January 23 | 5 Movies
The idea of life after the world as we know it has come to an end has provided inspiration for filmmakers practically since the movies learned how to talk. In Deluge (1933) it was a natural disaster that destroyed the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. In Things to Come (1936) an unending war leaves the world in ruins. But after the atomic bomb was unleashed in 1945 and the United States conducted nuclear tests in the South Pacific and in the Nevada desert as the Cold War heated up, nuclear fears became very real to Americans. The movies responded, most obviously with a slate of low-budget giant monster spectacles where familiar creatures are mutated by radiation (as if nature is responding to the poison and death that mankind has unleashed on Earth). Amidst these matinee thrills, however, was Five (1952), an independently-made drama that soberly engaged with the idea of civilization wiped out by nuclear Armageddon.
Still, atomic scare films were the provenance of low-budget science fiction and fantasy movies until On the Beach (1959), Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of Nevil Shute’s controversial novel. The producer-turned-director was something of an independent but he brought Hollywood production values and stars to the story of the last survivors of a nuclear war waiting in Australia for the winds to inevitably carry the nuclear fallout into the southern hemisphere. Kramer shot the film on location in Melbourne, Australia, with a cast that includes American stars Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins, who bring not merely gravitas but a kind of legitimacy to the project as a serious work of social commentary. Kramer also cast legendary musical star Fred Astaire in his first serious dramatic role as a nuclear physicist who spends his final days racing cars with reckless abandon.
Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, famed for his collaborations with Luchino Visconti and Federico Fellini, brings a melancholy beauty to the production and composer Ernest Gold memorably weaves the Australian folk song "Waltzing Matilda" through the score, slowly transforming it into a mournful remembrance in the final scenes. This is the end of the world not with a bang but with the whimper of people waiting for death to come. That wasn't a theme that the U.S. military condoned and they refused to allow Kramer the use of an American nuclear submarine in the picture; a British vessel was used in its place. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther praised the film as "deeply moving… it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving."
Set centuries after the apocalypse, Logan's Run (1975) is set in a seemingly perfect utopia, a sterile city where an exclusively young population lives in gleaming white geodesic domes. Michael York stars as a "Sandman," the city's form of law enforcement where the only criminals are those who try to escape their fate (nobody lives past the age of 30), and Jenny Agutter as the woman who inspires him to flee their gilded prison and seek the fabled "Sanctuary."
The production saved money on sets by shooting in Dallas, Texas, where recent construction and modern architecture offered gleaming buildings of concrete, steel and glass. For the underground escape, the filmmakers shot in the Sewage Disposal plant in El Segundo, California. The most elaborate sequence in the film is the spectacular "renewal," an optimistic name for what is essentially a public execution with a dazzling light show. The carrousel was created on a soundstage where hidden wires levitated the actors during the ritual. Despite the savings from the Dallas shoot, the budget spiraled from $3 to $9 million, quite a price tag for a science fiction film before Star Wars (1977) gave the genre new life. But the gamble paid off. Despite mixed reviews, Logan's Run was a hit, earning $25 million, a special Oscar for its visual effects, and six awards from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, including Best Science Fiction Film.
Nuclear apocalypse wasn't the only threat to the future of mankind and atomic fears gave way to other unsettling perils bringing the world as we know it to an end. In The Omega Man (1971), Charlton Heston is the last human in a world where a deadly plague literally exterminates humanity but for a handful of mutated survivors. It's based on Richard Matheson's novel "I Am Legend," which had previously been adapted for the screen in the low budget American-Italian production The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price as a scientist hunting the infected, who have been transformed by the plague into vampires, by day and working on a cure by night. The Omega Man changes the cause from a virulent pandemic to biological warfare (a contribution of screenwriter Joyce H. Corrington, who put her PhD in chemistry to use) and reimagines the mutant survivors as a kind of undead albino race that declares war on all symbols of humanity, including Heston. It also challenged convention by casting African-American actress Rosalind Cash (in her first major big screen role) as the other central surviving human and making Heston and Cash a romantic couple. They share one of the earliest interracial kisses in a major Hollywood motion picture.
Heston plays a much brawnier and less haunted man of action than Price did in the earlier adaptation. He's adjusted to his isolation in a self-made fortress in the middle of Los Angeles, a location that director Boris Sagal transforms from a familiar American metropolis into an eerily deserted city thanks to effective location shooting. The biggest challenge was a scene of Heston speeding down the deserted streets of downtown LA. The solution was to shoot in the business district in the early dawn hours of a Sunday morning. The film helped turn Heston into the king of dystopian science fiction, coming so soon after the wildly successful Planet of the Apes (1968), where Heston bared his chest and took on the simian slavers of the human race. He turned it into an end-of-the-world trifecta in 1973 when he starred in Soylent Green (1973), where overpopulation threatens the survival of humanity.
Though it was made over 50 years ago, No Blade of Grass (1970) is perhaps the most relevant film to our era in this program. Based on the novel "The Death of Grass" by John Christopher, it offers a world in collapse after a virulent fungus that attacks plant life spreads across the globe and destroys crops with alarming efficiency. Actor-turned-filmmaker Cornel Wilde turns this tale of ecological collapse into a gritty and brutal survival thriller as one family sets out to escape the city to a country farm as civilization descends into panic and barbarity around them. At once ambitious and rough around the edges, it’s a warning of the stresses we put on the planet—Wilde opens the film with a montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide—and a commentary on the animalistic nature of humanity under pressure.
As a filmmaker, Wilde is provocateur, favoring primal images and direct statements to make his points. As a result, No Blade of Grass is as blunt and grim as it is ambitious, directed with a matter-of-fact presentation of desperation and savagery as society rapidly spirals into a tribal existence. "I saw the opportunity to use it as the basis for a powerful adventure film with an ecological warning to the world," Wilde wrote in 1984. Critics of the day were brutal—Roger Greenspan at The New York Times dismissed it as "More laughable than terrifying"—and audiences were appalled at the violence and brutality. Yet Wilde's shocking portrait of society one disaster away from descending into barbarism anticipates Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971), which (like No Blade of Grass) was set and shot in rural England and was condemned at the time for its violence, and films as diverse as Mad Max (1979) and Time of the Wolf (2003) echo its portrait of a world turned savage as the underpinnings of civilization crumble.
The series ends with World Without End (1956), a low budget science fiction adventure starring Hugh Marlowe as the commander of a Mars mission that crash lands on a mysterious planet where mutant cavemen and giant spiders roam the surface and the remnants of civilization live underground. Produced by Allied Artists, the film was born out of opportunity. The studio had access to space travel footage from the 1951 Flight to Mars and producer Richard Heermance wanted to cash in on the science fiction boom currently in vogue. Director Edward Bernds, a B-movie veteran of Blondie and Bowery Boys comedies, was hired to concoct a screenplay around the footage. His story borrows liberally from H.G. Welles' "The Time Machine"—the estate of H.G. Welles supposedly threatened to sue—and leans on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
It was produced in both Technicolor and CinemaScope with a bigger budget than most Allied Artists productions, but it's still skimpy by Hollywood studio standards, with the Iverson Movie Ranch standing in for the planet's devastated surface. Australian-born actor Rod Taylor has an early role as a junior officer and briefly doffs his shirt for a little beefcake while the skimpy outfits of the beautiful young women of the underground society were designed by legendary pin-up artist Alberto Vargas, who served as the film's production artist. It's his only screen credit. Though hardly a classic of the genre, it looks forward to the sci-fi cheesecake of Queen of Outer Space (1958, also directed by Bernds) and the budget-minded look of TV's "Star Trek," and in a way it even anticipates Planet of the Apes.
