Tonight we went back to see how it all began, with Roger Corman's first sci-fi picture "Day The World Ended" (1955). He made a couple of Westerns before this, but it was here that he found his niche. The story is more conventional than those he would become known for. It's a tale of "Atomic Apocalypse" that uses the common plot device of gathering a group of survivors together, then trapping them until their disparate personalities cause conflict.
"Jim Maddison" (Paul Birch) knew this day was coming. That's why he and his daughter Louise moved to the middle of nowhere, to protect themselves from nuclear war. Now that it has happened, they appear to be the lone survivors, at least in the immediate area. Maddison receives no replies to his s.o.s. calls, there's no sign of anyone left in charge.
Then comes a knock on their door. It is "Rick" (Richard Denning), a man desperate for food and shelter. He is carrying another man who is unconscious and badly wounded with radiation burns on his face. Maddison doesn't want to let them in but is persuaded by daughter Louise (Lori Nelson) : "Dad, we can't just leave them out there to die". Maddison relents, but soon there is another knock. "Louise, we can't take in any more people! We only have enough food for two in the first place"!
The point is moot, for she has already answered the door and the caller has a gun. He is "Tony Lamont" (Mike Conners), a hoodlum accompanied by his stripper girlfriend "Ruby" (Adele Jergens). Maddison convinces Tony to put his gun away, but the tension has already been established. Tony is not gonna go along with the program, whatever it turns out to be.
The final addition to this nest is "Pete", a straggly old prospector who arrives with his burro in tow. Maddison puts them up in a backyard shed where Pete is content. He will be no trouble but he is still another mouth to feed.
Maddison checks everything and everyone with his Geiger counter, constantly monitoring radiation levels. Everyone except the Wounded Man is clean; he measures a dose that should be lethal, but by nightfall he is up and walking around. He asks for food : "For some reason I crave raw meat". Maddison explains that he has some on hand but it must be rationed. "We don't know if we'll be able to get more".
"Okay, then I'll go outside. There's game up in the mountains. I need the meat....I can feel it, I have to have it".
Maddison is against this : "You can't go out there! You're barely recovered. Besides, we don't know who else may be running around". He gives a nod to Tony, indicating other criminals. But the Wounded Man is determined to be let out, so he can get his fresh meat. Maddison opens the door and lets him go.
Had Corman followed this plot thread more succinctly, the film would've been tighter and more interesting. Instead, he spends the next half hour building up the conflict between Maddison and Tony, who now has eyes on Louise. "I've always wanted a country girl", he smirks. This irritates his city chick Ruby, who then goes out back to drink moonshine with old Pete the prospector. Ruby will try to seduce good guy Rick with a pseudo-striptease, and this will set Tony against him as well, so you've got all of these personality clashes happening instead of focusing on the trajectory of the Wounded Man. Corman will return to him when he is found dead, at which point it becomes clear there is a Monster on the loose, but the movie would have benefited from a cut of fifteen minutes, slashing all the personal stuff. This is what Corman learned to do in his later films, where the personalities are kept to a minimum and the Monsters are unleashed very quickly His best early works all run in the 60-67 minute range.
Maddison confesses to Rick that he was once a Navy captain, stationed off a Pacific atoll during an H-Bomb test. "What the public was never told was that some of the animals on the island survived that test. I was in charge of bringing them back for study. I made a few sketches that I've held onto all these years". He takes out a folder to show Rick his drawings of a large, fanged squirrel, a ferocious, wild eyed fox and a ten foot monkey with horns growing out it's head. "You see it's skin, that rough look? It was hard as steel, like armor plating".
That's what the group will finally have to deal with, although it's never explained if it's the same giant monkey from the H-Bomb test or a new one created by the nuclear war. You the viewer won't care, however, because you'll be too busy having The Beejeezus scared out of you by this thing. It's without doubt one of the best Rubber Suited Monsters evah, and I just wish Corman had devoted a little more time to it instead of the overlong power struggle between Mr. Maddison and Tony the Hoodlum. The last 20 minutes with the Monster are where the film takes off and shows us flashes of the future Corman Brilliance, so for that reason I'm gonna give "Day The World Ended" Two Solid Thumbs Up. Many fans on IMDB rated it higher, some saying it is one of his best works, but I prefer the films with the weirder storylines, like Crab Monsters who have ESP, or The Sculptor with a Bold New Technique.
Still, Corman does a competent job with this more traditional story, getting good performances out of Paul Birch (who we last saw as the Alien in "Not Of This Earth) and especially Mike Conners as "Tony" the Hood. He's young here, and I had to keep asking myself, "Is that 'Mannix' "? Sure enough it was. Give this movie a look just to see how Corman got started. It's a little slow in the middle but certainly worth a view. /////
That's all for the time being. I am having fun with something called The Hemingway App, a website where your writing is corrected to be more Hemingwayesque. It keeps telling me my sentences are too long, haha, and they probably are, but then I've read some Hemingway and I don't like his style anyhow. It's too choppy, too clipped, and he does something I go out of my way to avoid, which is using the same word over and over : "The boat rocked in the choppy sea. The man tried to steady the boat, but the boat could not be stilled". I'm paraphrasing, lol, but he does that, and apparently it was on purpose! For myself, I double check my sentences to make sure I'm not doing that, because I have a tendency to inadvertently use words or phrases repeatedly, and to me it sounds clumsy. I have no formal training whatsoever. I got poor grades in every English class I ever took and the study of grammar and sentence construction bored me to tears, so I never remembered where an adverb was appropriate (never, according to Hemingway), or what a participle was or any of that stuff. I learned to write by reading a lot of books and then trying it myself. Over the years of blogging, I have become very conscious of the need to write proper sentences, ones that are readable and make sense, but I still don't know the technical details of writing, so I'm cracking up when I put a paragraph into the Hemingway App and it kicks my butt. :)
But then, to me the most important thing with my own writing is it's rhythm, and my attempt to sound like myself, and besides.........Stephen King once said that "Hemingway sucks"! Yikes.....better not put that in The App. :)
I'm gonna go for my CSUN walk. See you at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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