Welcome to the Post-Apocalypse: Panic in the Year Zero! (1962)

"Now, you stay on the back roads. And you keep your gun handy. Our country is still full of thieving, murdering patriots."

- Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Just a few short months before the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a boil, actor Ray Milland's directorial effort, Panic in Year Zero! (1962) played in American theaters. 

This low-budget, black-and-white, post-apocalyptic movie involves the destruction of cities across the globe by nuclear missiles, and the response of one U.S. family, the Baldwins, who flee the Los Angeles area as nuclear warfare breaks out.

Unlike many post-apocalyptic movies of more recent vintage, Panic in Year Zero! doesn't showcase views of bombed-out city streets, busy military control rooms, or overcrowded rescue centers and shelters.

Instead, this cinematic effort takes place mostly on the open road as the Baldwins attempt to learn what has happened to their home and family, gather supplies -- food and gasoline -- for a possibly indefinite stay in the wild, and reckon with looters, thugs, and other unpredictable elements dangerous to the continued existence of the "nuclear" family unit.

Panic in Year Zero! has been termed (by critic Michael Atkinson at The Village Voice) the "most expressive on-the-ground nightmare of the Cold War era," and that's because director Ray Milland and scenarists John Morton, Jay Sims and Ward Moore have successfully transformed weakness into strength.

With very little budget in which to showcase the end of the world, they have instead focused their efforts on the moral condition of man following the apocalypse.  Accordingly, Panic in Year Zero! isn't about the end of the world.  Rather, it's about the way that human beings deals with the end of the world.

Ray Milland's patriarch, Harry Baldwin, in particular, faces some difficult decisions in this drama. Early in the film, he snaps into a sort of permanent "survival mode" and knowingly leaves the niceties and rules of civilization behind. This abrupt, serious change in his demeanor frightens and upsets his wife, Ann (Jean Hagen), but Harry understands immediately how bad things could get in a world without law and order. 

"Survival is going to have to be on an individual basis," Harry tells his wife.

The crux of the issue is worth debating, and Panic in Year Zero! doesn't shy away from the discussion.  In a desperate world, is it right to use the tactics of the looters and thugs to achieve a positive end for your own family?

What's the line in the sand that should not be crossed when the future of your loved ones rides on every choice you make?   

And finally, if you make your own family's survival your one and only priority, aren't you putting yourself on a collision course with others who have, for the same reasons, done exactly the same thing?

There's nothing like eating under the open sky... even if it is radioactive.

As Panic in Year Zero! commences, the Baldwins have just departed Los Angeles with their camper in tow. Their weekend vacation quickly turns to horror, however, when they witness flashes of light in the distance. They see a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles, and instantaneously, all the radio stations and phone lines are down.  

The Baldwins soon meet another traveler on the highway who reports: "I heard Los Angeles being torn apart, and saw it being tossed into the air."

The apocalypse has come.

As the main road begins to fill up with cars fleeing the nuclear fall-out in L.A. in a "second exodus," as Harry calls it" the Baldwins head to a small town to acquire supplies.

At  Hogan's Grocery Store they buy everything they can to assure their survival, including candles, soap, matches, and canned goods.  Then they head to a Johnson's Hardware Store to purchase guns.

Short on cash, Harry asks Ed Johnson (Richard Gardland) to take a check for the guns. When Ed refuses to let Harry leave with the guns, Harry resorts to violence to take the weapons, and flees the store. The breakdown of civilization is occurring rapidly, and Harry is part of it.  "My family must survive," he insists.

Soon, Harry, his wife Ann, and two children -- Rick (Frankie Avalon) and Karen (Mary Mitchell)  -- make it safely to the mountains.  They destroy a small bridge after they traverse it, so they cannot be found.  Then they hide the trailer and take up residence in a large cave. 

Here -- in their new home -- the Baldwins spend their first night of the "Year Zero," a term designated by the U.N. to describe the post-war world. Meanwhile, on the radio, the President of the United States reports that "there are no civilians," that "we are all at war."

Harry rigorously maintains his survival mode despite Ann's objections, and refuses to permit Ed Johnson (the hardware store owner...) and his wife to join up with his family in the cave. Later, Harry finds the Johnson's dead, murdered by three young thugs in a local farmhouse; thugs with whom Harry had an earlier altercation. 

After these men attempt to rape Karen, Harry and Rick arm themselves and attack the farmhouse. There, they discover that the men have been keeping the home's rightful owner, a young woman named Marilyn (Joan Freeman), as a hostage and apparent sex slave. After Harry kills two of the men in cold blood, he and Rick rescue Marilyn.  The third thug, Carl (Richard Bakalyan) is nowhere to be found...

Back at the homestead, Harry debates his actions with the Johnsons and the strangers.  "I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself," he tells Ann.

When Carl shows up and badly wounds Rick, Harry realizes he must risk trusting someone if his son is to survive the night.

Save us from the dangers and perils of this night...

Panic in Year Zero! is an inelegantly-crafted genre film, yet one with tremendous visceral impact.  The film's editing isn't always very good -- or even coherent -- particularly during the many  "traffic" highway scenes. 

In these all-too-frequent moments, the film cuts almost randomly to cars speeding by the camera, and there's no sign of the Baldwin's camper anywhere. And worse, these kind of moments are repeated over and over again, with successively less impact. At times, these "traffic" scenes seem injected into the narrative from another movie all-together.

But  budgetary and editing problems aside, Panic in Year Zero! very smartly and ably focuses on the small, the intimate.  The audience is asked to consider each of Harry's decisions and weigh how well he is "maintaining his values" in the face of all-out societal breakdown.

Harry's wife, Ann, doesn't cope well with Harry's decision to arm his young adult son, for instance. Nor is she happy that he turns away the Johnsons when they most need companionship and supplies. Ann also objects to the fact that Harry has "turned his back" on the civilized world, and desperately wants for there to be something better for her children. 

"I know I should be grateful we're still alive, but... I love you, Harry, but not more than a future without hope," she explains. 'I've got to have hope to go on. I've got to know there are other people like us, like our children. People who are better than just animals!"

The problem, of course, is that a "hope" in the goodness of mankind is one hell of a gamble in a situation like the one faced by the Baldwins. 

Unwarranted trust could cost everyone their lives, and Harry realizes this fact too well. Harry even refuses to trust Marilyn at first, after she has (apparently...) been raped by the thugs, and after the thugs have attempted to do the same to his daughter. In protecting his family from real dangers, Harry has lost his capacity to judge people at all.  He sees only fear and death where, in many cases, he could make allies and friends, and lessen his difficult load.

Harry's dilemma seems particularly realistic, especially today. In a similar situation, how many of us would act in the same fashion; refusing to trust "strangers" until we knew that the danger was passed?  It's a noble impulse to protect one's own family, and yet, at another level, we're all part of the human family too. 

Civilization, in the final analysis, is defined by man's willingness to do something positive for the survival of his fellow man; for somebody else's family. Harry realizes this, I believe, by film's end, when he finally needs help for his family; when Rick is shot and requires a doctor's attention. Now, Harry is suddenly in Ed Johnson's shoes, needing help from someone else.

Harry's inability to trust his fellow man is made even more poignant, actually, by the apocalyptic events of the film. Nobody who really cared about the "other guy's" family would ever launch a nuclear war in the first place.  The world as depicted in Panic in Year Zero! is about the absence of trust in the global human community, even when things are good; even when people are -- by and large -- safe.  It's a breach so bad that people would rather destroy the planet than "hope" and believe in the goodness of people they don't quite understand or don't share their ideology. Harry's experience on the road, protecting his family, is thus a microcosm for the very paradigm that gave rise to nuclear holocaust. 

On some level -- and this is devastating to him -- Harry realizes that he is no better than the looters and thieves.  He has stolen guns and gasoline, refused to share his supplies with a family in need, and committed cold-blooded murder.  He has damaged and destroyed property, even setting fire to cars on the highway to make an opening in the traffic pattern.  His intentions are always good ones: the survival of his family.  But still, Harry's intentions aren't quite good enough: the survival of law and order, and of civilization in general. This is made abundantly clear to Harry when he meets the good-hearted doctor, who is staying behind in his wrecked town to care for any of "his" people (his town-fok) who should return. This is a man who -- at great personal danger -- has not forgotten his role and importance in the community.

Panic in Year Zero is a little strange and "off" at times. The musical score by Les Baxter is jazzy and upbeat when it should be disturbing or portentous. The weird, multitudinous shots of cars speeding down the road are jarring, and take one out right of the Baldwins' existentialist dilemma.  But outside these weird flourishes, the film remains an expressive and intimate tale about what it means to truly be civilized.

Civilization, it turns out, is even more necessary when the world has gone to Hell. If man loses civilization, he'll be back to scrawling pictures on cave walls, huddling forever in darkness and fear. 

The Baldwins escape that fate in Panic in Year Zero!...but just barely.

Cult-Movie Review: Mad Max (1979)

"They say people don't believe in heroes anymore..."

- Mad Max (1979)

Despite multitudinous descriptions to the contrary, George Miller and Byron Kennedy's Mad Max (1979) is not actually a post-apocalyptic film. 

Rather, it's pre-apocalyptic. But the handwriting is certainly on the wall...and on the open roads. 

This celebrated cult film might more accurately be described as dystopian in concept because the filmmakers imagine a world, "a few years from now," in which widespread lawlessness has taken hold, and the authorities -- increasingly more fascist in tone, powers, and demeanor -- are helpless to prevent a culture-wide death spiral into anarchy and chaos.

Dominated by a caustic aesthetic of anticipatory anxiety, a sense of psychic uneasiness that suffuses every frame, Mad Max is literally a movie about mankind speeding -- foot pressed hard against the pedal -- towards moral and spiritual annihilation. 

Often, I compare Miller's Mad Max to the early cinematic endeavors of Wes Craven (Last House on the Left) and Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) because there's a genuine feeling while watching Mad Max, that you, yourself, are in peril. 

As is the case with Craven or Hooper, the audience feels jeopardized in Miller's hands, as though it might end up seeing something that could truly do the psyche harm. 

At one point in the film, our hero -- police officer and family man Max (Mel Gibson) -- admits that he's "scared," and the audience wholly shares that trepidation.  Max's vicious world is one without a safety net, in which the laws of the jungle dominate.  Miller enthusiastically takes the film beyond the bounds of  movie decorum and good taste right from the start -- from the opening sequence -- and leaves viewers wondering just how far he will tread into taboo territory.

The result is a film that has lost none of its dreadful, visceral power in over three decades.

   

"Look, any longer out on that road and I'm one of them, a terminal psychotic, except that I've got this bronze badge that says that I'm one of the good guys. "

Mad Max opens, both symbolically and literally, on Anarchie (Anarchy) Road, as leather-clad members of the under-staffed MFP (Main Force Patrol)  pursue a dangerous "terminal psychotic" called Nightrider. 

Nightrider believes himself a "fuel-injected suicide machine," and survives all attempts at pursuit and restraint.  At least that is, until Max (Gibson) -- the best -- joins the chase.

Finally, Nightrider is killed in a high-speed wreck.  Unfortunately, his "friends," led by the gang leader Toecutter, desire vengeance. One of Toecutter's minions, Johnny, is apprehended by Max's friend, Officer Goose (Steve Bisley), but then released by effete, officious lawyers. Next, it is Goose who becomes a target for Toecutter's mad revenge.

After Goose is burned and maimed on the road by Toecutter, Max resigns from the force. With his wife Jesse (Joanne Samuel) and young son in tow, he heads out on a vacation from his responsibilities.

Unfortunately, Max's family almost immediately crosses paths with Johnny, Toecutter and the others, and pays the ultimate price.  Max's wife and son are run down on the open road, and left dying. 

Enraged, and with no legal recourse, Max takes command of a souped-up police interceptor, and engages his enemies on the open highway, outside the bounds and restrictions of the law.

I'm not a bad man.  I'm sick.  I've got a personality disorder...

As is the case with all works of art, this film arises from a very specific context.

In particular, Mad Max emerges from the era of "Oz-ploitation" or the so-called Australian New Wave, which included such works as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock.But more specifically, Mad Max  is very deliberately a reflection of the events, trends and fads of the early 1970s.

As co-writer James McCausland has acknowledged, much of the film's anarchic energy is fueled by the 1973 Oil Crisis, in which OPEC reduced oil production and quickly sent world economies into a tailspin. As gas supplies were rationed, McCausland apparently saw reports of violent outbreaks at gas stations, where drivers acted decisively and aggressively to assure that they weren't caught short at the pump.

Also critical to the formation of Mad Max's underlying structure, no doubt, was "The Super-Car Scare" of 1972 - 1973, which occurred at the height of muscle car culture in Australia. There were talks at that time, indeed, of new vehicles that could travel 160 miles an hour, as well as news story accounts of young, out-of-control drivers in muscle cars (small cars with big, powerful engines...) racing through small communities and causing civil and traffic disturbances.

If you also acknowledge a bit of punk influence here -- courtesy of the nihilistic music movement on blazing ascent, circa 1974 -1976 -- you can easily detect how all the creative ingredients for Mad Max fall into place.

Suddenly, we have punk criminals prowling the highways of Australia in souped-up super vehicles, vying for both the remaining oil supply and day-by-day, moment-to-moment domination.  One scene in the film explicitly joins all contexts: Toecutter and his gang hijack a gas trunk on the road, and siphon precious gas from the storage tank. The underlying message is of a corrupt but rising youth movement leeching off and destroying a dying establishment.

If "No Future" was the unofficial credo and soundtrack of punk music in those days of the disco decade, Mad Max remains the most potent visualization of living for the moment, on impulse, and entirely for self. This is what the law of the jungle is, as dramatized by Toecutter and his gang.  He is a man with no respect for life, law, family, or community. All he cares about is getting what he wants when he wants it. "Anything I say? What a wonderful philosophy you have," he quips to a cowering victim.

The world has gone to Hell in a hand basket in Mad Max, and those who still play by the old rules of law try to understand what has happened, and struggle to play catch-up  "Here I am, trying to put sense to it, when I know there isn't any," Max notes, importantly, after the death of Goose. He's dealing here with a world that no longer makes sense to him.

Accordingly, Max progressively loses his faith that society's decaying infrastructure (as represented by the ramshackle local police center or "halls of justice") can stop the world from spiraling towards destruction.  

It's clear Max's loss of faith arises for a reason, and is not some personal, solitary angst.  His boss, Fifi (Roger Ward) keeps mentioning the need for heroes, and the culture's absence of heroes. 

But what heroes, honestly, could possibly inhabit a blighted, decrepit police station like his? 

The nihilism of the world, of "the terminal psychotics" seems to have bled the life out of public institutions in Mad Max, leaving them as rotting monuments to a previous golden age.  Max realizes, appropriately, that Fifi's comments are "crap." What his world needs is not cowboy heroes, but a functioning infrastructure; one that funds the police, trains the police, and supports the police in the battle against crime.

Although the lawyers and judicial officers glimpsed in Mad Max are portrayed as effete, intellectual egg-heads with their heads-up-their-asses, the police are not viewed in terms much more friendly. In the film's first scene, we catch a young MFP officer ogling a couple making love, and then indulging in a high speed chase which endangers other officers, and civilians. He looks like he could be a gang member himself...except he's wearing a leather cop uniform. Similarly, Fifi is interested only in results, not the letter of the law. He just wants the paperwork to be "clean" so he doesn't get in trouble with superiors. Again, the impression is of an old, once noble institution that has given way to corruption and decrepitude.

Again and again in the film, Max sees evil triumph over the (flawed) forces of order, and so must make a fateful decision about his own place and role in the world. Mad Max thus brilliantly diagrams one man's disillusionment about society, and his final, knowing, unfortunate break from it.  Many see the film as being fascist in viewpoint because the criminals attempt to argue that they are merely "sick" (and thus to be treated with compassion), but I disagree with that assessment. Max gets revenge, but at what price?

The price is the very eventuality that Max so dramatically fears all along. He knows, even starting out, that there is very little difference between the cops and the "terminal psychotics" who vie for control of the roadways.  When Max's family and friends die, that line is blurred entirely. Max realizes, contra Fifi, that there can no longer be any heroes. Heroes only work in context of a functioning civilization and support system.

As critic Keith Phipps astutely intimated, Mad Max is almost a character piece, a tale of a man trying to figure out where he belongs under the rules of the New World (Dis)Order:

"Only Mel Gibson, given the best entrance since Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars, has the ability to stand in the way, and from the start Miller links that ability to an appetite for self-destruction. It takes a while for that appetite to manifest itself fully, however. Miller places his hero at the center of a three-way tug of war between the violent anarchy of the outlaw, the barely suppressed fascism of the authorities, and the domestic comforts of his wife and child."

I often write here about how deeply and thoroughly I disapprove of movies that utilize revenge as the primary motivation for heroes or superheroes.

I think that's just pandering to an ugly, ignoble impulse in human beings. In this case, however, I would argue that Mad Max does not glamorize revenge and, on the contrary, sends its wayward hero off into a form of societal banishment for his transgression. Max ends up in the wilderness/wasteland, seeking redemption for his voluntary break from the mores of  an (admittedly crumbling)  society (see: The Road Warrior).  It takes him two more films, essentially, to reconnect with his more noble human nature.

So yes, Max gets his bloody vengeance in this film, but his ultimate fear is realized too. In breaking the laws of civilization, the only difference between him and the Toecutter's minions remains that he possesses a bronze badge.  What would his wife and son think of him now?

The final shot of Mad Max consists, not coincidentally, of an open and empty road. We race down it going ever faster, but  never actually arriving at a destination. There is no love and no companionship on this long road.  Max now lives for no one but himself.  He can look forward to isolation, mistrust, and confrontation...but nothing else; at least nothing good or positive.

This is a threshold moment...

While carefully noting what he believed was Mad Max's sense of amorality, Chicago Reader film critic Dave Kehr also accurately described the film as some "of the most determinedly formalist filmmaking this side of Michael Snow."

What that description means, in lay terms, is that Mad Max isn't about dispassionately recording or realistically chronicling the details of its sparse, almost Western-styled narrative. Rather, it's about making the audience feel strong emotions. Namely fear, rage and even, briefly, bloodlust.

The reasons behind Mad Max's passionate, singular approach to filmmaking are actually, I believe, entirely moral.

As the film's villain, Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne) notes to an underling named Johnny (Tim Burns), an act of brutal murder can be considered a "threshold moment" in terms of the human soul. That's his philosophy of life. There's no future. There's no common good. There's just the shattering of boundaries, until everything -- and everyone -- is wrecked.

Now, a threshold is widely defined as the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, and that seems to be precisely what Toecutter is fostering in both his friends and his enemies.

He is sponsoring and encouraging madness, psychosis and violence. Indeed, there seems to be a plague of madness and nihilism sweeping the world in this film, and Toecutter fosters it in his cohorts (such as Nightrider) and his protege (Johnny).

In the film's climax, the audience's surrogate -- Max himself -- endures a similar "threshold moment," treading literally and metaphorically into morally "prohibited" territory (as a street sign indicates) just as he is about to cross-the-line of legality. The fearsome legend on the sign literally warns him to stop (lest he become like Toecutter), but Max ignores it.

This particular bit of clever framing (pictured above) is not an accident.  Max crosses a moral and geographical boundary in search of personal satisfaction, and Miller's shot deliberately evokes an earlier one in the film, set on a lovely beach. 

There, Toecutter and his gang have similarly ignored signs and warnings about transgression, and headed off knowingly into forbidden territory. The point of the nearly identical staging seems to be that Max -- in taking the law into his own hands -- is following the very nihilistic path he fears.

Mad Max is actually a moral film, I submit, because it concerns that threshold moment in each of us too. Vengeance might be sated.  But after the vengeance? 

As Last House on the Left observed, post-violence, "the road leads to nowhere, and the castle stays the same." In other words, there's a very big difference between portraying violence and approving of violence. I would argue Mad Max (brilliantly) portrays violence, while never, even for a moment, glamorizing it or approving of it.

Instead, Mad Max asks: what comes with moral transgression? How does a crossing of the "threshold moment" affect a good person? And if good people can willingly cross the threshold to barbarism, what becomes of civilization, a social concept erected on the foundation of the common good, not personal retribution? 

Mad Max gazes at all these ideas, but does so while moving at 150 miles-an-hour. 

The film -- heightened immeasurably by Brian May's superb score and George Miller's orchestration of the high-speed stunts -- conveys a powerful sense not just of speed, but of speeding out of control. 

Mad Max also reveals a world falling apart at the seams, but doesn't offer pat explanations for the breakdown, or easy answers about the solution.   We can try to "put sense" to the madness of this world, but there is quite definitively no sense behind the human impulse towards self-destruction. 

If Mad Max is right, the world itself is terminally psychotic.