Actor Ray Milland’s penultimate film as director (most of his few directing gigs were for television, including episodes of General Electric Theater (1953-1962), Goodyear Theatre (1957-1960) and Thriller (1960-1962)) is a grim tale of survival in post-World War III America. It was released by American International Pictures not long before the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up the Cold War and tensions were already running high, not just between the superpowers but within American society itself.
The Baldwin family – dad (Ray Milland), mum Ann (Jean Hagen) and teenagers Rick (Frankie Avalon, in his first AIP film ahead of appearances in a string of beach related teen movies) and Karen (Mary Mitchell) – leave suburban Los Angeles on a camping trip just as a nuclear war breaks out and destroys the city. Harry fears that anarchy will soon reign so takes charge, buys some guns and takes his family into the countryside, sheltering in a cave. Harry becomes increasingly suspicious about everyone he meets, his paranoia seemingly conformed when Karen is assaulted by a trio of young men who have already raped and imprisoned teenager Marilyn (Joan Freeman).
Panic in Year Zero! is a decidedly rough and ready film, Milland displaying little finesse as a director and the editing is frequently choppy and abrupt. But it’s undeniably effective. Like the best political punk singles of the late 70s, it’s raw and unsubtle but it makes its point, even if it does to by battering you repeatedly over the head. In a variant on Lord of the Flies, Panic in Year Zero! charts the breakdown of the family unit, Baldwin transforming with worrying ease from respectable suburban family man to gun totin’ survivalist, to the dismay of Ann and Karen though Rick enthusiastically sides with his father. Despite that, the film never fully allows us to side with Harry, Ann constantly acting as an increasingly ignored voice of reason.
But it’s hard not to sympathise to a degree with Harry’s attempts to protect his loved ones, even as he becomes more unreasonable and dangerous. In the end he’s really no better than the people he’s trying to protect his family from and he eventually comes to realise this, noting to Ann that “I looked for the worst in others – and found it in myself.” He’s driven by his own paranoia, a deep-rooted distrust of his fellow man that he presumably kept in check pre-attack but which surfaces in full force in the aftermath. It’s almost like the apocalypse has given Harry a purpose that his cosy suburban life never could as he enthusiastically embraces his new control freak, survivalist lifestyle, tooling up on hand guns and literally heading for the hills.
He is, to be blunt, an arsehole, a paranoid nutjob driven to greater and greater acts of violence and aggression at even the slightest provocation. He makes fine and noble speeches about civilisation and society, yet does everything he can to undermine what little there is left of both. He’s reckless and selfish, his entirely understandable desire to protect his family making him do the most appalling and disproportionate things in their name. He’s fuelled by unhelpful Presidential announcements, relayed by a gung ho emergency broadcasting service, assuring listeners that “there are no civilians – we are all at war.”
Unable to afford shots of ruined cities and hordes of radiation-scarred survivors, Milland and his screenwriters Jay Simms (of The Killer Shrews (1959) and The Giant Gila Monster (1959) infamy, though he had a hand in the more interesting The Creation of the Humanoids (1962)) and John Morton (this seems to have been his only credit) turn their lack of resources to their advantage. The attack is succinctly but chillingly represented by loud noise and a handful of stock shots of mushroom clouds before the film focuses its attentions on an average suburban family whose holiday is disrupted in the most devastating fashion.
Daniel Haller takes a break from his lush design work on the Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe/AIP series of Gothic horrors, his grittier, more mundane set dressings perfectly complemented by Gil Warrenton bleak monochrome widescreen photography. Les Baxter’s score is less impressive, a strangely jaunty and wholly inappropriate jazz score that would have seemed more at home in one of the later imitators of the same year’s Dr. No than it did it a bleak post-apocalyptic drama.
Milland scores better as an actor than as a director. Roger Corman later related to interviewers Betrand Tavernier, Bernard Eisenschitz and Christopher Wicking how “the technicians who worked on the film, who were my technicians, told me that Ray had been somewhat overwhelmed. He wasn’t organized enough to act and direct at the same time. He lost time on a three-week scene and forgot his lines.” And yet despite that, he managed to turn in an uncharacteristically sombre science fiction review from AIP. There are no mutants, no radiation-born monsters, no boggle-eyed aliens, just marauding gangs of brutal teenagers, vigilante mobs and opportunistic small businessmen who are revealed as the real monsters.
How much of all this is meant to be satire and how much of it we’re meant to take at face value isn’t clear. It’s up to the individual viewer to make their own judgement. Some will undoubtedly be rooting for Harry and his survivalist tendencies, others will see it as a caustic view of the fragility of American society and the fascistic tendencies of some of its more reactionary members.
Shot as Survival and briefly re-released as End of the World, Panic in Year Zero! first saw release on an odd pairing, double billed with Roger Corman’s Poe-based Gothic horror anthology Tales of Terror (1962). Despite being one of the first of the serious post-nuclear dramas, it has rather fallen by the wayside over the years, not garnering anything like the attention of the pulpier AIP science fiction films of the 50s of the Gothic horrors of the 60s. Which is a shame as, although it’s ragged and suffused with an often uncomfortable misanthropy, it’s nevertheless and interesting and commendably straight take on a real-world subject that the public were becoming increasingly alarmed about.
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