Point Doom
Five (1951)
directed by Arch Oboler
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Five begins from a helicopter, the camera unsteady as it tracks a woman stumbling barefoot and fearful up a dirt road in the mountains. She is worn out and scared, one of only a handful of survivors of a nuclear disaster. The rest are men in a “world without bills,” as someone lovingly describes it, but the science is as off-balance as the mother-to-be. Made with a small budget and hurried script in the wilderness vicinity of the director’s own Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Malibu beach house, Five trades above its shortcomings on a horror film’s pace and the lighting of an acutely nightmarish noir.
The woman, thin and frail, only looks pretty asleep by the fire. She thwarts the first rape attempt by announcing her pregnancy, but the baby doesn’t live long out of the womb. Her anger emerges in shrill exclamations, directed at no one except the husband who did not share her immunity to radiation. She is treated like the tender shoots of a new crop planted on the hillside, but the choice she must make of a new man to love is the undercurrent beneath a less threatening philosophical question: do the five want a simulacrum of the lives they left behind, or a new world with its own rules?
They can’t agree. Bottom line is, no one wants to leave that house, and I can’t blame him. Life after the apocalypse seems like a moot point, and I inevitably think of a former employer’s wistful memory of seeing Planet of the Apes for the first time. “He’s got a gun, a horse, and a girl who can’t talk. It’s perfect.”
directed by Arch Oboler
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Five begins from a helicopter, the camera unsteady as it tracks a woman stumbling barefoot and fearful up a dirt road in the mountains. She is worn out and scared, one of only a handful of survivors of a nuclear disaster. The rest are men in a “world without bills,” as someone lovingly describes it, but the science is as off-balance as the mother-to-be. Made with a small budget and hurried script in the wilderness vicinity of the director’s own Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Malibu beach house, Five trades above its shortcomings on a horror film’s pace and the lighting of an acutely nightmarish noir.
The woman, thin and frail, only looks pretty asleep by the fire. She thwarts the first rape attempt by announcing her pregnancy, but the baby doesn’t live long out of the womb. Her anger emerges in shrill exclamations, directed at no one except the husband who did not share her immunity to radiation. She is treated like the tender shoots of a new crop planted on the hillside, but the choice she must make of a new man to love is the undercurrent beneath a less threatening philosophical question: do the five want a simulacrum of the lives they left behind, or a new world with its own rules?
They can’t agree. Bottom line is, no one wants to leave that house, and I can’t blame him. Life after the apocalypse seems like a moot point, and I inevitably think of a former employer’s wistful memory of seeing Planet of the Apes for the first time. “He’s got a gun, a horse, and a girl who can’t talk. It’s perfect.”
posted by NPK at 6:32 AM
<< Home