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Talk Cinephilia to Me The Last Man on Earth (1964) Episode 1 Notes
"Talk Cinephilia to me" is a podcast about watching cinema--artistic, outsider, experimental and B movies--brought to you by author playwright, Juli Kearns, and her son, Aaron Dylan Kearns, an experimental filmmaker who, though he was raised on great cinema, loves tawdry horror. He knows things I don't about film. I know things he doesn't. Most importantly, we know enough to be very aware of what we don't know. We promise to be humble, somewhat meandering hosts because we're disaffected dyslexic leftists with opinions and our filters are busted.
In this episode we discuss the 1964 Cold War style, post-apocalyptic film, The Last Man on Earth, which features Vincent Price as the last survivor of a pandemic that turns people into vampires.
As we only briefly explored the possible influence of Antonioni's film L'Eclisse on The Last Man on Earth, I thought I'd post a few screengrabs from relevant scenes. Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, released in Jan of 1962, had scenes filmed in Rome's EUR (Rome Universal Exposition), a modernist suburb created by Mussolini. The below couple of screengrabs are from when Vittoria has ended her relationship with her lover and is walking away from his apartment. These scenes were filmed and edited in such a way that a sense of isolation, of unease and Cold War alienation is transmitted.
The Last Man on Earth is most frequently given as having been filmed in Rome in the winter of 1961-1962, and if this had been the case there would be no possibility Antonioni's film could have had an influence on it. However, Vincent Price's daughter wrote in a biography on him that he filmed in Rome in the winter of 1963, and I find that on 30 January 1963 "Variety" magazine, in the "Rome" section under "Chatter" announced "Vincent Price arrived to star in 'Last Man on Earth'...a sci-fi tale based on book, 'I Am a [sic] Legend' by Richard Matheson."
In the below screengrabs from The Last Man on Earth we see Morgan in what is supposedly an American city, and yet the choice was made to film the EUR water tower, construction on which had finished in 1960. Called Il Fungo, The Mushroom, it's a very unique piece of architecture and looks like the soaring tentacled monster-machine tripods from the early illustrated versions of War of the Worlds.
A plague has turned everyone into vampire-zombies, and as far as Morgan knows he's the "the last man on earth". One day a dog appears, the only other creature he has seen in several years that's not a vampire-zombie, and he follows the black poodle into the EUR, trying to catch it. He finds in that area a number of staked vampires, which means he's not the last person on earth. Someone else has survived and is killing vampires.
As shown in the below screengrab, in L'Eclisse, Vittoria chases a friend's loose dog, a black poodle, in the EUR. This occurs after Vittoria has been partying with a couple of friends, one of whom is Marta, a white colonialist from Kenya. They are in Marta's apartment and have been looking at photos of Kenya when, inspired by her images of indigenous tribal individuals, Vittoria dresses up in blackface and dances around with a spear. The friend who is Kenyan, having been born there, becomes uncomfortable and tells her to stop. She relates that she's worried about violence, that there are 6,000,000 Black Kenyans and they want to throw out the 60,000 whites. She says, "We're lucky they're still in trees and have barely lost their tails or they'd have already thrown us out," adding that a few have studied at Oxford, but "the others are all monkeys." It's at this point in the conversation that Marta notices her dog has disappeared and guesses it has let itself out the unchained door. They go out to find the dog, which has joined up with a pack of loose dogs. Which dog is Marta's? The black poodle. Vittoria approaches Marta's dog that is with a white poodle, and jokes, asking if there have been any problems between them.
In Matheson's book, the dog seems to have been a mutt, whereas in the film it is a black poodle, like the dog Vittoria chases. If one is familiar with L'Eclisse, when Morgan chases the dog through the EUR it rather feels as if the black poodle has escaped from Antonioni's film and run onto the set of the The Last Man on Earth. Indeed, it's rather eerie.
"Someone else is alive in this world, but where are they? Where are they hiding?" Morgan wonders, staring down the empty streets after finding the staked vampire-zombies in the EUR.
In L'Eclisse, toward film's end we are shown a man reading a newspaper with a headline of the nuclear arms race, this occurring during a long sequence of shots of empty streets, and with the juxtaposition we are set up to not interpret them as peaceful, instead we experience anxious suspence.
The Last Man on Earth begins with Morgan rising in the morning and marking his calendar so we see the date is Sept 5th 1968. After Morgan marks his calendar at the film's beginning, we don't see it again, but I believe the film spans several days ending on Sept 8th. L'Eclisse spans several days in Vittoria's life, the film ending on September 10th 1961. She had arranged to meet with her lover that evening but neither one shows up at the appointed place.
As to the EUR, Wikipedia states:
The complex was planned to be home to a World Fair to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome and of the beginning of the Fascist era. The autonomous agency responsible for organization and construction of the project, E42 (Esposizione 1942), was created on 26 December 1936.
The name of the project was later changed to EUR, but the Expo never took place and work on it stopped in 1942. Again, Wikipedia relates:
After a period of controversy over its architectural and urban planning principles, the project to design EUR was commissioned from the leaders of both of the rival factions in Italian architecture: Marcello Piacentini for the "reactionaries" and Giuseppe Pagano for the "progressives". Each of them brought in their own preferred architects to design individual buildings within the district. EUR offers a large-scale image of how urban Italy might have looked if the Fascist regime had not fallen; wide axially planned streets and austere buildings of either stile Littorio, inspired by ancient Roman architecture, or Rationalism, modern architecture but built using traditional limestone, tuff and marble.
When I bring up, in the podcast, the confusing politics concerning the ending of the film, the impression that we're given that the new society is fascist, or perhaps socialist or communist, I was considering the filming that was done in the EUR, but whatever is intended to be communicated seems muddied. Price's character is clearly repelled by what he feels is the new society's joy in violence, the one being built by the vampire-zombies, but he is told that he has not been able to see himself as the vampires-zombies see him, and that he has killed a number of their people, and is considered by them to be a murderer.
If the connections I've traced between The Last Man on Earth and L'Eclisse aren't coincidental, they emphasize, by association, the subject being about racism, colonialism, genocide, and the book openly raises the question of prejudice with how Morgan sees himself as the last real human. In both the book and film, he acknowledges how he has incorrectly perceived the others, yet in the film his final declaration is that they are mutants and he is the last true man, even as he is killed at a church's altar, which is steeped in symbolism as in the movie it is his blood that will save the others. He is impaled by a spear, the symbolism suggesting he is a vampire as well, and yet he is also the Christ whose blood will save them. Because of the gory transformation of people, by the plague, into vampire-zombies, it's easy to read them as fascists rather than as a population threatened with genocide through racism. Perhaps it's a problem of the film attacking too many birds with one stone, because the stone only suits certain birds.
In the book, the vampire-zombies kill not only those humans never infected, but also those who were infected and died and were reanimated, which is a different kind of vampire from what they are. In both the film and the book, their aim is to build a new society.
From the book, in which Morgan is instead named Robert Neville:
“Your — your society is—certainly a fine one,” he gasped. “Who are those —those gangsters who came to get me? The —the council of justice?”
Her look was dispassionate. She’s changed, he thought suddenly.
“New societies are always primitive,” she answered. “You should know that. In a way we’re like a revolutionary group —repossessing society by violence. It’s inevitable. Violence is no stranger to you. You’ve killed. Many times.”
“Only to—to survive.”
“That’s exactly why we’re killing,” she said calmly. “To survive. We can’t allow the dead toexist beside the living. Their brains are impaired, they exist for only one purpose. They have to be destroyed. As one who killed the dead and the living, you know that.”
The deep breath he took made the pain wrench at his insides. His eyes were stark with pain as he shuddered. It’s got to end soon, he thought. I can’t stand much more of this. No, death did not frighten him. He didn’t understand it, but he didn’t fear it either.
The swelling pain sank down and the clouds passed from his eyes. He looked up at her calm face.
“T hope so,” he said. “But —but did you see their faces when they—they killed?” His throat moved convulsively. “Joy,” he mumbled. “Pure joy.”
Her smile was thin and withdrawn. She has changed, he thought, entirely.
“Did you ever see your face,” she asked, “when you killed?” She patted his brow with the cloth. “I saw it—remember? It was frightening. And you weren’t even killing then, you were just chasing me.”
He closed his eyes. Why am I listening to her? he thought. She’s become a brainless convert to this new violence.
“Maybe you did see joy on their faces,” she said. “It’s not surprising. They’re young. And they are killers—assigned killers, legal killers. They’re respected for their killing, admired for it. What can you expect from them? They’re only fallible men. And men can learn to enjoy killing. That’s an old story, Neville. You know that.”
He looked up at her. Her smile was the tight, forced smile of a woman who was trying to forgo being a woman in favor of her dedication.
“Robert Neville,” she said, “the last of the old race.”
His face tightened.
“Last?’ he muttered, feeling the heavy sinking of utter loneliness in him.
“As far as we know,” she said casually. “You’re quite unique, you know. When you’re gone, there won’t be anyone else like you within our particular society.”
At the conclusion of the book, Neville realizes that "normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man." He is the abnormal one now, and so they fear him and he must be killed, because of that fear, because he is a connection with the past.
Matheson was initially involved with the writing of the screenplay for the film, and we don't know what his problems with it were, but he separated himself from the project, chose to be credited with a pseudonym.
A thing we briefly discussed was what the advertising poster for Last Man On Earth would have one expect and which has nothing to do with the film which is the Second Empire gothic mansion that such films as Hitchcock's Psycho associated with horror for the popular imagination--the flat mansard roof with dormer windows, and pavilions that break up a roof's monotony. Nowhere in the movie does such a house appear, and I doubt the public has any association between it and Cold War post-apocalyptic landscapes. The EUR water tower is certainly the most distinctive, dramatic architectural feature in the film, but it was in Italy and this was supposed to be America. I wonder how many people left the film asking, "Where was the house?" How many people noticed it was absent?
At the podcast's end, we briefly mention the film short The Second to Last Man on Earth, made by Aaron in 2014 when he was 15 or 16 years of age. It's a purely-for-the-fun-of-it film that, among other such films he used to make, he has had for years listed under the collective title, Internet Movie Toilet Paper. It can be seen at this link. He also, wasting time with being house-bound, wasted some productive energy by making The Second to Last Man on Earth #2.
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