FANTASIA OBSCURA: Before There Was Will Smith in ‘I Am Legend,’ There Was Vincent Price
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you really should just stop after the first one. Seriously, just stop. Don’t keep going.
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
(Dist.: American International, Dirs.: Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow)
Of all the truisms we embrace as a culture, there’s one held by almost everyone that comes close to being a great universal given: the book is often better than the film it was based on.
From Dracula through Solyent Green to Watchmen, there have been numerous adaptations made of beloved books, even classics that are or deserve to be part of the canon, which come up short compared to the source material. Sometimes it’s due to a wild reimagining of the writer’s work by the director or the fact that the production budget is just not up to putting on screen what the reader imagines is on the page. More often than not, it’s the language of the separate media, in that words on the page play with different parts of the reader than visuals on the screen do with the viewer. This makes the viewer experience of the story radically different, leaving readers feeling cheated when they watch.
One such classic that’s often held as an example is I Am Legend, a novel from 1954 written by Richard Matheson. Matheson was a giant on the literary side of the genre who also worked in the visual medium as well; among his works, he wrote two screenplays that were part of Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle,” contributed 14 screenplays to The Twilight Zone (with an additional one getting adapted years later for Amazing Stories), did a script for both Star Trek and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., and wrote the screenplay for the made-for-TV movie that became the pilot for Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
I Am Legend is a novel about a man who is the survivor of a plague that either kills its victims or turns them into vampires. The book gives a solid scientific explanation for the existence of these vampires as we follow the protagonist, Robert Neville, through days of holding onto his sanity as he hunts down the undead that outnumber him, alone, the last man on Earth.
The novel is written in a first-person narrative that could easily be lifted off the page and read unedited in a one-person staging of the work on a minimalist set. Such an adaptation would effectively convey the themes of the book, the madness that threatens us when we’re alone, and how we can get twisted when immersed in horrific circumstances, giving the audience an uncomfortable closeness to the subject that would bring them to places they might never have gone.
Unfortunately, there were not enough German Expressionists available when the book started its adaptation cycle…
The film does a fair job of adapting the novel, in large part because of Matheson’s script (under his nom de pen “Logan Swanson”) maintaining much of the feel as well as plot from the original. We follow Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) through his day, picking up supplies and lathing wooden stakes as he spends the daylight hunting down the vampiric survivors, then readying himself for the long siege at night when those vampires come to his home, now a fortress done up in a “hoarder chic” theme, trying to claim him themselves.
It’s a lonely existence, being cooped up at home all night with days to come filled only with soul-crushing chores before you. It’s a prospect that Price conveys well in a scene where he watches old home movies before he starts to break down:
Midway through the film, we get a flashback to his life before the fall, where we see Morgan with his wife Virginia (Emma Danieli), his daughter Kathy, and his best friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi Stuart). We watch Kathy succumb to the plague, and see the turning of Virginia and Ben, who as it turns out, is the leader of the vampires besieging Robert every night. The prospects for Robert are very bleak, until a young woman, Ruth (Franca Bettoia), enters his life, at which point things take a turn that accelerates out of control quickly.
Speaking of taking sudden turns, the adaptation of the book had a number of vector changes between the sale of rights and the premiere in the theaters. Matheson had originally sold the book’s film rights to Anthony Hinds for adaptation by Hammer Films, but British film board censors supposedly objected to the script presented them for pre-review. (How this got in the way of the studio that produced The Quartermas Xperement is unclear and suggests other business considerations might have had a hand in this.) Hinds sold his rights to American producer Robert Lippert, who by this time had started mounting productions overseas to (continue to) avoid making guild payments that would be owed on films made in the United States. At one point, part of the discussion involved having Fritz Lang direct the screenplay, but by then, his advancing blindness took him out of consideration, denying us what might have been a dream production.
Instead, the production shot in Italy under two directors, one Italian with mostly Italian principal players in order to qualify as an international co-production under practices in place at the time. This gave the film a visual style most audiences might not have been able to easily relate to unless that person went to both the drive-in and the art house to see settings similar to those used in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. As the film takes place in the somewhat far-off year of 1968, giving it some distance from expected settings found in horror films of the time, this works in the movie’s favor, evoking the trappings of a nightmare.
It’s a gorgeous nightmare, however, watching Price’s Morgan jury-rig what’s left of civilization to allow himself to overcome horrific creatures who want to feast on him. The themes of how we maintain humanity as the end draws near and change imposes itself are presented with authority, and resonate especially well as much of what we held and believed in the 20th Century gives way to the different.
For its part, a film about the end of the world with a screenplay adapted by the author of the book it was based on (even though Matheson claimed later he had reservations about the production), should be the last word on the matter, one would assume.
Well-l-l-l-l-l, actually-y-y-y…
NEXT TIME: You know that old tradition in horror films, where the credit “The End” has a question mark after it? The one that suggests that there may be more to the story? Yeah, we’re doing that here, too…
