by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Review copyrighted © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Last Man on Earth is something else again: the first of at least three
film versions of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, a 1954 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel in
which the entire human race is hit by an unstoppable plague which first kills
its victims and then, if their bodies aren’t burned first, turns them into
vampire-like creatures. The movie rights were bought by Hammer Studios in 1957
and they attempted to make a version with Fritz Lang as director (now that would have been an impressive coup!) and one of a number of fine British actors
(Stanley Baker, Paul Massie, Laurence Harvey and Kieron Moore) in the leading
role of Robert Neville — called Robert Morgan in this version — the sole
survivor of the plague who’s carrying on a one-man war against the vampires.
But Hammer placed the film in turnaround and their original U.S. distributor,
Robert Lippert, picked it up and decided to make the movie as a U.S.-Italian
co-production, filming it in Italy with two directors, Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo
Ragona. He also hired Matheson to write the script, but then put so many other
writers on it — including William Leicester, Furio Monetti and director
Ragona — that Matheson had his name taken off the film and replaced by the
pseudonym “Logan Swanson.” To play Robert Morgan, Lippert hired Vincent Price,
and though Matheson thought he was miscast (and Price’s presence is a bit problematical if only because in 1963, when
this film was made, he was far more identified with old-style Gothic horror
than science fiction), Price responded to the rare challenge of a script that
not only made sense but gave him a rich, multidimensional characterization in a
serious story he didn’t have to camp up to make entertaining.
During his long
reign as King of Horror Price mostly got silly scripts and got through them
basically by winking at the audience, as if to say, “I don’t take this crap seriously, and there’s no
reason why you should, either” —but occasionally he got a good script that gave
him some real cinematic meat and allowed him to show off what a fine, rangy
actor he could be: this film, Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death, Michael Reeves’ The Conqueror Worm a.k.a. Witchfinder General. I still
regret that the finest performance Vincent Price ever gave is totally lost —
his one-man show as Oscar Wilde, Diversions and Delights, which fortunately enough I was able to see on stage
in San Francisco in 1977 but, to the best of my knowledge, was never recorded
or filmed. (It was also one of the few times Price got to play an actual
historical person; others included his role as Mormon Church founder Joseph
Smith in the 1940 biopic Brigham Young and the real-life “witchfinder general” Matthew Hopkins in The
Conqueror Worm.) Despite the multiple
writers and directors — usually a bad sign for any movie — The Last
Man on Earth turned out to be an excellent
movie, with Price burning off the screen and avoiding most of his horror-schtick trademarks (though there are a couple of sequences
when we hear Price’s famous extended laugh, and they seem a bit out of place)
in a movie that, though obviously made on the cheap, benefits from real
locations (albeit in Italy, though the film is supposed to take place in the
U.S.) and is effectively staged and edited by the directors.
The plot features
Price as a vampire hunter who uses the same armamentarium Van Helsing used
against Dracula in the story that basically wrote the rules for the classic
Gothic vampire genre — the
vampires are repelled by mirrors (because they cast no reflection in them) and
garlic, and they can be killed by driving wooden stakes through their hearts.
He goes about doing this during daylight because the vampires are only active
at night, and at night he has to barricade himself inside his home because a
gang of vampires regularly attempt to break in and kill him each night. (The
sequences of Price erecting the barricades inside his home to ward off the
vampires are strongly reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead, made four years later, and Night of the Living Dead director George Romero conceded that this film had
influenced him.) Then we get a flashback to Morgan’s life pre-plague, in which
we meet his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli) — whom he calls “Vergy” for some
reason — and their daughter Kathy (Christi Courtland). Morgan works as a
biomedical researcher at a lab owned by Dr. Mercer (Umberto Rau), and his principal
assistant and best friend is Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart). Kathy gets the
plague and Vergy calls a doctor, who notifies the authorities; they take
Kathy’s dead body away for burning in a giant pit. Meanwhile Morgan and his
fellow researchers are stumped by the plague — they can’t even decide whether
the organism causing it is a bacterium (which could be seen by an ordinary
light microscope) or a virus — and Cortman reports to Morgan that he’s heard
stories of plague victims who’ve been buried (as opposed to burned) coming back
to life as vampires. “That’s all those are, stories!” says the rationalist Morgan — and in a nice bit of
irony it turns out that Cortman himself died, became a vampire, and is the
leader of the vampire clan trying to break into Morgan’s home and kill him
before he kills them. Then Morgan spots a dog running across a field and chases
it, glad that there’s something
alive and normal-looking still around — only by the time he catches the dog and
it comes home with him it, too, expires from the plague. Then he meets a young
woman, Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia), who tells him that there are others who
have figured out a way to make a drug from natural plant sources that will not
cure them of the plague but will allow them to control it, live relatively
normally and avoid becoming vampires.
Unfortunately, Morgan has become a
“legend” among these people because, in his one-person war against the
vampires, he’s killed some of them as well and they’re sending out a posse to
exterminate him before he kills any more. Morgan discovers the source of his
own immunity to the plague — exposure to the bite of a bat years before that
inoculated him with a natural vaccine — and finds that by combining his blood
with Ruth’s serum he can make a drug that will cure her. He does so, but in the
meantime he’s tracked down by the fellow survivors and he’s killed by metal
harpoons thrown by them while standing on the altar of an abandoned church and
screaming at them that both the
vampires and the survivors are freaks and he’s the only real human left. There have been at least two major
remakes of The Last Man on Earth:
a 1971 version with Charlton Heston called The Omega Man and a 2007 film with Will Smith that used Matheson’s
original title, I Am Legend. Also
listed on imdb.com is a 1967 short called Soy Legenda and a 2007 Asylum Studios knockoff called I
Am Omega released to compete with the Will
Smith version. I can’t compare how The Last Man on Earth stacks up against these since I’ve never seen the Will
Smith version, I haven’t seen The Omega Man since I caught it in a theatre when it was new
(though I remember joking to my mom that she had said during the 1950’s and
1960’s that Charlton Heston seemed to be making the entire history of the world
on film, since he was cast in so many historical spectaculars, and when he
started doing science-fiction in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s — the first
two Planet of the Apes movies, The
Omega Man and Soylent Green — I joked that he was extending his history of the
world into the future), and I’ve never read Matheson’s novel — but on its own
merits The Last Man on Earth,
despite its relatively crude production values and the problems with Vincent
Price as a “type,” is an excellent film that gave Price an acting challenge to
which he rose magnificently. And the story’s premise is so haunting and
powerful it’s no wonder so many filmmakers have returned to it since!
