The Last Man on Earth (1964) **½

In an attempt to atone for the sin of seeing I am Legend while never having seen this film or The Omega Man in its entirety begins here. I had previously stated that I always try to catch an original before a remake, reboot, etc. but this was one of the few times that I was at fault. This film was an Italian production dubbed into English and was apparently a source of inspiration for George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The film is essentially broken into three acts and that it the method with which I will discuss the film.

The first third of the film begins quite effectively with some shots of a skyline of a major city with the semblance of normalcy. We then move to street level and the feeling that something is amiss begins to creep into the mind as they are deserted. There is not a single person in sight in this major city and then we discover where the people are. The haunting shots of the empty streets are replaced with the bone chilling shots of corpses littering the roads and sidewalks. We then meet our main character, Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) who awakens and begin his monotonous routine that he has followed for the past three years. His internal thoughts are projected to the audience through a voice over and this is quite effective. With only one character there has to be some method of communication and a narration would appear to be the best fit. But the voice over is not narrating the story, they are Morgan's own thoughts and feelings. He doesn't tell us right away what happened because he already knows and would not narrate the story to himself in his mind. We get snippets of the plot as he thinks to himself while going through the routine of his daily errands. Price works effectively in these scenes, his casual disregard and immolation of the dead bodies into the burning pit shows no emotion or moral dilemma as he has been doing this for quite some time. He even states his motivation is pure survval, either him or them, and he's not willing to submit to death despite the hell that his life has become. When night comes, he retreats to his boarded up house with his jazz as vampires try to break into his home. He awakens the next morning to the same surroundings and routine however he decides to stop at his late wife's grave to pay his respects. This scene is the first where Morgan actually speaks, our first voice actually came from the lead vampire, Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart), blandly stating that they were going to kill Morgan. Our hero's first words are "I miss you, Virg" and he mourns over her grave.

The second act commences with his discovery that he lost track of time and must fight off the vampires to return to his sanctuary. We see the vampires are slow moving and easily fought off when there are only a few to contend with. Once he makes it safely inside his house, he begins to flashback to the events that had led up to his current situation. These scenes work the least I believe most strongly due to the wooden dubbing that was done for English audiences. The actors sound like they are just reading their lines from the script and are not putting any kind of emotion into their performances. Not as noticeable in the first act, since Price is our only source of speech and it looks as though Price, when we do see him speak, is actually speaking English. We meet the Morgan family, his wife Virgina (Emma Danieli) and daughter Kathy (Christi Courtland), and also discover that Ben is a close family friend. Kathy refers to him as "Uncle Ben". We learn that a fatal disease is spreading across Europe and eventually makes its way to America. His wife and daughter succumb while he works to find a cure at the research center. Ben who was also employed there, warning him that some of the population were turning into vampires, decides to lock himself away due to his fears. After losing his daughter's body to the pit, the pit he now uses for his own victims, he decides to give his wife a proper burial only for her to return to the house that night. We cut back to Morgan in the present having just barely returned from his wife's grave. These scenes should work to both answer the lingering questions from the first act and lead into the final act but due to the acting and plotting of these scenes, and the length of the flashback, it served to uproot the audience from the story and ruin the momentum established by the first act. Some of the most emotional scenes are completely glossed over: the fact that he has to murder his wife who has returned to life as a vampire, what happened to Ben between the time he locked himself away and now being the leader of the pack assaulting Morgan's home every night and Morgan's first days dealing with his loneliness and how he must force himself to kill the creatures in the day that hunt him at night.

The third act begins the next day where Morgan again begins his normal routine to see a dog running up to his house, only to run away when Morgan calls to him. The utter joy on his face in seeing another normal creature still alive and his desperate chase of the animal across the city would have been better portrayed not coming directly off the poor second act but do serve to pick up the momentum that was lost. He discovers that there are others who must be alive as he comes across speared bodies of vampires that were not killed by him. The dog returns that night, injured, and Morgan discovers that it is infected from its injury. Previous to his discovery he was making plans about all the happy times the two would share and the tragic realization that he would have to kill the animal should be traumatizing to him but due to his experiences he can only laugh at the irony of the situation. While burying the dog, who has a stake in its heart, he meets Ruth Collins (Franca Bettoia) who that night informs him there are others still alive that are battling the infection with a vaccine that prevents them from turning into vampires. She makes the shocking revelation that her people fear and despise Morgan because of his cold-blooded murder of the vampires, and even some of their group, and their confusion as to his survival. Despite his ability to cure Ruth, her companions arrive and after easily killing off the vampires attacking the house, go after Morgan before Ruth can relate that he has found a cure to them human again.

Favorite moment: The ending is great in that Morgan, being hunted because as a normal human, he is too different from the pseudo-vampires to have a place in their new society, allows them to kill him rather than reveal he has a cure that can make them human again. The irony that his method of survival through the killing of the vampires while they rested led to him being hunting for his savage practices is shocking and his demise at the hands of the pseudo-vampires is chilling as he has taken the cure with him to his grave. His unwillingness to die at the hands of the vampires is mooted through his desire not to cure the "freaks" who wish to start civilization again. Ruth's cold consolation to a crying baby that everything will be all right now is frightening in that she must not conceal the fact that she is the last woman on earth or risk the same fate as Robert Morgan.