Panic in the Year Zero! (Milland 1962)

(NOTE: this is another classic review, originally written in 2008 and before my review of the The Quest)

Late last year, I was working on a project about the adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel “I Am Legend,” and picked up a DVD with the first adaptation of the novel, The Last Man On Earth (Salkow 1964), a low budget production from noted B-film horror studio American International Pictures (AIP), producers of many early Roger Corman films. The disc was a double feature DVD which included another AIP production, Panic in the Year Zero!

Panic in the Year Zero! both stars and is directed by Ray Milland, star of Billy Wilder’s famed 1945 film The Lost Weekend (which I still need to see) and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Dial M for Murder, working from a script by John Morton and Jay Simms. The film is the story of the Baldwin family, consisting of patriarch Harry (Milland), wife Ann (Jean Hagen of Singin’ In the Rain [Donen and Kelly 1952]), son Rich (teen idol Frankie Avalon) and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel), who are on their way to a camping vacation when they discover a mushroom cloud over the Los Angeles area. As word comes in over the car radio of the destruction of major cities over America (and Canada!), Harry decides the family needs to continue on their journey as opposed to returning home in order to protect themselves both from the fallout and possible lawlessness as society seems to collapse around them. With each mile, the family is pushed by Harry’s increasing survivalist drive into extreme behaviour which pushes them outside the bounds of societal order.

The central thematic and dramatic crux of the film is the conflict between survival and the need to preserve society and civil order, and the point in which irrational panic begins to take control of the former. The masterstroke of the filmmakers is in their use of the stereotypical patriarchal organization of the Baldwin family to organize these themes and allow the audience to gradually witness the system of patriarchy and its values undermine themselves rather than resorting to didactic tactics.

While Ann occasionally voices questions about Harry’s increasingly aggressive measures to ensure his family’s safety, her willingness to submit with ease to Harry’s decisions allows the viewer to witness the contradictory, simplistic and dangerous aspects to Harry’s militaristic and survivalist attitudes for themselves. Harry frequently references potential threats towards the family in order to coerce their willingness to go along with his plans. However it is his behaviour that is closest to the threats he describes, turning to using weapons on store keeps and causing a massive traffic accident in order to get his family across a major highway. When Harry is finally confronted with what appears to be the threat he has been worried about, the situation only escalates because of Harry’s insistence of possessing firearms.

In perhaps the most damning moment of the film, Harry, having established his family’s base in a cave, preaches about the need to attempt to maintain a semblance of civilized life. However, unlike Ann’s previous and later moments of stating the need to maintain rational behaviour and trust in her fellow man, Harry’s view of civilization is limited to the need for daily shaving. Civilized behaviour is merely an act to be preformed, an act without substance.

Milland has a complex character in Harry, and his performance is up to par, allowing the viewer to keep sympathy for Harry even as he continues to dig his own grave and one for his family. The only other actor given substantial material to work with is Avalon as Harry’s son, and his performance is solid if not up to Milland’s work. Harry’s use of his son within the film is alternatively frightening and loving, as he tries to transform Rich into a man such as himself.

Where the film struggles is in its third act, in what I can only guess at the moment is due to the film being produced during the days of the Hay’s Code. After two acts of Harry’s increasing ethically questionable behaviour, the film attempts to shoehorn in a group of villains in order to mitigate the questions surrounding the actions of the Baldwin family. The filmmakers do their best within these constrictions to keep the moral ambiguity going however, as the last minute crisis of the film is the result of another of Harry’s fear based decisions, and the ending of the film refuses narrative closure, undermining the attempted moralizing on the part of two individuals at the film’s conclusion. The end result is fascinating to behold.

Milland’s direction of the film is solid if unspectacular, making the best of the low budget production values of AIP. Unfortunately these limitations occasionally become noticeable, including the use of some obvious stock footage and a poorly realized mushroom cloud. Thankfully the film is mostly an actor’s piece, allowing Milland to focus upon the drama and thematic issues rather than effects work, elaborate sets and staging. In Milland’s favour is also the solid screenwriting of Morton and Simms. A set of third act coincidences however are problematic, unnecessarily bringing back characters whose roles could easily have been fulfilled by other characters.

Oh, and I could not talk about the film without discussing Les Baxter’s music. Having written music for many AIP pictures, Baxter here writes a very jazzy score which, while seemingly at odds with what is onscreen, strangely enough works for the film in the end, giving the film an off kilter feel which matches the shifting morality of the family.

All in all, Panic in the Year Zero! is worth checking out, a thematically rich and dramatic B-film. Personally, I really want to check out more of these AIP films given my success thus far with them. However, in order to get a bit of possible pain out of the way, I think I am going to watch another film with actor directing himself next: The Quest (Van Damme 1996).

God help us all.

Carnival of Souls (Harvey 1962)

A group of young women sit in a vehicle as a car of young men pull up, challenging them to a drag race. The young women in the car are up for the race, save one named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), a passenger who sits miserably silent in the vehicle. The race commences, arriving at a damaged bridge which both groups proceed over, only for the women to be knocked over the bridge and into the river. A search of the river turns up nothing, many onlookers commenting the car will never be found. However, out of nowhere, Mary turns up on land, a mess but alive. A week later, she leaves town for Salt Lake City for a job as a church organist, now in the driver’s seat and soon to suffer horrible visions. And that is just the beginning of the ordeal she is to suffer through.

So begins Herk Harvey’s one and only feature film, Carnival of Souls (1962), a blackly comic horror film which explores patriarchal authority and the marginalization of women just as the second wave of feminism was on the rise. While the set up of the film is simple, and as with many B-films, filled with ghastly images made on the cheap, Carnival of Souls is a highly sophisticated little film, relying not on jump scares but atmosphere, playing with narrative and traditional Hollywood conceptions and constructions of space and time.

The reason I have highlighted the start of the film is that it is the most important scene of the film whilst simultaneously being the least important scene of the film. The dramatic conflict of the film is centered on the seeming disconnect Mary feels towards herself and the world around her, being either unable or unwilling to engage with society as a whole. With the accident placed at the start of the film, and the visions Mary experiences, the reason for Mary’s disconnect would appear t be related to the accident, a point she doesn’t believe and yet is insisted upon by many other authority figures throughout the film, including a medical Doctor.

While it is true that the visions Mary experiences may be related to the accident (I will neither confirm nor deny this being the case), given the way the film is structured and the accident presented, there is no evidence that Mary’s disconnect from the world is caused by accident at all. We are never shown Mary before the accident, nor does she say anything during the whole of the race scene. Mary could very well have been as supposedly cold and distant as she is in the film before the accident as much as after, and given how Harvey presents Mary as framed apart from the other women in the car before the accident, she more than likely was.

Yet the opening accident scene is still vitally important, as it is rich in symbolic meaning as it establishes the thematic and subtextual groundwork for the rest of the film. The race is not a race between youths, but between sexes, as the male and female cars battle it out for control on the bridge. It is no mistake that it is the men who knock the women off the bridge, then afterwards try and marginalize their own role in the accident: it is this scenario which is repeated time and again between Mary and various symbols of patriarchal authority throughout the film, figures who are lampooned while still symbols of a very real systemic horror.

Each male figure in the film attempts to marginalize Mary by laying the blame for her supposed problems at her feet, be it spiritually (the pastor), scientifically (the Doctor) or “romantically” (the sleazy John Linden [Sidney Berger]). Much like the young men at the start of the film who attempt to pass on the blame for the accident, each patriarchal figure reacts with shock to Mary’s refusal to merely listen to them lecture her and play the role that they, and society, dictates, oblivious to their own role in assisting Mary’s suffering.

Even the sphere of the unknown is a site of male dominance, as Mary is haunted not by visions of women, but of well dressed men. It is no surprise then that Mary is at her most terrified when presented with situations in which she is rendered speechless, literally: twice in the film, Mary seemingly becomes invisible to the world, lacking the ability to have the world around her listen to what she has to say. This point is driven home all the more when Mary finally comes face to face with a vision of herself as a seemingly lifeless dance partner of one of the male ghouls which has haunted her throughout the film.

While the film as a whole is highly stylized and over the top, natural given the dark comedy of the film, Candace Hilligoss’ performance as Mary is magnificent, bringing a layer of legitimate psychological depth to a role that could easily have become one note. Mary’s resistance to patriarchy in the film is not an overt political resistance, but one driven by a deeply held, even primal, refusal to accept the world as is, and as such is not fully understood by Mary herself consciously. Hilligoss manages to effectively embody this struggle, with much of her performance hinging upon the subtleties of her facial expressions and physical mannerisms rather than on dialogue. No other performer in the film comes close to Hilligoss’ work, though to be fair, the rest of the cast doesn’t nearly have the level of material to work with.

Herk Harvey’s direction however deserves particular attention, transforming his budgetary limitations into strengths, as he and his crew play with Hollywood concepts of cinematic time and space in order to place the viewer into the mindset of Mary and achieve a distinctive horrific atmosphere. Scenes do not so much begin and end so much as they flow into one another or fragment off from the whole of the film, launching the viewer (and Mary) from one location to another without warning, often utilizing the soundtrack to assist in the disorienting of the viewer as the music often bounces from being diegetic to non-diegetic while the editing blends space and time together in surprising ways. This playfulness leads the viewer to distrust the very foundations of Hollywood cinematic practice, and the end result is often unsettlingly, effectively preventing any sense of any space being safe for Mary, and thus by extension, the viewer. After all, how can one escape patriarchy in a society that favours patriarchy?

Occasionally, the low budget and inexperience of the filmmakers does show. A large number of the supporting cast members are fairly stiff, and while Harvey does his best to make this work, he cannot cover it up entirely. Furthermore, Harvey allows the film to occasionally dip too far into the realm of comedy for its own good, drifting too far into an overt parody of horror films rather than playing the fine line between horror and humour and losing sight of his larger thematic goals.

Still, these are minor quibbles in an otherwise great film, and given that Carnival of Souls is such a rarity, a politically progressive feminist film in a genre that more often than not marginalizes and demonises women, these flaws serve more as a reminder of the restrictions facing the filmmakers, both financial and political. The film can be found for rent off of the Criterion Collection website, and has been made available on DVD both by Criterion and other distributors.