DAY THE WORLD ENDED
1955
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Lou Russof
Day the World Ended, released in the December of 1955, brings us to a couple of milestones in the intertwined histories of American International Pictures (still operating as the American Releasing Corporation) and the filmmaker who was going to become their leading light, Roger Corman: for the former, it's actually an enormous milestone, one-half of the company's very first pair of double features, and therefore quite possibly the first immediately profitable movies AIP ever made, thereby putting them on the fateful path that, by the 1960s, would bring the company closer to being a new major minor than the new poverty row studio it had started out as; for the latter, it's the very first sci-fi/horror film to bear Corman's directorial credit, though as he'd already produced Monster From the Ocean Floor and produced and partially-directed Beast With a Million Eyes, that's obviously a much smaller milestone. Even so, if nothing else, at least it has that little bit of historical importance. Day the World Ended, it turns out, does not have anything else. Not even a definite article to start out its title, which for whatever reason—I feel like there's a groanworthy joke here, about how putting three more letters on the posters would've cost too much—isn't a terribly uncommon position for a mid-50s B-movie to have been in (just look at the ones Corman had already made), and it can sometimes even give their titles a breathless, headlong sort of sensation that suits them. But this might be the most obnoxious example of its absence I've ever seen: it's just sounds bad, and it's going to take more focus on my part than the movie's even worth to consistently render its title without it. Then they up and named its double feature-mate The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues, so no points, even, for consistency.
In any case, it's a disappointment—not an outright shock, I suppose, but a disappointment—to find Corman tumbling immediately from the first good movie of his directing and producing career, Apache Woman from earlier in 1955, back down into the realm of the actively terrible; it's also perhaps strange to discover that Roger Corman's first good movie was a Western, a genre that Corman worked in for only a couple of years, churning out movies people have barely ever heard of, while his worst directorial effort so far was his first (well, "first") movie in the pair of overlapping genres that he's most celebrated for. More confusingly still, it's a distinctive step back from the pair of sci-fi/horror movies he'd already produced, both of which are bad mostly only because they're so cheap and junky, especially Beast With a Million Eyes, which has cardboard evil birds and not even adequate sound recording. (So we have a personal milestone too: Day the World Ended is the first movie in Corman's filmography, chronologically-speaking, that I've had the pleasure, or whatever, of viewing with some level of actual preservation having gone into the copy I watched, and that has been presented in the correct aspect ratio.) The more galling disappointment is that I'd just spent the whole review for Apache Woman praising screenwriter Lou Russof, not only for that script but for an unblemished track record with me, and then it turns out that neither half of AIP's first double feature—Russof, most prolifically, wrote both—even has a fully competent screenplay, let alone a good one, though Day the World Ended's is much worse.
What we have in Day the World Ended, then, is a full-on nuclear post-apocalypse (I'd say "as the title makes clear" but of course, given the priorities of 50s sci-fi, it actually doesn't: for instance, while MGM's 1947 movie The Beginning or the End is about the development of the first atomic bombs, Bert I. Gordon's 1957 movie Beginning of the End is about irradiated grasshoppers—and is, you'll notice, also missing that definite fucking article). Anyway, this one is about the nuclear post-apocalypse, and is in fact a pretty early entry into that subgenre; I can only confidently point to a couple of (cinematic) precursors, 1951's Five and 1952's Captive Women, and together they establish early on what the broader post-apocalyptic genre's paramount concerns still kind of are today, namely small group power dynamics and, uncharitably, kink—I mean, they named a movie about a nuclear war "Captive Women"—though, more charitably and perhaps more accurately, they're about bringing the conflict between civilized rationality and atavistic savagery, that not all of our enlightenment has ever quite dispelled, out into the open.
And so we find ourselves in a certain box canyon, in what I think is explicitly California, or at least it's relatively near San Francisco. Here, special geological and atmospheric conditions have created a stark bubble of safety in the midst of an all-out global thermonuclear exchange, the boundaries of which are almost statically marked by a thick, radioactive fog. Just barely across on the safe side is Rick (Richard Denning), a geologist, not that this matters too much, along with another fellow, Radek (Paul Dubov), though Radek didn't quite get across before getting striped with radiation; likewise having found their way into this refuge are Tony (Mike Connors) and Ruby (Adele Jergens), a gangster and his moll, plus Pete (Raymond Hatten) and Diablo (a mule), the former being a hillbilly who is also, unaccountably, a 19th century prospector stereotype. Bereft of any other options, they all descend upon the only dwelling in the canyon, occupied by U.S. Navy Cmdr. Jim Maddison (Paul Birch) and his daughter Louise (Lori Nelson). Jim is adamant that they not admit any of them, because while the Maddisons have, in Jim's survivalist paranoia (though he doesn't seem so crazy now, huh?), stockpiled supplies for just this eventuality, what was intended for two can scarcely be enough for seven. Nevertheless, Louise invokes basic decency, and prevails upon her father to let them in. This works out so well that within minutes Tony has already threatened Louise's life, and it's lucky that Rick was there to cold-cock him and divest him of his firearm. Tensions simmer, as they will, and they get twisted up with what's happening outside, for in fact our seven are not the only survivors of the nuclear holocaust, just the only ones who still maintain their human shapes—and amongst this mystery tribe of mutants who have been reforged by radiation for a new world and eat only of the contaminated flesh and drink only of the contaminated water, it's pretty clear that Radek must soon take his place.
Only a little about this sounds objectively bad—its clamped-down scenario sounds suspiciously low-budget, of course (though at around $90,000, I believe this was Corman's ritziest to date), but the only thing that leaps out as bad, I think, is "wait, did you say '19th century prospector'?", and even this is more wonky and weird than bad-bad—but I think you'd be honestly surprised how little of it manages to be effective. The best of it pretty much exclusively attends the external sci-fi threat (even when the connection isn't immediately obvious), and it's still only sort-of-okay, involving on one hand Radek's transformation that's akin to an unthreatening werewolf (Radek, prone to moonlit wanderings, is not so much a menace as he is merely unavailable for Saturday night bridge), and, on the other, the occasionally-vocalized but never dwelled-upon (or paid-off-upon) possibility that Radek is only a forerunner of the fate of all of them, for, after all, even within this naturally-occurring fallout shelter they've still been exposed to some of that evolution-accelerating radiation. There is the further matter of the out-and-out monster who's come down out of the hills (Paul Blaisdell, inside a suit of his own design), and whose transformation is fully complete: Jim's tale of a ship full of experimental animals mutated by American nuclear tests has given Rick a premonition of what might happen to other primates, and this premonition is right, for these humans have grown scales like armor and claws like knives (and also a silly third eye right in the center of their skulls). That monster, too, seems to have some manner of extrasensory power, and Louise in particular is increasingly haunted by psychic calls that only she can hear and which may or may not herald a transformation of her own, which is pretty distressing for Rick because she's about the last woman on Earth and she seems to dig him, despite still grieving over the fiance who was caught out in the war and can only now be dead (and is thus played by a nightstand photograph, cutely enough, of Roger Corman himself, though if you've put it together, probably the neatest thing in the movie is the cool if ultimately meaningless fact that its tragic monster, who of course is but the mutant form of Louise's fiance, is portrayed by its director and its special effects man in turn--it is cool, and vaguely meaningful, that the movie almost certainly wants to put you ahead of where its characters will ever be, and in the end Louise's mutant boyfriend dies unrecognized, uncomforted, and alone). This is the best stuff, and still with serious downsides, especially that Blaisdell's sub-sub-Power Rangers suit is pretty dumb, and plainly not easy to move in (it apparently wasn't even really possible to see out of, and getting it wet came very close to drowning Blaisdell), so even the utilization of this cheap monster is heavily constrained. Poor storage at AIP found the prop rotting away within just a couple of years, though it almost looks like that process had started while the cameras were still rolling.
That's kind of it for the "fun sci-fi romp" of Day the World Ended, and it's by no means the balance of the film. That's just a really tedious post-apocalypse yarn about six-to-seven people whining about food despite one of them owning a fucking mule—the flabbergasting part is that the existence of maybe a hundred pounds of uncontaminated meat is not so much as acknowledged—and power struggles, mostly over the unattached hot chick. And of course that's just genre, so what sinks it into pure misery is how very poorly-built those power struggles are; for one thing, there's the fact that Tony (the heel is, of course, Tony) brought a hot chick with him already, and he's not even after "a harem," but seems to want to socially "trade up" (as determined by a society such as no longer exists) and actively rid himself of his existing girlfriend, because she's annoying or possibly just because she's older (Jergens, incidentally, is about the only actor in the whole movie ever allowed to really acknowledge, psychologically, that the end of the world is the end of the world). Anyway, the barbaric post-apocalyptic sexual slavery plot somehow finds itself enacted, instead, in the pitch of a dull and unintuitive noir, and for unclear reasons the Corman movies of this period centered upon antisocial criminal types found themselves leaning, exclusively, upon uncharismatic and unpleasant-to-watch dickweeds in order to render that type; Tony doesn't even have the slight modulation that Corman's films still had to provide for his other ne'er-do-well protagonist in The Fast and the Furious, or the personability that had to be provided to tell the villains apart in Five Guns West. And at a fundamental level, he's just too fucking inept to be our villain, and that distorts the movie around him, forcing our heroes into even-more-staggering ineptitude in order to keep him a going concern: every other scene in the film, accordingly, is a brand new invitation for the good guys to kill him, either because he tried to rape Louise, or he tried to grab Jim's gun, or whatever; giving his hosts a reasonable excuse to rid themselves of another hungry mouth should probably have already sealed his fate in his first scene; he makes no attempt afterward, or for the entire film, to hide his continued malignity; he brings no valuable skill to the post-apocalyptic table, so that's clearly not why he's still breathing; and Connor plays him with exactly the one "brash tough" dimension that gets horribly tiresome before his first scene has even ended.
It's boring, and it stalls: it never even advances to "stage two" of the post-apocalyptic film playbook, to at least start prompting practical and philosophical discussions of what's to be done about Tony; they just don't do anything. The sole silver lining is that Tony prompts what is, by some margin, the best-choreographed action scene so far in Corman's career—a fistfight I'd even be willing to consider one of the best-choreographed action scenes anywhere in Corman's career, for it's an outright amazing living room brawl by the standards embedded in any description that includes both "Roger Corman" and "living room," but I assure you, Connor and Denning truly do beat the shit out of that living room, boy—although this only happens because Jim, hard-nosed paranoiac, sleeps in his living room, with his gun on the back of the couch, so it has the unfortunate effect of calling attention to what a weird, idiotic set-up we've got here in this post-apocalyptic flophouse. I presume the room for the three male guests is Jim's repurposed bedroom, which means it probably has a lock, but I'd bet it at least has a door.
So it simply can't survive the lazy and irritating genre stereotype that is Tony, though we're not really looking at anything particularly good otherwise, and (brawl aside) Corman's directorial skill has dissipated a bit since Apache Woman, with the filmmaker often at a loss as to how to shoot this (evidently) extremely modest home that only occasionally consists of more than a living room, and sort of feels like it's adding and subtracting compartments on the fly. It's a little stultifying visually, and while it does have recourse to opening this up with the outdoors, when we attend to a nearby waterfall and its accompanying pond, I hope you're ready for a stunning continuity error regarding Louise's swimsuit, a color change that comes through crystal-clear even in this black-and-white film. But then, Corman reminds you he's gonna be good: there is one really forward-looking kind of shot, involving Louise half-mesmerized by the call of the monster, where Corman's implied the threat with a cool shadow and then blocked Nelson to walk, glassy-eyed, almost straight into the camera, and it's a bold and unsettling gesture amidst a film that's otherwise nothing but efficiently cranked-out even at its best. It at least ends stronger than it middles, but the preceding 70 minutes (the film runs 78, and feels longer) have been nothing but throwing Rick's stolid science heroism (I'm not sure why it wouldn't have occurred to them to cast Denning as the villain—he's the sci-fi "name" here, sure, but mostly because he did play the human antagonist in Creature From the Black Lagoon) against the wall of Tony's sordid, muddled "the real monster was man" movie, and those modes simply never harmonize. This would've pretty much put paid to the prospect of a good movie, even if this one's incongruous elements weren't so individually substandard already.
Score: 3/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- There's a lot of talk in Day the World Ended about the need to breed, but man, get real, you obviously do not have the genetic base for repopulating the Earth.
- As is extremely common in nuclear war stories, the assumption is that the whole of humanity has been destroyed. This is actually somewhat contradicted before the end, though I don't know why you'd assume everybody in e.g. Indonesia or South Africa died because the United States and the Soviet Union had a war, however destructive, in the northern hemisphere.
- For that matter, I'd love for Russof to tell me by exactly what means the Soviet Union, in 1955, one year before the Soviets had an intercontinental bomber (and kind of still didn't) and three years before they had an intercontinental ballistic missile, inflicted a full-scale nuclear attack upon the continental United States.
- For the sake of fun, let us not get too hung up on what "a million years of evolution" can do, even though I don't think anybody is sprouting a third eye, whatever else.
- It's very important that the canyon's sides are lined with lead for some reason, like ionizing radiation otherwise would just pierce straight through Crystal Peak or Loma Prieta, no problemo. I'm not very persuaded by the whole "box canyon" thing, anyhow.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- "What's so bad about me?" You met by taking her hostage and nothing has changed in your relationship since then, asshole.
- Jim suggests, "Have her between the two of you. I guess he's thinking ahead to the inbreeding depression problem that this still isn't going to solve, but I at least would've phrased it differently.
- And seriously, just shoot him already.
- AT LEAST TIE HIM UP OR CONFINE HIM IN SOME WAY.
- It goes more to the work's intentions and goals, so this just sounds like "I'd like your movie better if it were a different movie," but it's hard not to notice that the prospect of Louise herself turning into an evolved thing just like her "dead" fiance and Rick and Jim futilely battling against that, realizing they're sort-of being the villains, is a much better story, and requires even fewer actors on the payroll.
Sensawunda:
- Even so, I do genuinely do like the last five minutes, just because there's some recognizable nerve to the way Russof spins his "happy" ending towards something more downbeat and virtually absent of catharsis.
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