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Review
THE OMEGA MAN
Rating: 
USA. 1971.
Director – Boris Sagal, Screenplay – John William Corrington & Joyce H. Corrington, Based on the Novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson, Producer – Walter Seltzer, Photography – Russell Metty, Music – Ron Grainer, Makeup – Gordon Bau, Art Direction – Arthur Loel & Walter M. Simonds. Production Company – Walter Seltzer Productions.
Cast:
Charlton Heston (Robert Neville), Rosalind Cash (Lisa), Anthony Zerbe (Matthias), Paul Koslo (Dutch), Lincoln Kilpatrick (Zachary), Eric Laneuville (Richie)
Plot: 1975, in the ruins of Los Angeles. The whole world has been killed off by bacteriological warfare, all except for one man Robert Neville, a research scientist who has managed to take an antidote. At night, Neville is hunted by the mutated survivors, which the plague has been turned albinoid and made vulnerable to sunlight. They are led by Matthias, a former tv newscaster who invokes them to destroy everything that belongs to the society that created them. But then Neville encounters a group of normal survivors and realizes that his blood may prove the only hope in saving them before they succumb to the plague.
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) is a classic genre novel. The novel, which widely differs from this film adaptation in many essential details, concerns the last man left alive on Earth who nightly faces a horde of vampires, the mutated remnants of humanity, who stand outside his door, imploring him to come and surrender to them. The ending, wherein comes a startling conceptual reversal of all traditional relationship between vampire and hunter, is stunning.
I Am Legend has been often in the cinematic eye. Hammer Films brought Richard Matheson to England in 1957 to write an adaptation Night Creatures, but this was dropped due to censorship problems. Richard Matheson later wrote the Italian-made adaptation The Last Man on Earth (1964), which is surprisingly faithful to the book but is in itself a dull film. Next came The Omega Man, the most high profile of the adaptations. Other versions were announced in the mid-1970s, while in the 1990s scriptwriter Tracy Torme’, of Fire in the Sky (1993) and Sliders (1995-2000), toyed with getting an adaptation off the ground and then there was a big-budget $100 million adaptation announced with Ridley Scott at the helm and Arnold Schwarzenegger starring, although neither of these emerged. This was later revived with a script by John Logan, to star Will Smith and with Michael Bay at the helm, before finally emerging as I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith and directed by Francis Lawrence.
Unfortunately, The Omega Man is a ham-fisted adaptation of I Am Legend. For one, all the vampires have been eliminated. It is as though the producers were eager to make a film that was divorced of any association with B movie vampires. The Family in black hoods, shades and white albinoid faces certainly cut striking figures, but they make no real sense. It is difficult, for instance, to see what stops them from simply breaking into Neville’s house – in the book, they couldn’t because of the vampire’s inability to enter somewhere they were not invited into and because the house was shielded with garlic and mirrors. And while The Omega Man has assiduously avoided the B-movie vampire label, it has on the other hand fallen into another cliche – The Family are no more than the mutants out of a B science-fiction movie. The script here comes from husband and wife screenwriting team of John William and Joyce Hooper Corrington who later performed similar outrages on the Planet of the Apes saga with their script for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).
Most of the novel is taken up by Neville’s mundane day-to-day existence and his quest for the origins of the plague. Understandably, this does not translate well to the screen so the Corringtons have invented an entire second half with Charlton Heston trying to save a small enclave of survivors. (It is never made clear how this group managed to survive so long while everybody else succumbed). However, when it comes to the image of Charlton Heston sitting in an abandoned cinema watching and reminiscing over Woodstock (1970), The Omega Man eventually reveals its true colours as a Utopian fantasy of the Free Love Generation. While post-holocaust films from Mad Max 2 (1981) onwards co-opted the values of the Western, the post-holocaust films of the 1970s – the likes of Gas-s-s; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970), Glen and Randa (1971) and Zardoz (1974), all looked to the idea of remaking the world along the lines of Love Generation idealism, celebrating the ideals of communalism and altered states headspace. The vampires are now construed as an evil Manson-like cult, which are pointedly also called The Family. The end of the film descends into clumsy allegory where all the allusions between Charlton Heston shedding his blood to save humanity and Jesus Christ are played up – the film even ends with Heston having literally sacrificed his life to save the world, lying in a fountain in a crucifixion pose with a spear penetrating his side.
At least in the early parts of the film, director Boris Sagal does a moderately effective job of creating an image of isolation with Charlton Heston prowling the empty streets of L.A., just taking a new car and driving through the showroom window when his old one breaks down and imagining hearing telephones ringing in his head. It is modestly effective, although a film like The Quiet Earth (1985) does a far better job of portraying the psychological isolation and madness that being the last survivor of the human race would entail. Alas, The Omega Man also casts Charlton Heston in square-jawed heroism mode – Heston’s idea of isolation is to make wisecracks while playing chess with a bust of Caesar. And after this effective opening, the film quickly lapses into being an action movie – with Charlton Heston wielding machine-guns and stunt driving motorcycles. The film also taps into the burgeoning Blaxploitation genre, in casting Rosalind Cash as the heroine opposite Heston. (The Omega Man was at least ahead of its time in being one of the earliest films to feature interracial love scenes involving a Hollywood male lead).
The Omega Man is the most well known film of Boris Sagal, a prolific tv director. Boris Sagal’s other genre outings include The Helicopter Spies (1968), a feature film re-edited from episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Hauser’s Memory (1970). Sagal died in a helicopter crash in 1981. He is also the father of Katey Sagal, alias Peg Bundy of tv’s Married ... With Children (1987-97) and the voice of Leela on Futurama (1999-2003). Last updated: Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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