BY HANK REINEKE
In the early spring of 1961, shortly following the
completion of his work on A.I.P.’s Master
of the World - and following a series of lectures regarding “The Enjoyment
of Great Art†– Renaissance man Vincent Price was to jet off mid-April for two acting
assignments in Rome, Italy. The two
productions he had signed onto for producer-writer Ottavio Poggi were Gordon, il Pirata Nero (Gordon, the Black
Pirate) and Nefertiti, Regina Del
Nile (Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile). The former film – arguably the better of the two - was belatedly released
in the U.S. in June 1963 under the title Rage
of the Buccaneers. The film was distributed
regionally in the U.S. with neither fanfare nor critical attention.
Rage
of the Buccaneers would first appear on the drive-in circuit as
the odd undercard to such films as Broccoli and Saltzman’s Bob Hope/Anita
Ekberg comedy Call Me Bwana. Rage was later paired, a bit more
sensibly, with The Playgirls and the
Vampire, an Italian-horror production mostly recalled by old-school monster
movie fans and admirers of voluptuous continental on-screen beauties. The weak-tea newspaper campaign in the U.S. for
Rage of the Buccaneers could have
hardly been helpful in exciting foot traffic into neighborhood cinemas. Though the posters for the U.S. release
promised Furious Action! Passionate Love!, the accompanying
newspaper adverts offered the far less sensational promise of Excitement plus… Emotional Turbulence. Emotional Turbulence? Meh.
In truth, Rage of
the Buccaneers would be dimly recalled, if at all, by U.S. movie fans due
to it popping up on television as 1964 drew to a close. In early November of 1964 it was announced -
with some degree of ballyhoo - that the NBC network had acquired no fewer than eight
post-1960 “first-run†films for television distribution. But even the network’s big newspaper
announcement was late out of the starting block. Rage of
the Buccaneers had already been televised by several NBC affiliates as
early as September 1964.
Several essays and film books would note that Price’s latter
ill-fated Italian film, Nefertiti, Queen
of the Nile would not actually see a theatrical release in the U.S. market. This is actually untrue. The film had the briefest of runs – as a second
feature in support of the Buddy Ebsen comedy Mail Order Bride - at a drive-in theater outside of Phoenix, AZ in
March 1964. The film then seemingly disappeared
from movie screens - both big and small - until it was picked up as a
late-night television programmer in 1966. Shortly thereafter, Nefertiti
too fell pretty much off the face of the planet, at least as far as U.S.
audiences were concerned.
Then, in 1985, with the home video boom in the ascendant,
Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile was briefly
resurrected as a “big box†VHS cassette release in the U.S. on the Force Video
label. In the UK, there were at least
two video cassette releases of Gordon, il
Pirata Nero, first as The Black
Pirate (Apex Video) and later as Gordon,
The Black Pirate (Midas Video). As
far as I’m aware, these are the only three editions of these two obscure
Vincent Price films to be officially
released on the English-speaking home video market, though there are bootlegs
circulating of both films. I only dredge
up this old history in the, perhaps, overly optimistic hope that Kino Lorber
might make note of these glaring deficiencies in their own burgeoning catalog
of Vincent Price home video offerings.
In any case, Price’s second professional visit to Italy
would prove to be more successful. In
January of 1963, Hollywood scene gossip columnists reported that Price would
celebrate the New Year by preparing a return to Italy for a “Halloween release
of his next horror movie, The Last Man on
Earth.†The film was to be based on
the novel I am Legend by Richard
Matheson. Matheson’s novel, the author’s
first, was published in August of 1954 by Fawcett Gold Medal books. It was a slim paperback of one-hundred and
sixty pages, but Matheson was no amateur writer, having previously published a
score of science-fiction-based short stories in magazines and anthologies.
Matheson’s novel was optioned by Britain’s Hammer Films
in 1957, that studio even commissioning the author to write a screenplay for a
proposed production. The problem was
that the British censor board found Matheson’s screenplay unrelentingly grim
and violent, warning should any production be mounted, there was little chance
that the film would pass code. So a wary
Anthony Hinds at Hammer chose to sell the rights of Matheson’s screenplay to American
producer and cinema theater chain owner Robert L. Lippert (Curse of the Fly). Lippert
subsequently engaged Price to star in the project, traveling to Rome in late
summer of 1962 to arrange crew and casting of the film’s Italian supporting
players.
Matheson’s I am
Legend recounts the final years of Robert Neville, one of the few survivors
of a pandemic turned plague that killed off most of the earth’s population. The rub is that while those afflicted
remained technically dead, they retained
mobility. Neville goes to great lengths
to investigate why the “undead†have transformed into bacillus vampires of a sort: they drink blood and avoid the rays of the sun much as did the Gothic
and folkloric vampires of yore did. But
otherwise they remained mostly human in appearance save for a decided graveyard
pallor.
Neville (renamed Robert Morgan in the film) is a reluctant,
modern day, post-apocalyptic Van Helsing. He has chosen to actively seek out and
confront the vampire hordes. He really
has no other choice as, much to his disdain, he’s under near-constant assault
by them. Matheson’s book is an
undeniably grim one with an equally fatalistic ending, but his slim volume
would go on to influence countless filmmakers and aspiring science-fiction
writers in years following publication. In manner of tone and presentation, it’s reasonable to say that George
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was
highly and undeniably influenced by The
Last Man on Earth.
Price wasn’t terribly excited to travel to Italy in the grim
winter season of 1963, but the offer to visit Rome would give the actor the
opportunity to canvas galleries and antique stores in search of artworks. In June of 1962 it was announced that Price had
entered into his semi-famous partnership with the Sears, Roebuck & Co. to
search out art that could be consigned and sold as lithographs through the
department store chain. This interest in
art was a lifelong passion of the actor’s and he had already been collecting
artworks for Sears a month prior to the official press release of their
collaboration. The actor told columnist
Bob Thomas that his searching out the Vincent
Price Collection for Sears had already resulted in a “whirl†of activity,
and that he’d already “bought 1,700 paintings and etchings: I’ve got to have
2,500 before the sale starts.â€
By Mid-January of 1963 Price was already in Europe, first
visiting Paris before traveling on to Rome to begin filming. In the space of three days and visits to the galleries
and artist studios of the City of Lights, Price offered that he had already
purchased one hundred and fifty paintings that he thought Sears could sell for
$300 or less back in the U.S. Columnist
Doris Sanders noted that Price had already admitted dropping four thousand U.S.
dollars on the very first day of his Parisian shopping spree. It was also noted that the artists Price
approached were appreciably happy as the actor – funded by his corporate
sponsor - always chose to pay cash up-front.
Shooting of The
Last Man on Earth (a cooperative effort of Lippert’s Associated
Productions, Inc. and Italy’s Produzioni La Regina) took place in the last week
of January of 1963 and concluded mid-February. There wasn’t a lot of time for Price to seek out art treasures in Rome
as the actor needed to return to the U.S. almost immediately. He had been scheduled to give twenty-two
lectures on art in a thirty-day span, sharing his own enthusiasms on the
subject while tying them to Sears’s targeting marketing strategy.
Prior to his lecture at Ball State University in Muncie, IN
on March 7, 1963, Price remarked to a local reporter that he had recently
returned from a film shoot in Italy. He
recalled how he had been suitably impressed by the level of artistic flourish exemplified
by contemporary European filmmaking. He
described the production shoot in Rome as having been blessed with “marvelous
photography†(courtesy of cinematographer Franco Delli Colli), and describing
his recent experience as something resembling Cinéma vérité in its maverick styling. The filming in
Italy, he explained, was “Stark, real, with no make-up on actors.â€
Fast forward to the present: revisiting director Sidney
Salkow’s The Last Man on Earth in this
semi-lockdown year of 2021, one can’t help but be shocked by the film’s
prescience. This Kino Lorber set
features the bonus supplement Richard
Matheson: Storyteller, but it’s reasonable to substitute the term “Seerâ€
over “Storyteller†for the revered writer. There’s simply no way of side-stepping this film’s accidental mirroring
of a fictional pandemic scenario with today’s on-going Covid epidemic. All of the elements we see today have been
foreshadowed here.
In one flashback sequence a colleague shows Vincent Price
a headline that reads a new “Plague Threatens Europe,†one suggesting that
perhaps the disease is perhaps “Carried on the Wind.†Price dismisses the notion,
even though he is a scientist employed at the Mercer Institute of Chemical
Research. Price chooses to discount the threat. He dismisses the proposed doomsday scenario since he refuses to believe
“half-baked theories that sell newspapers.â€
His opinion only changes when his own family is torn apart by the rampaging disease – but not before
losing long and tested friendships with colleagues who beg him to re-consider
his “Doubting Thomas†dismissals of the pandemic. It’s only when his own daughter is stricken by
the virus that Price seems to acknowledge that there’s something in the air
that threatens his family personally. Still he insists that his grieving wife not to summon a doctor to
examine his ailing child, fearing his daughter might be removed from home by
authorities upon any report of the contagion illness.
He also suggests to his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli),
that it might be best not to send the child to school with all that’s been
going on. As for his personal belief why
he himself hasn’t succumbed to the virus, Price muses that it was likely due to
his having generated an immunity through antibodies. These antibodies were the result, he opines,
of having suffering a bat bite during a pre-pandemic visit to Panama. Does any
of this sound somewhat familiar to all of us ploughing confusingly through the
years 2020-2021?
In this case, I don’t necessarily agree with the wariness
of British censors concerning such material circa 1962. But there’s no denying that The Last Man on Earth is, from beginning
to end, an unrelenting grim, dystopic film. From visions of corpse strewn streets at the film’s opening, to the picture’s
symbolic, if fatalistic, finale on a church altar, the film is un-redeeming in
its bleak view of the future. The film
is true science-fiction as the film takes place in the future… if not a not-so-distant
one. The film was released in Europe in
late 1963, but we learn through Price’s record-keeping wall calendar that the
plague first descended in December of 1965. When the film opens, we learn that Price has managed to survive, alone
and weary, as late as September 1968.
It’s hardly a victory to have survived. One of the more unfortunate results of dying
from the plague is that one does not remain dead. The victims live on as night-dwelling
vampires in search of blood. The problem
is that Price is seemingly alone as a fresh source of food. So the vampires instead feast, as per Price’s
recollection, off the cannibalized flesh “of the weak ones.†Price’s home is much like a fortress,
providing little comfort but with tools necessary for survival: a ham radio,
several generators, low hanging electrical cords that provide dim light, canned
goods, and a wood lathe that allows him to fashion wood stakes to control the
nightly vampire siege.
Though Matheson has removed the vampires from the
Gothic-trappings of old Europe, they are repelled by the same manner of ancient
folklore: strings of garlic cloves, the holy cross, and mirrors. The toll of being Earth’s “Last Man†is evident. Price’s Robert Morgan suffers from loneliness
and isolation and the wearying effects of nightly twelve-hour long assaults on
his home by hordes of the undead. It’s
also worth noting that Price – a noted real-life gourmand – achingly sighs that dining can longer be savored as a
pleasurable activity. The intake of food
now merely provides “fuel for survival†but little else.
Price can travel about freely in the daylight, but most
of his time is spent collecting corpses and tossing them into an open pit of
fire that had serves as a crematorium created to stem the onset of plague. Such memories are told in a flashback sequence
that underpins the merciless tone of the film. Trying to prevent a military officer from tossing the corpse of his own beloved
daughter into the fire-pit, Price cries out for one MP to take pity. The soldier’s response is somber, informing
the distraught Price, that it’s simply not possible. “There are a lot of
daughters in there,†he answers coldly, “including my own.â€
The finished film was, perhaps not unexpectedly, met with
mixed reviews. One person who expressed
more than a measure of disappointment with the resulting film was screenwriter
Matheson. The writer was so unhappy that
Lippert brought on a second writer (William F. Leicester) to re-work his
original script that Matheson asked to be billed in the credits only under the
pseudonym of “Logan Swanson,†the combined surnames of his mother and
mother-in-law. It’s unclear what
Matheson thought of the two remakes of The
Last Man on Earth, since both subsequent – and far more well-known -
productions (The Omega Man (1971) and
I am Legend (2007) would stray even farther
afield from his original vision.
Personally, I feel the passing of time has proven this black-and-white
film be the best of the lot, no matter how imperfect. Vincent Price would reminisce that he too thought
this low-budget Italian production turned out far better than even he had
imagined it would. His only real
problems he had with filming The Last Man
on Earth was the producer’s insistence that Rome could convincingly double
as Los Angeles circa 1968 and that Lippert’s threadbare production allowed for
no heated trailer to return to when he was not on set. The cold of January and February on the
continent was as bone-chilling as the novel’s premise.
Unlike Rage of the
Buccaneers or Nefertiti, Queen of the
Nile, The Last Man on Earth would
enjoy a decent U.S. run. In late
February of 1964, American International Pictures founders, James H. Nicholson
and Samuel Z. Arkoff announced the company had acquired five foreign features they
would distribute in the U.S. during the coming year. This
import package had been assembled to help celebrate the company’s tenth
anniversary as both a production and film distribution company. The most exciting pick-up (on paper, at
least) was Sean Connery’s film War Head
(later released under the titles On the
Fiddle and Operation Snafu), but
they also acquired the musical comedy Some
People, the horror-peplum Goliath and
the Vampires, and two sci-fi efforts, The
Last Man on Earth on Unearthly
Stranger.
Through AIP The
Last Man on Earth would enjoy a relatively decent run of stateside regional
theatrical screenings. It would begin
its run by playing both cinemas and the drive-in circuit in May of 1964,
sometimes as the top-bill to Unearthly
Stranger, but more often as a second-billed attraction to everything from
Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath or to
Richard Lester’s Beatles romp A Hard Day’s
Night. By June of 1965 The Last Man on Earth was still making
the rounds of drive-ins, this time as support to Price’s newest sci-fi
extravaganza for AIP, War Gods of the
Deep. Though The Last Man on Earth will stand neither as Vincent Price’s best
nor most iconic film, it just might be the one that continues to resonate – if
only by accident - due to the uncanny prognostic topicality of its subject matter. Shivery for reasons well beyond vampirism.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray edition of The Last Man on Earth is presented here
in a 1920 x 1080p with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, dts sound and an attractive
slipcase cover. The film looks very good, certainly well beyond any
previous of the movie’s previous Public Domain releases – of which there have
been many. Aside from the aforementioned
six-minute featurette, Richard Matheson:
Storyteller, there’s also an audio commentary track by film historian
Richard Harland Smith.
This edition also offers both the original U.S. and
Italian theatrical trailers of the film, removable English sub-titles, as well
as a pair of original TV spots for the film and trailers of seven other Vincent
Price titles offered through Kino. There’s also a two-an-a-half minute segment of Joe Dante’s “Trailers
from Hell†which briefly touches on the film’s reputation, as well as a brief clip
of the film’s alternate ending that includes actress Franca Bettoia’s excised
line of final dialogue. I might have
once described The Last Man on Earth
as a cautionary tale, but I fear the boat has already sailed on such prudent
circumspection.
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