Friday, December 16, 2022

Authentic Morse Code in a classic movie

If you haven't seen it, On the Beach is a thought-provoking movie (aren't they all, from Stanley Kramer) starring Gregory Peck as a submarine commander in a post-nuclear world.

The gist of the movie is this:

"In 1964, World War 3 devastated the Northern Hemisphere, killing all humans there due to nuclear fallout. The only habitable areas are in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere, but air currents are slowly carrying the fallout south.

Australian survivors detect an incomprehensible Morse Code signal coming from the West Coast of the United States. The American nuclear submarine USS Sawfish, now under Royal Australian Navy command, is ordered to sail north to locate the source of the signal."

Once the source is located - a Coke bottle resting on a telegraph key - the crew member uses the key to report back to the Sawfish. While there is spoken dialog over the telegraphy, it's quite easy to make out "coke bottle on key by window" in CW.

When the movie was released in 1959, it premiered on all 7 continents (yes, even Antarctica).

The London premiere was attended by Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom Yakov Malik. Star Ava Gardner attended the Rome premiere. The Tokyo premiere was attended by members of the Japanese Imperial Family. The Stockholm premiere was attended by King Gustav VI Adolf. The Melbourne premiere was attended by Premier of Victoria Henry Bolte.

Gregory Peck and his wife traveled to Russia for the screening, which was held at a workers' club, with 1,200 Soviet dignitaries, the foreign press corps, and diplomats.

It was a Big Deal back then.

On the Beach is unavailable on both Netflix and Amazon Prime but is available in its entirety on YouTube.

The Morse scene is 1h 37m into the video:


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12 comments:

  1. Video contains content from MGM. It is blocked in the Netherlands unfortunately. I guess I need a VPN. 73, Bas

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    1. I was afraid that would be the case in some countries - yes, maybe access via a proxy server?

      73,
      John

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  2. I was a USAF radio op back then. We viewed it at an on-base movie theater. Most of us caught the cw text. All were impressed with the film.

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    1. The subject matter of the movie was quite significant, being at the height of the Cold War. I would love to know how various societies/countries perceived it. I'd never heard of it until the late 80's when my father told me about it and we watched it on Betamax - remember those?!

      73,
      John

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  3. I saw this movie on TV in the late 1960s, just before I got my radio license. I was just a whipper-snapper at the time, and there was no reality to the film's story for me. Yet, the scene of the Coke bottle by the window tapping the key stayed with me. Later, I read the original novel by Nevil Shute in translation and had a feeling of helplessness. (In the novel, the submarine was the USS Scorpion, though.)
    A few months ago I saw a movie entitled Greenland, which just reminded me of "On the Beach." In the film, an asteroid, not a nuclear war, was the cause of the extinction of the earth. People who evacuated from the U.S. took shelter in Greenland. Nine months later, survived people came out of the shelter and called out to the world on the radio. "CQ CQ CQ This is Greenland Station. Is anyone receiving?"

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    1. That's very interesting, Tatsuya - thanks for the comment.

      The novel was written in 1957 and, ironically, the Scorpion was lost 11 years later. I just finished reading a book (Scorpion Down) about the reason/opinion the Scorpion sank & think I'll read Shute's novel next. I usually like books better than the movies that sometimes follow.

      I had not heard of 'Greenland'.

      73,
      John

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  4. I read the novel (checked it out of the library from the Sci-Fi section, which I had recently discovered and was reading everything there I could get my hands on) about 1967, when I started Junior High 7th grade, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. I had nightmares for weeks.

    Those were the days where we were told that a bright flash in the sky could be the beginning of the end of civilization, and there was nothing to be done for it, except die horribly from radiation poisoning.

    A few years prior to that, my family had moved into a new subdivision, where the homeowners association had reserved a vacant lot to build a neighborhood fallout shelter. My dad went to one of the meetings, and came back and said that they were discussing who would man the machine gun to mow down the folks that hadn't paid to be in the shelter. We moved out of that neighborhood soon after (dispute with the contractor that built our house on a creek bed, that was still flowing through our crawl space).

    One of the neighbors had built a shelter in their basement, and I used to play the board games they kept in the shelter with their kids.

    Just plain creepy...

    -- Dave, N8SBE

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    1. I wonder if the Soviets had a similar mindset - shelters, bomb drills, etc...and if their studios ever produced movies like 'On the Beach' or any of a similar genre. Their poster business seems to have been fully engaged:

      https://tinyurl.com/59s498zx

      73,
      John

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  5. The director was Stanley Kramer and not Stanley Kubrick; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053137/

    Zack
    N8FNR

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  6. For people having issues to watch the movie in their country, you may want to check and watch a shorter clip: https://youtu.be/Q2luo6jg4ac?t=428

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