THE LAST MAN ON EARTH: In this first adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND, Price fights off an army of undead strangers and relatives— inspiring George Romero to make NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in the process.
time-honored system of collaboration that had been practiced in Rome since the “Hollywood on the Tiber” days. Like RETURN OF THE FLY, the film was produced by Robert Lippert, who set-up a co- production deal with the fledgling company Produzioni la Regina in Rome. Ragona would have been brought in to prep the film, to assemble the supporting cast and crew; Salkow would have ar- rived a week or two prior to filming and func- tioned as director on the set, with Ragona serving as his first assistant until post-production, at which time he assumed control of the Italian ver- sion, supervising its final cutting and dubbing, just as Salkow would have done back in the States, delivering his own cut to Ragona prior to
his amendments. Looking at THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, it shares the same directorial shortcom- ings as Salkow’s earlier collaboration with Price, United Artists’ TWICE-TOLD TALES (1963), a key part of this story which the commentators fail to reference. Both films share the same flat, unstoryboarded look and inability to believably in- tegrate actors and setting, so that we seem to be
35-E Video Watchdog 179 Digital Exclusive
watching a filmed rehearsal rather than something that can lure us into a suspension of disbelief. “Richard Matheson: Storyteller” (6m 24s), pre- viously issued on the MGM’s 2005 DVD Double
Feature of THE LAST MAN ON EARTH and PANIC IN YEAR ZERO, manages in seven minutes to
give us a better account of how THE LAST MAN ON EARTH was made than the film’s entire au- dio commentary. Matheson recounts how he wrote his script for Hammer Film Productions who, cit- ing insurmountable problems with the BBFC over the script’s content, sold it off to Lippert (a silent
producer on earlier Hammer productions like THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT), who then hired TV scribe William F. Leicester to revise it. Not liking the results, but still welcoming the income, Matheson took credit under the pseudonym Lo- gan Swanson. The disc ends with a truly exhaus- tive stills and poster gallery, including colorized lobby cards and a surprisingly large number of what are known to some collectors as “dead shots”—ie., blurred or badly composed.
—Tim Lucas .
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95