by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi film screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) was of two movies that made an
obvious double bill because of the similarity of their titles: Last Woman on
Earth (1960) and The Last Man on
Earth (1964). Last Woman on Earth was produced and directed by Roger Corman for
American International Pictures in association with his own company, Filmgroup
(one word, though an Allied Artists TV reissue spelled it as “Film Group”), and
was based on a script by Robert Towne — who was also in it, more on that later.
Towne went on to a distinguished career as a writer and a less distinguished
one as a director — his best known credit was probably the screenplay for Chinatown (though he wrote an at least partially happy ending
and director Roman Polanski changed it to a nihilistic one, much to Towne’s
disgust), and he’s one of the many talents both in front of and behind the
camera who went from a Corman apprenticeship to a major career. Last
Woman on Earth was apparently a project
Corman threw together because he was already organizing a location trip to
Puerto Rico to shoot Creature from the Haunted Sea and he wanted to get the most bang for his buck while
there by making a second film — the way he would allow Francis Ford Coppola to
shoot his first film, Dementia 13,
with the same cast and crew as his own production The Young Racers; and why he would squeeze two days’ extra work out
of Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson by finishing the 1963 version of The
Raven early so he could make another film
with them, The Terror.
It helped
that Towne’s plot features only three on-screen (live) human characters: New
York financier Harold Gern (Anthony Carbone), his wife Evelyn (Betsy Jones
Moreland) and his tax attorney Martin Joyce. The performance of the actor
playing Joyce is credited to “Edward Wain,” but that was actually a pseudonym
for … Robert Towne. It seems that he hadn’t yet finished the film by the time
Corman and his crew were set to leave for Puerto Rico, so Corman had to bring
him along so he could finish the script on the spot. Rather than pay for two people to come to Puerto Rico, Corman decided to
save plane fare and living expenses for one by drafting Towne to play the part
himself. Like Blake Edwards in Frank Wisbar’s 1940’s “B” Strangler of
the Swamp, Towne’s performance proves that
his real talent lay in writing, not acting. It also is an early indication of
the flaw that would sink a lot of Towne’s later major productions: a gift for
pseudo-profundity which led him to write things that pretend to intellectual
sophistication but really don’t achieve it. One suspects that Corman told
Towne, “Write me an Ingmar Bergman script — only make sure I can slap an
exploitation title on it so I can sell it to the drive-ins.”
What Towne came up
with was a profoundly uninteresting romantic triangle between Harold, Evelyn
and Martin that turns into a post-apocalyptic movie when, vacationing on Puerto
Rico while Harold’s latest IRS investigation gets sorted out, Harold takes
Evelyn and Martin deep-sea diving with SCUBA gear — and while they’re
underwater a sudden interruption in Earth’s oxygen supply takes place, just
long enough to wipe out all other humans and land-based animal life. They come
to life but keep breathing through their diving masks until they realize that
whatever happened to the air that annihilated the rest of humanity is over and
they can once again breathe safely — and the rest of the plot deals with
Harold’s attempts to lord it over the other two and insist that Evelyn doesn’t
have sex with Martin even though she’s been clearly restive in her trophy-wife
status and genuinely attracted to him. The main problem with this film is that
the three people are relentlessly uninteresting and we really don’t like any of them. We also don’t understand why Evelyn
would want to commit adultery
with Martin other than proximity and Robert Towne the writer’s scriptorial fiat
to give Robert Towne the actor a chance to make it on screen with a hot babe.
At the end Harold and Martin start fighting over Evelyn, who’s waiting in a
deserted church for one of these men to take her and run off with her — we get
the impression by then that she really doesn’t care which one — they have a
fight scene that mostly takes place in the water before Harold is finally
fatally injured and Martin and Evelyn face an uncertain future as a would-be
Adam and Eve.
It’s possible Corman could have improved this film greatly if
he’d been willing to pay salary, expenses and travel for an actual actor to play Martin, and it’s pretty clear whom that
should have been: the young Jack Nicholson, who was under contract to Corman at
the time and could have brought an explosive romantic and sexual intensity to
the character that clearly eluded the writer playing him. One other interesting
thing about Last Woman on Earth
is it was shot in color — I think this is the first time Corman shot a film in
color — though the extant public-domain videos all stem from a badly faded 16
mm print in which the dominant colors are yellow and brown. (This was also
largely what happened to the American International production we’d screened
the night before, Queen of Blood
— was there a dark corner of the AIP vaults where the climactic conditions were
just right to fade films in this particular way?) With three uninteresting
people enacting hackneyed situations and totally missing the potential for an
end-of-the-world film (I kept thinking these three couldn’t possibly have been
the only people SCUBA diving at
the time the world briefly lost its oxygen supply, and Last Woman on
Earth would have been a far more
interesting — and, alas, expensive — movie to make if we’d met some of them),
and the extant print looking quite murky and dull (though at least it does full
justice to Betsy Jones Moreland’s red hair!), Last Woman on Earth is yet another bad film in which one senses a good
film struggling inside it to get out.
