Beneath Our Radiant Mushroom Cloud: Fallout

Nevil Shute's On the Beach is a harbinger of a radiation-wrecked future, and Stanley Kramer's film adaptation captures the hysteria of a nuclear holocaust. The documentary Fallout, which chronicles this book-to-screen production, is interesting and informative, but it preferences 'the life and times' of Shute and Kramer over an in-depth investigation of the film and its construction, writes Anthony Carew.

Additional keywords: Lawrence Johnston, Gideon Haigh, Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Melbourne, war, World War II, Hiroshima, atomic bomb, apocalypic.