, the Seattle area was so well protected with counter-missiles that they managed to knock out all but one enemy missile - the one that burst over the Peninsula.
Hence: a virtually undamaged city, where people had time to "retire" in a variety of ways, most indoors, after having gone home, parked their cars, and "ended it" in as orderly a manner as the Aussies would a few months later. Shute makes it clear that the "luckiest" were those who were incinerated at primary blast sites, not those who, lingering, sickened and died by burning up from the inside out.
In the novel, no bodies are seen, except by Lt. Sunderstrom - the guy who goes ashore to investigate the signal's origins. He goes into a latrine and finds people dead there, some half-in/half out of the stalls - having vomited and evacuated their bowels unto death. The only other people he sees are, at a distance, a party on a patio, people sitting at a table, the women still wearing their dresses, with highball glasses all round. But when he gets closer, Sunderstrom sees that "the picnic had been going on for over a year", and he turns away in repulsed horror.
This was entirely deliberate on Shute's part. He wanted to bring home the horror of atomic war not by invoking vast, epic scenes of destruction, but by creating images of empty, lifeless cities. The buildings and homes mostly intact...all the people gone.
Kramer's film captures this mood perfectly. True, that both San Francisco and San Diego would have been spared atomic attack does stretch the imagination, but that's the screenplay's fault, not Shute's.
As the poem says which Shute chose as the novel's frontispiece: "This is the way we die, not with a bang, but with a whimper". The film captures and presents this central theme perfectly.
I think you should re-read the book, bastach, because much of what you relate about it isn't all that accurate.
In the book, the radio signal was not coming from the city of Seattle. It was coming from the naval base at Santa Maria Island, some distance from Seattle. They did see the aftermath of an air burst where a guided missile apparently got hit, but that was on Vancouver Island, not the Olympic Peninsula. Since there is no destruction in the town of Edmonds (where Yeoman Swain jumps ship) or Seattle they conclude that the heavy anti-missile defenses on the Peninsula protected Seattle and environs from destruction. But they do not attribute the few broken window panes observed in Seattle to that blast -- they were just the product of two years' lack of maintenance.
It is true that they conclude that the absence of visible bodies is due to people going home to die. However, Shute never makes any statement to the effect that, as you put it, "the 'luckiest' were those who were incinerated at primary blast sites, not those who, lingering, sickened and died by burning up from the inside out". He may infer that (debatable), but it's never explicit by any means.
But when you say that, "This was entirely deliberate on Shute's part. He wanted to bring home the horror of atomic war not by invoking vast, epic scenes of destruction, but by creating images of empty, lifeless cities. The buildings and homes mostly intact...all the people gone", that is simply not true. On the contrary, every city in the Northern Hemisphere, save one, that's seen or reported about in the book has been destroyed by nuclear bombs. Seattle was the sole exception. The sub sees that both San Francisco and Honolulu have been destroyed, and we hear that her sister ship, in its exploration of the North Atlantic area, had found New York and most other areas blasted by bombs or missiles. We also learn that Washington and London were bombed, as well as many cities in the USSR and China; the Scorpion had also found Manila destroyed in its initial run through the Pacific, during the war. Certainly they saw some some untouched places in remote areas, but on the whole most of what Shute writes about Northern Hemisphere cities is that they've been destroyed.
Cities in the Southern Hemisphere are, of course, untouched by bombing, and the sight of cities normal except for life is indeed eerie, but that's only a small part of what Shute wrote and is mostly confined to the South. When you say, "Kramer's film captures this mood perfectly", well, no he doesn't -- at least not as you claim, that he's invoking Shute's vision. He is not. Yes, the sight of an unbombed San Francisco may be a stretch, but it is powerful -- the film's version of Seattle. But any inference that Kramer was mimicking a generalized view of Shute concerning the lack of destruction is simply not accurate. Shute wrote of plenty of destruction.
True, that both San Francisco and San Diego would have been spared atomic attack does stretch the imagination, but that's the screenplay's fault, not Shute's.
My fault with a typo, re: "cities". I meant "the one city they explore", namely Seattle.
Points well taken re: nuke blast on Vancouver Island, etc. Once upon a time, I tried to find Santa Maria Island on a map of Puget Sound but without success - I may have been narrowing the search much too close to the city itself.
But I still think that the single close-up viewed city, Seattle, was Shute's way of foreshadowing the "whimpering" end that would overtake Australia. As with Seattle, Melbourne and environs would die with buildings intact and inhabitants dead indoors. That's the dramatic impact of the crew seeing Seattle/San Francisco - not the expected blast site, but a relatively intact seashore city bathed in sunshine but with no human inhabitants ... just as the seashore cities of Australia would soon be, with no one left "on the beach".
When you say, "Kramer's film captures this mood perfectly", well, no he doesn't -- at least not as you claim, that he's invoking Shute's vision. He is not. Yes, the sight of an unbombed San Francisco may be a stretch, but it is powerful -- the film's version of Seattle. But any inference that Kramer was mimicking a generalized view of Shute concerning the lack of destruction is simply not accurate. Shute wrote of plenty of destruction.
I understand that Shute imagined vast bomb destruction for most cities, including the possibility of seabed changes that might render old familiar waterways unnavigable. What I was stressing is that, by making the one closely examined city - the sole exception, as you rightly called it - "clean and empty", Shute was exposing the crew, and the reader, to the fate that would overtake them in Australia. That is, Seattle/San Francisco was the exception that did not prove, but rather defied, the 'total devastation" rule. As exceptional and counter-intuitive as an intact but radiation-poisoned city seemed in the context of a world-destroying war, its abnormal air of cleanliness, seeming peacefulness, etc., served as a statement of how the Southern Hemisphere would expire.
will have to check out The World, the Flesh and the Devil I see its on YT so will grab a copy in case it gets deleted.
Thanks for the suggestion.
www.youtube.com/eastangliauk
Well, the sight of an intact but empty San Francisco may have been Stanley Kramer's means of showing the crew what a post-annihilation Melbourne would look like, so in that sense (intended or not) there may have been some foreshadowing involved in those scenes.
But I wouldn't say this was the case with Shute vis-a-vis Seattle in the book, for one major reason: by the time the Scorpion visited America, she had already made that cruise to the cities of Cairns, Port Moresby and Darwin in Australia and New Guinea -- intact cities untouched by war. More than anything they'd see in the North, that would have driven home to the men a sense of what mankind's posthumous legacy would look like, at least in the South.
Shute even alludes to this in the novel, when Towers, Osborne and Holmes are talking about their trip and the war on the return voyage home from northern Australia. Shute often goes into great length about the appearance of cities and some other spots that hadn't been bombed, cities that looked like people should still be living there, and he especially goes into this in describing what those three southern towns looked like. In that scene aboard the sub, Peter muses about this fact, and says, "If we'd seen any damage...". He meant that had they seen actual destruction it would have been much easier to accept the impending end of humanity. But seeing only perfectly normal-looking towns, with no obvious visual differences from when they were populated, made it harder for him to grasp the enormity of what was happening...or even that it was happening.
I can understand this. In reading the novel I always felt the frustration the men must have felt when they stood looking through the periscope at towns that looked not merely intact but inviting -- cities bathed in sunshine, with the sea lapping at their shores, cars in the street, flags flying, everything outwardly normal...save for the absence of people. The idea that not only were these cities dead, but poisoned with steadily intensifying radioactivity -- all the more deceptive and pernicious because of its invisibility and the fact that it caused no readily observable damage -- was hard to accept when viewing a scene so normal. It must have been difficult to keep reminding oneself that merely stepping outside into this alluring scene would be fatal.
Of course, this impression was possible only when looking at cities just recently affected by radiation. Over time, weather would cause decay and destruction on all the untended and un-repaired cities and towns throughout the world (and for that matter, even on the already destroyed ones), as gradually all of man's works rusted, decayed, fell apart and collapsed before, after many centuries, becoming nearly obliterated, with some scattered exceptions. But thinking that far ahead didn't seem to be a prevalent topic in the last months of human life on Earth. (And if the rabbits thought about it, they had only one more year to come to any conclusions!)
Hob, ever catch the "Life After People" series a few years back? Nothing but episodes showing famous cities and landmarks decaying after centuries of no more people. Interesting but it kept making the redundant point of how if there are no people left to attend things they all, as you say, rust, decay, fall part, collapse and are obliterated after many centuries. It was strictly the novelty of seeing computer animation suggest what happens to all the famous places.
shareYeah, that was an interesting series, though ultimately it got a bit redundant. The series eventually contradicted some of the projections made in the original two-hour pilot. They'd forgotten things like nuclear power plants blowing up and other such time bombs that would cause destruction across the planet, even poisoning it in some ways.
I did like seeing Manhattan going back to nature over the next few thousand years or so -- Spring Street again a spring, and so on. And cell phones undamaged after several millennia, which is frightening enough. Oh, and those flying cats, an example of adaptive evolution for kitties living high up in empty skyscrapers. Of course, if the buildings fell down in 150 years that wouldn't be enough time for flying cats to evolve, but the idea is intriguing.
I also liked the notion that, because of the nature of Hoover Dam, Las Vegas would be the last city on Earth with electricity -- it would stay on for about a year before the turbines were shut down by that tiny mussel or whatever it was that would eventually accumulate enough to jam them up. Mankind's last visible legacy from space -- Circus Circus.
Of course, the big difference is that in this scenario people simply vanished -- no bodies, no harm to other life forms (except pets and some farm animals who would soon die without human care), all of which is of course ridiculous. And no worldwide radiation, although there would be radioactivity and other toxins blown into the atmosphere when those power plants and so forth break down without human maintenance. The show was of course simply a means of showing the fragility and temporary nature of man's works as opposed to a credible scenario of the world's end. But in those parts it does have something in common with OTB.
BTW Hob, I just discovered there was a BBC radio drama of "On The Beach" a couple years ago and just got hold of it. I'll let you know how it went though I suspect it'll be scrupulously faithful to the novel.
shareI think I heard about that. My wife (English) listens to BBC-4 all the time and I vaguely recall her telling me about this. But I never heard it. If that very vague memory serves, I believe it was faithful to the novel -- perhaps (though I don't know this) even to the point of being set in that never-was 1963. Yes, do let me know how it is, thanks.
You know, if the Cuban Missile Crisis hadn't gone well we would have had WWIII and, who knows, Nevil Shute's scenario might have come to pass pretty close to schedule -- maybe wiping out all life in 1964, as in the movie, instead of '63. Gee, too bad we missed it! Nevil, had he been alive, would have been so pleased.
I listened to the radio drama today. It's in two parts, runs two hours total. Other than the fact that Osborn's first name is Tim this time (I guess John Osborn is too familiar a name for the Brits?) and the fact that there is a subtle hint that maybe Dwight and Moira do consummate (but the listener can think otherwise just as easily) it really sticks to the novel in a streamlined fashion. For instance we have the first journey to Morseby (but not Darwin) and when they go to the west coast, it is again Seattle where the transmission comes from, but there is no exploring of San Francisco. Afterward, they go up to the Aleutians to test the atmosphere. I've forgotten the sequence in the novel but if it was that way there, then the film did a smart thing changing the order to have the test first and then going to the source of the transmission.
I'd forgotten if the novel named the Scorpion's executive officer (the sub gets its original name back) but in the drama it's "Jack Ryan" which of course is a name famous elsewhere in fiction! And the XO is also the one who goes ashore in Seattle which I don't think was the case in the novel.
The period setting remains an undefined early 1960s given the references to people coming over in '58 etc.
Oh and I might add that Dwight takes the time to note that Moira looks great in a bikini in the sailing sequence and Peter and Mary, watching from shore note that Moira (as in the novel) definitely loses her top on purpose when she tips the boat over. :)
Eric, sorry for the delay in replying, your post got lost in the mess that constitutes my emails!
Thanks for the information -- I may get Catherine to get the play on her BBC links.
Tim Osborne? Why can't they just leave him as was? "Jack Ryan"? Please! They're worried about "John Osborne" but not "Jack Ryan"?! In the book the officer who goes ashore at Santa Maria is Lt. Sunderstrom. I don't recall if he's the exec or not, though he might well be -- a high-ranking officer at any rate, chosen because he knows the naval installation there.
And yes, in the novel they went north to Alaska after visiting Seattle. I've always found it curious that after making such a big point about "The Jorgensen Effect", Shute deals with its resolution in an after-the-fact manner, reporting in a single paragraph near the end of chapter 6 that, "They had disproved the Jorgensen effect." (I'm doing all this from memory as I don't have a copy of the book at hand.) But it's just a post-visit mention, with no details of the voyage there or their stay in the vicinity.
In the book this occurs in the Gulf of Alaska whereas in the movie it's off Point Barrow, a thousand or more miles to the north. But I think it's a better idea for them to go to Seattle first to nail down the radio transmissions, then do Alaska second, mainly because of the captain's concern in the book (just glanced over in the film) about ice fields and mines. A trip to the Gulf of Alaska might be hazardous enough, but getting all the way up to Point Barrow would add immeasurably to the dangers. They'd want to solve the Seattle question first before the risks of the Arctic trip, in case they had an accident.
Speaking of the Jorgensen effect, if you think about it does it make any sense, at least in the way they expect it to manifest itself? Jorgensen's theory is that the precipitation in the Northern Hemisphere would have washed the air, causing radioactive particles to fall to the ground and seas sooner than expected. By reducing or eliminating atmospheric radiation in the North, he thinks little of it will be transferred to the South, and that human life could survive down there, at least in Antarctica. But a couple of problems:
First, if the air is being washed in the North, wouldn't the level of radiation being wafted south already be lessened -- that is, well before it hits Cairns or other areas in northern Australia? (And other areas of the world.)
Second, if the effect exists in the North, wouldn't it also exist in the South? There's a lot of rain in the northern portions of the Southern Hemisphere, which is tropical. Wouldn't the radioactive particles already present in the northern reaches of the South have been affected, at least to some extent, by the South's own precipitation, and a corresponding drop in radiation levels in those areas become evident? Instead the radiation levels increase as time goes by.
Third, if the effect exists, why would it manifest itself as decreasing first in the farthest northern regions? Why wouldn't the effect be felt across the Northern Hemisphere, perhaps to varying degrees (depending on local weather conditions), but throughout the hemisphere? Rain and snow fall across the planet. If the effect exists, even with local variations the air should be washed in rough uniformity across the hemisphere. Therefore, it shouldn't be necessary to go as far north as possible to see if the effect exists. It would be evident in some measure all throughout the Northern Hemisphere, and probably in those parts of the Southern Hemisphere already poisoned. (And by that time radiation levels in the North should be pretty uniform across the hemisphere, not still slowly increasing as you go north, as was reported by the RAAF plane sent out from Perth -- the one that got as far north as somewhere south of Shanghai discovered while investigating the Jorgenesen effect, as in the book.)
Shute's attachment to portraying radiation as spreading evenly all across the globe, running with nice uniformity north to south, is not too realistic, at least as far as post-nuclear conditions in the North go.
In case Catherine has trouble accessing the drama (BBC tends to pull them after a brief period), let me know by PM and I'll upload it to Dropbox for you to download.
Cinematically, I guess the big reveal of what the transmission is as the last item works better because it would have made the whole Alaska business seem anti-climactic in the way it comes off in the novel.
Got hold of the Blu-Ray today as well and I think for the first time evidence of a cut sequence becomes apparent when Dwight asks Moira after he gets back "is that invitation to spread fertilizer still open?" I don't think there is any scene in the earlier part of the film establishing Moira's father and his farm or any invitation to Dwight on that point. I have a vague recollection of one Gardner bio suggesting there was cut material involving her so this would seem to hint at it.
Interesting stuff re: the science because it shows how Shute was basically just as ignorant as say, Rod Serling, who wrote all of his works with no regard for the science whatsoever.
Catherine found it for download from BBC so I think we'll be able to get it. I'll let you know.
I'm sure there was footage cut from the film (isn't there always?) and the lapse you note isn't surprising, as the film is full of such disconnects -- many of which we've pointed out elsewhere. The film's narrative is disjointed and full of stray and random dialogue or events that make no sense in the context as presented.
I think disproving the Jorgensen effect works much better as it's done in the book, since they've already established that the radio signals were an accident and that radiation levels are pretty uniform across the hemisphere. For this reason the effect is already rendered anti-climactic, which is why Shute gives it only a passing resolution. In the film, by showing it doesn't exist first, the discovery of the source of the radio signals becomes a greater anti-climax than had the two events come the other way around.
Nevil Shute was an aeronautical engineer and therefore hardly ignorant of science. He was writing a cautionary tale meant more to disabuse people of the notion that there could be a safe haven across much of the world in the event of a nuclear holocaust in another part of the globe. He chose the most apocalyptic means of demonstrating this and I think he achieved his goal of making people look at the idea of atomic war more soberingly and, yes, realistically, since no one could escape such a war's many ill effects.
As for Rod Serling, his sci-fi writings were meant as moral lessons, psychological tales and the like, in the guise of science fiction. I'm sure he knew a lot more science than is evident in most Twilight Zones. Like much good science fiction, the author uses a commercially successful genre to make a social, moral or other point. By definition, science fiction contains fictional aspects necessary to tell the story and, where applicable, make its point. During the Cold War, for example, much Eastern Bloc science fiction, especially in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the USSR itself, contained jabs at Communist society, heavily disguised amid the science fiction elements.
Remembering as I do now "No Highway In The Sky" (the only other work of his I'm familiar with) I should certainly have clarified that remark to "nuclear science" or whatever. I did see OTB more in the Serling mode of aiming for a bigger point while exploring the human side of things.
I recall some of the other disconnects you've mentioned like just who was in Brisbane to give over command to Dwight if they didn't have the other contextual parts of the novel. Overall though, I didn't see a whole lot of gaps that cut footage was needed to clarify (too bad the shooting script is not available).
Of course, there's no proof a scene was actually filmed that would have bridged the narrative gap between two now-disjointed scenes. Frankly I have no reason to suspect that a scene of Moira's father telling her to invite Dwight down to spread some fertilizer, or of it being her own idea, was ever written or filmed. It's just one of the film's many off-hand references that come out of nowhere and disappear quickly and inexplicably. I just think it was a weak script. There are too many lapses that can't simply be explained away by a cut scene.
But take, as one example of poor scripting and direction, the scene right after we meet the Holmeses, when he leaves to go to the Navy Department and she's left staring at that calendar ominously headed "1964". That scene dissolves to a street scene in Melbourne. First we see an abandoned, decaying car run up against the curb, its door permanently askew, the passer-by trying to shut it with his umbrella, only to have it bounce stubbornly back open. Kramer then uses one of his typical crane shots to pan up and out over the street, where everyone not walking is either riding a bicycle or a horse, with no cars in sight.
Obviously this is meant to convey the book's image of an oil-less Southern Hemisphere, with no petrol available to drive anymore, and with many cars consequently abandoned on the streets. However, in the book, these sights took place over a year after the war. We learn that in its immediate aftermath people continued to buy petrol and drive until "it dawned upon Australians that all oil came from the Northern Hemisphere." In the movie, we hear the radio report right at the beginning stating that "The atomic war has ended." So how did all those bicycles and (especially) horses abruptly materialize on the streets of Melbourne? And why would an abandoned car look so weathered and beaten up? There wouldn't have been anywhere near enough elapsed time since the end of the war (apparently just a few days or maybe weeks earlier) for conditions to have reached that stage.
This problem is compounded by the scene immediately following, after Holmes goes into the building and we cut to the Admiral reading out a report that all oil comes from the Northern Hemisphere and that they should carefully conserve all remaining stocks in the supply depot. If they're just discovering this fact then, again, why the dearth of cars in the streets? Hasn't the Admiral looked outside his window lately? This scene is also poorly executed in that it mentions this critical matter of the lack of fuel almost as an incidental item, barely (and somewhat incoherently and over-complicatedly) garbled by the Admiral, just a minor point to be noted once in passing and let go. It also misfires because it comes after we've seen the street scene. I'll bet many Americans, if not others, missed the point of all those horses and bikes, thinking that in a remote and "quaint" country like Australia those were common forms of transportation. The oil shortage should have been mentioned prominently, early and consistently, and preferably occurred over a longer and more realistic time frame, to have the results and impact it has in the book.
In the novel the city has been largely destroyed and the bridge has fallen into the bay. It was the 50s so perhaps they didn't have the budget nor the balls to portray all that nuclear fallout horror that the book describes. Kinda sad really, because this movie had so much potential, but the sappy romance plotline almost ruined it.
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