By
Hank Reineke
Panic
in Year Zero! rolls out calmly in a Leave it to Beaver 1950’s idyll, the four member Baldwin family readying
an early four A.M. start for their much anticipated camping and fishing vacation. It doesn’t look much like four swipes past midnight,
despite the groggy time-checking complaint of teenage son Rick Baldwin (Frankie
Avalon). The sun, in fact, is high and
shining brightly overhead as the family loads themselves into their sleek Mercury
Monterey hitched to a shiny Kenskill trailer
home. Rick’s parents, his saturnine
father Harry (Ray Milland) and doting mother Ann (Jean Hagen), ignore their
son’s sleepy protestations and they all climb merrily into the car along with
sister Karen (Mary Mitchel).
The family vacation is spoiled some two hours later when,
while driving into the mountains to their Shibes Meadow campground destination,
a blinding flash of light and a sonic boom sounds behind them. The family scampers out of their car to
witness a giant billowing mushroom cloud plume upwards toward the heavens. There’s little doubt in their minds that the
unthinkable has transpired. There’s an
interim when all communication with the outside world has been lost; the family
is even unable to receive messages via the Conelrad civilian alert radio
system, the Cold War era’s preferred conduit of emergency broadcasts. When they are finally able to receive news
via their car’s AM radio, they’re not surprised - but still horrified - to
learn that all of Los Angeles and its “surrounding areas†have been irradiated
in a nuclear attack.
The family soon learns via a second radio bulletin that
Los Angeles is not the only U.S. city to lie smoldering in ruin. New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia have also
been similarly attacked, as have the capitol cities of Rome, London, and
Paris. We’re never told exactly who is
responsible for these reprehensible sneak atomic weapon attacks, but since its
1962, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume the Godless Commies were behind it
all. Interestingly, or perhaps
prophetically, Panic in Year Zero!
was released to cinemas in the summer of 1962, only a few months preceding the Khrushchev
vs. Kennedy nuclear chess game that was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Unlike most pure entertainment films that emerged from
American-International, Panic in Year
Zero! is an unrelentingly grim relic of the atomic age. Milland’s Harry Baldwin, ever the patriarchal
father, will go to any extreme to protect his family. His earliest protective measures are noble,
but he’ll soon turn completely paranoid – and commit a series of increasingly alarming
cold-blooded acts out of sheer desperation. This film, in the manner of a similarly themed sci-fi title, Stanley
Kramer’s On the Beach (1959),
concentrates not on those incinerated but instead entirely on those who have survived
a nuclear attack. The protagonists in
the film are not foreign invaders or militarists; the folks Milland is most
wary of are, sadly, his fellow citizens.
His adversaries are the similarly frightened people who, having
survived the blast, have gone mobile. Those who have piled into any moving vehicle they can commandeer to seek
some solace in the relative safety and refuge of the mountains. As he witnesses the endless parade of
automobiles streaming into the remote areas outside of Los Angeles, Baldwin doesn’t
see his fellow countrymen as scared witless refugees seeking safe haven. They are, instead, deemed potential competitors
for dwindling resources.
Baldwin switches instantly into survival mode, and is
distrustful of everyone. With the radio
reporting incidents of looting in and around the outskirts of America’s urban
areas, citizens are being instructed by the civil defense corps to seek refuge
in the fallout shelters. Baldwin decides
that his family’s chances of survival will increase exponentially if they do
the exact opposite as told. He chooses to go deeper into the mountains,
certain that “survival will have to be on an individual basis.†His soft-hearted wife disagrees with his cold-hearted
survivalist instincts, but she’s not able to sway him in his position. It’s 1962, after all, and he’s the man of the
house.