1951 science fiction, dir. Arch Oboler, William Phipps, Susan Douglas
Rubeš: IMDb. After the bombs
fall, only five people are left alive… and they can't get on.
I am not one of those people who can identify every piece of
nuclear test footage. But the one that opens this film is a really
easy one: Crossroads Baker, from 1946. (Also one of the few that would
have been available given the date of this film.)
Arch Oboler is best known for his radio scripts, but he also made
films. For this one, he kept the budget ruthlessly small: not only are
there only five actors, all unknowns at the time, but his crew were
all recent graduates the from USC film school, and most of the filming
was done at the guest house on his ranch (designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright).
This feels like something not really written for the medium: I could
easily see it as a stage or radio play, and the visuals are rarely
important. Indeed, as with many low-budget films, there's a remarkable
lack of bodies considering the undamaged nature of the towns; we see
the odd skeleton, but that just raises more questions, because it
takes a month or two for a body to be reduced to that state (longer, if
the scavengers have been killed off too), but Roseanne (Rubeš) is still
staggering blindly away from the one place that might hold an answer
to her burning question: did her husband somehow survive?
Meanwhile William (Phipps) wears his beard very much in the manner of
a man who is not used to wearing a beard. (Trust me. I've seen it
before. Also I have found no photographs of him in a beard except from
this production.) Even good guy William, though, assumes that the only
remaining woman is his for the taking; and her counterargument is not
"no", but "I'm married (if my husband is alive) and pregnant". Ah, the
1950s.
Two more reasonable people turn up, and all seems to be going well
until person number five comes along, with his plans for looting the
abandoned city and living high on the hog rather than messing about
growing crops. Nobody really has much of an argument here, possibly
because of the great shortage of details (e.g. why specifically is
everyone else dead and is whatever killed them going to be more
concentrated in the city)… but the actors are a real pleasure to
watch.
It's an odd mixture of a film, but I ended up rather enjoying it.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.