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THE LAST MAN ON EARTH
(Vento di Morte)
Rating:  ½
Italy/USA. 1964.
Director – Sidney Salkow, Screenplay – William F. Leicester & Logan Swanson [Richard Matheson], Based on the Novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson, Producer – Robert L. Lippert, Photography (b&w) – Franco Delli Colli, Music – Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter, Orchestrations – Alfonso D’Artega, Makeup – Piero Mecacci, Art Direction – Giorgio Giovannini. Production Company – Produzioni La Regina/Associated Producers Inc.
Cast:
Vincent Price (Robert Morgan), Franca Bettoia (Ruth), Emma Danieli (Virginia Morgan), Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (Ben Cortman), Christi Courtland (Kathy Morgan)
Plot: Robert Morgan is the last man left alive on Earth. He shelters in his house each night. Outside the remnants of humanity who have been transformed into vampires come howling at the door, wanting his blood. He manages to keep them at bay using mirrors and garlic. By day, Morgan combs the deserted city, staking the vampires and trying to eliminate their numbers.
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is one of the classic genre novels, a post-holocaust vampire story that straddles a line between science-fiction and horror. It is the most well-known work of author/screenwriter Richard Matheson – George Romero even cited it as one of the prime influences on Night of the Living Dead (1968). I Am Legend has proven popular as a film project. Hammer Films planned a production in 1957 entitled Night Creatures with a script from Richard Matheson, although that never came off due to the British censorship board stating that the film as written would have to be banned in England. This Italian-American co-production was based on the Hammer script that was then rewritten by William F. Leicester. Unhappy with the finished product, Richard Matheson substituted the pseudonym Logan Swanson on the script, and The Last Man on Earth is generally regarded as an unsatisfactory adaptation of the novel. The book was later remade as The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, although this was even less satisfactory. This version scaled the story up into an action movie and eliminated all reference to vampires. Another planned adaptation was tossed around circa 1973-5 and in the 1990s Ridley Scott planned a big-budget production with Arnold Schwarzenegger, although neither of these ever emerged. In more recent years, the project was taken up again by various parties, before finally emerging as I Am Legend (2007) directed by Francis Lawrence and starring Will Smith, while there was also an unofficial rip-off of that film with I Am Omega (2007).
The Last Man on Earth is certainly a much more faithful version of I Am Legend than The Omega Man was. Both films are stuck with the inherently uncinematic problem the book presents – that for around 80% of the running time there is only one character on screen and no other people to react to. Both films get around the problem the same way – that of creating extended flashbacks to the beginnings of the plague. The Last Man on Earth has some occasional moments of interest, certainly more than it has been credited for. There is an effectiveness to the silent ritual that Vincent Price goes through in the opening scenes – replacing the garlic and mirrors around the house, sharpening stakes on a wood lathe, refurbishing his garlic supply out of a giant walk-in freezer in a department store, then staking various vampires throughout the city. The film also preserves the book’s remarkable end twist metaphor intact (the only film version to do so). The dazzling reversal where Vincent Price goes from vampire hunter to be seen by the vampires as a monster, the ‘legend’ of the book’s title, comes with a stunning clarity. Here at least, Richard Matheson has no reason to be ashamed of the adaptation.
What nearly kills The Last Man on Earth is Sidney Salkow’s dull direction. Salkow directs with pedestrian regard. The vampires seem a weak threat – Vincent Price can defeat a dozen or more of them at once and unarmed. There is none of the paranoid sense that comes in the book of a man isolated, hounded nightly by their taunts for him to come and join them. Vincent Price is also badly miscast. While he was a popular horror actor in the 1960s when the film was made, Price’s fruity overwrought hand-wringing is not suited to the part – what the film needed was a much more realist, more ordinary actor.
Director Sidney Salkow had been directing since the 1930s. He made over 40 films, almost all Westerns and a few thrillers, and most B-budgeted. His one other venture into genre material was the horror anthology Twice-Told Tales (1963).
Richard Matheson’s other genre works include The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) based on his novel, the scripts for Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World (1961), the occult film Night of the Eagle/Burn, Witch, Burn (1961), the Corman-produced mortician’s comedy The Comedy of Terrors (1963), the Hammer psycho-thriller The Fanatic/Die, Die, My Darling (1965), the classic Hammer occult film The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968), the historical biopic De Sade (1969), Steven Spielberg’s first film Duel (1971), The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973) tv movies, the haunted house film The Legend of Hell House (1973), the tv adaptation of Dracula (1974), the tv movies Scream of the Wolf (1974), The Stranger Within (1974), Trilogy of Terror (1975), Dead of Night (1977) and The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver (1977), the tv adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), the time travel romance Somewhere in Time (1980) from his own novel, Jaws 3-D (1983), Twilight Zone – The Movie (1983), and numerous classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, Thriller and Star Trek. Works based on his novels and stories are the afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come (1998), the fine ghost story Stir of Echoes (1999), The Box (2009) and Real Steel (2011).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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