The first post-apocalypse wasteland movie and it’s pretty good if you’re into these things for bleak stories of desperate living. This offbeat low-budget triumph sucks you into its depressing world where, best we can tell, everyone is dead except for five people. For writer/director/producer/production designer Arch Oboler, that’s the perfect springboard for a tale of humanity’s virtues and its deep, ugly flaws.
It anticipates a lot of later apocalypse films. The beginning bears a small resemblance to Night of the Living Dead as a woman in shock stumbles into a sanctuary and is all but catatonic while a man who’s clicked more firmly into survival mode takes her in and builds the base for them to continue staying alive. There’s even a little twist here that reminds me of Threads and that I won’t spoil other than to say that it’s sad as hell.
Our two main characters think that they’re the only people in the world who haven’t been dusted by the A-Bomb until they manage to meet three others. One’s a down-to-earth sorta fella, happy to help plant vegetation. One’s a fragile elderly man who still talks about his old job at the bank in the present tense. One’s a complete asshole who thinks that his ego still matters in the new world.
And that’s it. The cast of characters is small, but there’s no shortage of conflicts between them. Do we stay in the country where we’re reasonably safe and comfortable or do we venture out? Do we try to find our loved ones or do we merely accept that they’re almost certainly gone? Is this the end or the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a new and improved world?
Along the way, this independent film gets away with things that a mainstream Hollywood production couldn’t. While it doesn’t use the word (because that was somehow scandalous in the 1950s), it acknowledges pregnancy. It also covers a rape attempt and has a discreet breast-feeding scene. This film also tackles racism because one of our survivors is a black man and this film’s asshole character has a problem with that. He likes to think that these survivors are the new Darwinian elite, but this crew isn’t exactly what he was expecting. He thinks he’s above them, while he puts in only a fraction of the work and has no realistic vision for the future. He thinks he’s a leader, but he doesn’t get that things have changed. He’s useless, but doesn’t realize it.
Because this was 1951, Arch Oboler can’t lay all of the forbidden topics here on the table in bold view, but he can VERY AGGRESSIVELY hint at them, which is somehow more haunting.
This isn’t a great film (the characters often speak in over-cooked poetry), but it hooks you and it’s strange and it’s brave and it vibrates with the feeling that it’s talking about things that nobody else making movies in the US at the time was talking about.