Retro Cinema: The Last Man on Earth

Come this Christmas, I Am Legend, a science fiction horror film starring Will Smith and based on a novel by Richard Matheson, will be hitting theaters. This will make three adaptations for Matheson's novel, the last being 1971's The Omega Man, which starred Charlton Heston. The book was first adapted for the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth, a bleak post-apocalyptic nightmare starring Vincent Price. While still taking a few liberties with the source material, the Price film is easily the more faithful of the two, and this Italian/British co-production has been a personal favorite for years.

The film opens with a series of shots depicting a city with no citizens. A few bodies lie here and there, but otherwise the streets are empty. The Marquee in front of a church reads "The End Has Come." The camera moves into a residential neighborhood and into the home of Dr. Robert Morgan (Price), the titular last man on earth whose sanity is hanging by a thread. Each night Morgan's house is assaulted by vampire-like creatures, the after effects of the global plague that has wiped out mankind. The creatures are bloodthirsty but weak and are only dangerous in numbers.

Morgan awakens and begins going through his daily routine. The garlic on the door must be replaced as well as the shattered mirror (the creatures can't stand their own reflections), there are bodies to be disposed of as the creatures feed on their own, and of course there are wooden stakes to be made. He gases up his car and sets about his new vocation, methodically exploring every building in the city and driving a stake through the heart of any of the creatures he comes across.

The film takes place in 1968 and we learn through an extended flashback that society fell three years before that. Morgan worked as a research scientist with his friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, star of many an Italian genre film, most notably Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill), not realizing that Cortman would one day be one of the creatures pounding on Morgan's door every night. A highly contagious disease "carried by the wind" has migrated from Europe and decimated the population of the world. Morgan doesn't believe Cortman when he repeats rumors that some of those killed by the plague have been returning to life. When Morgan's wife Virginia (Emma Danieli) succumbs to the plague and he can not bear the thought of her being incinerated with all the others he buries her in secret. The scene in which she returns to him, still wearing the dirty house coat in which she was buried and with choral singers screeching on the soundtrack, is an old school marrow-chiller.

Morgan's solitude shows signs of easing when a dog shows up on his doorstep, and one day while going about his business he meets a woman named Ruth (Franca Bettoia) whose presence in the daylight proves she is not one of the creatures. Things are not as they seem, though, and as the poster for the Will Smith version of this story proclaims, "the last man on earth is not alone."

It just ain't a Vincent Price movie until some scenery gets chewed, but Price's talent for going over the top serves him well when Morgan is on the verge of slipping into madness. There are some wonderfully haunting moments like the time shift from Morgan's daughter's birthday party to a point some time later after the plague has struck. We shift from a backyard scene of children playing to the same yard but empty now and with a howling wind tearing through it. George Romero has stated many times how Night of the Living Dead was inspired by Matheson's novel, but after seeing Cortland and the other creatures pounding on the exterior of Morgan's house, the similarity to Romero's first film is obvious and I have to imagine he saw Last Man on Earth as well.

Be especially cautious when shopping for this flick on DVD. The film has long since fallen into the public domain, so pretty much anyone can release it. There was a Last Man on Earth/House on Haunted Hill double feature disk kicking around for years, but this is a grainy low contrast pan and scan print of the American International Television version which is practically unwatchable. The copy in my collection comes from Madacy Home Video and features a widescreen print with surprisingly good quality picture and sound for what was essentially a bargain bin purchase. I also understand a decent print is available as part of MGM's Midnight Movies line, paired up for a double feature with another apocalyptic movie from the period, Panic In Year Zero.