I’ve always wondered why there is always so much litter blowing around in end of the world films. Where does it all come from? Sure, you’d expect a certain amount of societal flotsam to be kicking around the place for the first few months after we’d all gone under, but wouldn’t it all get blown into the sea at some point? Have our geography teachers being deceiving us all along about prevailing winds?
This wasn’t the first thought I had whilst watching Vincent Price walking around the deserted streets of his vanquished city, but it certainly cropped up. This is perhaps because The Last Man on Earth captures the utter solitude that must confront any person with the misfortune to bear that title so well. Despite the obvious technical limitations of the time Ubaldo Ragona obviously put real thought into getting across the isolation of Price’s new world. After a plague wipes out everyone else on Earth (just about) Robert Morgan, who has a mysterious immunity to the disease, manages to go on living life for three years in this new, quiet world. There are lots of little touches which help trap us there with him. The fact that Morgan keeps track of time by writing on his kitchen wall (calendars being no longer printed) is just one of these and is perhaps the most telling, reminiscent as it is of prisoners scratching lines on their cell walls to measure the duration of their imprisonment. Overall though, Morgan seems to be coping very well with his new routine. When we see him collecting his groceries and filling his car with petrol it is difficult to see what has changed, coming across as a Romero-esque back-handed compliment to the state of society. It would seem that boredom is the greatest threat to Morgan’s survival.
Until one realises that one quite serious change is the fact that the only other people to have survived the plague are a race of nocturnal vampires/zombies. This is where the ‘I Am Legend’ adaptation works so well, and also, conversely, where it trips the film up a little. Though Richard Matheson wrote the screenplay for Ragona it is apparent that the final result is the product several re-writes. Thus, the early parts of Last Man set out Morgan’s sense of siege brilliantly, both in terms of the vampires trying to feast on him and also his own sense of inadequacy as a man of science in being unable to stem the plague. What slightly lets the film down is how little time it devotes to the emotional consequences of all of this on Morgan. The sense of rage boiling away in him at seeing his family succumb, and the need for revenge against the vampires and their curse that he blames for this is lost somewhere along the way. His systematic comb through the city preying on the vampires is subsumed by his overall meticulousness in trying to survive so is freed from any sense of retribution. The scene where he oversleeps at his wife’s tomb hints at what is really driving him along but the rather lengthy flash-back to happier times dilutes the potency of the message somewhat.
This helps account for what can seem like rather a heavy-handed and muddled ending. As we are unaware of what Morgan’s real motivations are (for they clearly transcend survival, even through the occasional haze of Ragona’s direction) his closing remarks are incapable of conveying the latent power of Matheson’s book. The three-way struggle between the vampires, the ‘mutants’ and Morgan is reduced to a simple, elemental fight between good and evil. However, the complexities of deciding which side represents what are flagged up but are never utilised or explored. It is a tribute to Price’s fine performance that the innate sorrow of Morgan’s plight shines through, even if the ultimate absolution of the book is denied him.