Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world's grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother's fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.
Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he's a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. 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 opens the film as Wilde's narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It's a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it's all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities. Before the film is over, we'll be subjected to images of dead livestock sprawled over the landscape (the virus infecting the grass kills the animals who eat it, all part of the ecological cycle of devastation), dead and dying victims of marauders, savage murders and even a live, clinically explicit hospital childbirth intercut with a premature birth delivered in a barn. Even "the miracle of birth" is seen as a violent and bloody event. A brutal rape scene, cut from some prints, gives the uncut film a far more grim sensibility than edited versions; in this world, the cavalry does not arrive in the nick of time.
Once the family takes flight, Wilde adds another horror: the complete breakdown of society, not simply law but the social contract that holds society together. A motorcycle gang prowls the highways for stragglers and abducts John's wife, Ann (Jean Wallace, Wilde's real-life wife) and daughter, while other bands of survivors become road pirates, pillaging any group they can overwhelm for food and supplies. "What kind of people are you?" demands Ann after their cars and supplies are stolen by a bigger, better-armed group of otherwise salt-of-the-earth types. "Same kind of people you are," one of them replies, and he's right. Our heroes are not simply survivors defending themselves from the worst instincts of survivors driven by panic and fear. John becomes a militia leader in his own right, drafting a young tough with a brutal streak, Pirrie (Anthony May), as his number two, and shooting anyone who would threaten his family or prevent their passage, and pillaging from the weaker they come across.
Wilde makes no pretence of these people struggling with the moral questions at hand. They act, and then weigh the moral consequences after (when John buries a victim, the act of asking forgiveness is more like a confession). This is a primal expression of Wilde's sensibility of man as the human animal driven to survive and protect its own at all costs. That doesn't just mean blood or family in this new tribal existence. After predatory gangs prey on his tiny group, John and Pirrie build up their numbers and soon lead their own militia, a group that John refuses to abandon when faced with a tough decision.
No Blade of Grass is an apocalyptic vision that Sam Peckinpah might have created, and it has more in common with Straw Dogs (which was released a year later, in 1971) than with most end-of-the-world movies before it. Unlike its American antecedents, which tended to jump right to the aftermath of the wasteland and the few stragglers left at the end of the world, Wilde focuses on the rioting, the anarchy, the regression to a tribal existence. How many American films before this showed the government instituting martial law and its heroes shooting policemen and soldiers to survive? It can't be coincidence that Wilde shot the film in England (as did Peckinpah with Straw Dogs), where films like The War Game, Fahrenheit 451 and Privilege (and later A Clockwork Orange) dared to portray social breakdown and governments transformed into repressive and authoritarian regimes, while in the U.S. even Riot on the Sunset Strip features no actual riot. No Blade of Grass is rougher and more blunt than any of those films, but his jagged, jabbing direction gives it a remarkable ferocity and savagery. Wilde goes for the visceral, delivering an ecological message writ large and an unforgiving portrait of humankind reverting to primitive form in the face of crisis. It makes the disclaimer at the end credits particularly evocative: "No living thing was harmed in the making of this motion picture."
The Warner Archive Collection DVD-R is a "Remastered Edition" release and presents the film in anamorphic widescreen in its complete, uncut form (with the rape and childbirth scenes and brief shots of nudity intact). The presentation is on the coarse side, likely due to the grain of the print; it looks appropriate to the film, which was largely shot on location, and it is clean and undamaged, with strong colors, and is complete and uncut. The initial release of the title, however, had swapped two of the reels and presented the film out of order. The Warner Archive quickly corrected the error and automatically sent corrected discs out to all who purchased the film from their website. Where a normal DVD recall would require the buyer to contact the company and fill out a replacement form, Warner took the onus off the customer and handled the replacement entirely from their end, making this the most efficient and painless replacement process ever in a DVD recall. Well done, Warner.
For more information about No Blade of Grass, visit Warner Video.
by Sean Axmaker
