LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960)

Harold Gern is a rich guy who is on the run from a major indictment. He and his wife Evelyn are in Puerto Rico with their lawyer Martin, trying to ride out the scandal, though Martin keeps trying to get Harold to take the situation seriously. They attend a cockfight which sickens Evelyn, and back at the hotel, Evelyn vents to Martin about her frustrations with Harold, then comes on to him, moves which he rejects, though clearly he’s interested. The next day, the three take a boat out for a diving trip. When Martin is stung by a ray, they come back to the surface but none of them can breathe. Leaving their air tanks on, they find the boat captain dead and no one answering on the radio. Soon, they realize that there has been some kind of incident and all the oxygen was sucked out of the atmosphere, though by the time they reach land, the oxygen has returned. Dead bodies and crashed cars are all they find in town, and Martin notes that they may be the last three people alive on the planet. Thus ends any real plot that a sci-fi movie fan might enjoy, and any real excitement that a B-movie fan might enjoy. From here, it basically turns into a stagy melodrama about the squabbling and posturing between three members of a love triangle. Earlier movies in this mold like FIVE or THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED also focused on romantic tensions but didn’t neglect the sci-fi apocalypse elements of the plot. 

Like those other films, the action here moves to an abandoned, isolated house. Harold and Evelyn head to the empty vacation home of a friend of theirs and Harold rather grudgingly allows Martin to tag along. Tensions rise among the three, with Evelyn shifting her desires back and forth between the men. There’s a fight that begins as the men slap each other with fish. The bland dialogue sometimes tries to pass as philosophical; when Evelyn tells Martin she wants to have a child with him, he replies, “All that’s left is fear for us to live with our pain” (whatever that means). Of course, having them decide to live as a threesome would have been too subversive for the time, so [Spoiler!] in the end, a blinded Martin dies in a church in Evelyn’s arms declaring there is no god, and Evelyn and Harold walk off together into an uncertain future. Given the title and the situation, this had promise, but it’s one of Roger Corman’s quickies, shot in about a week at the tail-end of another Puerto Rican production, CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. The script was unfinished so the writer, Robert Towne (who later wrote CHINATOWN) kept writing even as was acting (he plays Martin, rather ineffectively). The other two actors, Betsy Jones-Morland and Anthony Carbone, aren’t that much better; they seem like understudies waiting for the real stars who never showed up. As rough as I’ve been on this film, it’s not unwatchable, since the apocalyptic aspect does manage to hold some interest throughout--the brief scenes of them walking through the deserted town are effective. Pictured are Carbone, Jones-Morland and Towne. [DVD]