Where Have All the People Gone?

I didn’t find any evidence that TV movie Where Have All the People Gone? was actually a failed pilot for a series, but it definitely exhibits some of the danger signs:

1. Dubious premise. In WHAPG? a really big solar flare mutates a virus that inflicts a rapidly disintegrating disease on all except those few who have a genetic resistance to it. Thus the majority of the human race has been reduced to little piles of white powder inside their clothes. It’s a really rapid disintegration. Oh yeah, and all the animals have gone crazy. Peter Graves and his son and daughter were on a remote camping trip in the mountains—which in retrospect was coincidental to their survival—and try to reunite with Graves’s wife. It’s sort of like Panic in Year Zero!, only without the jazzy score or Frankie Avalon. Or any panic. This is not a very exciting apocalypse.
2. Overly neat casting. Along the way Graves and family add a bereaved mother and an orphaned child who's handy with a gun to their entourage, becoming the model post-catastrophic blended family. (Do I need to tell you that original mom ends up blowin' in the wind?) 1974 would not have been too early for a black man to get added to the mix, Athens notes, but no dice. In the fevered imagination of Peter Graves, the end times are lily white!
3. Hopeful, open-ended narration. Daughter Kathleen Quinlan ends the movie with the sentiment I don’t know what the future holds, but whatever it is, we’ll face it together.
4. Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey. Wow, what a career this guy had! Genesis II; The Strange and Deadly Occurrence (note the definite article—that was one strange and deadly occurrence!); Ebony, Ivory, and Jade; Conspiracy of Terror; The House That Would Not Die; The Death of Me Yet; and episodes of Mannix, Kung Fu, Police Story, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O… plus, he helmed the cult classic The Night Stalker with Darren McGavin as quixotic supernatural-investigating reporter Carl Kolchak—the pilot for one of my all-time favorite TV series (which still shows up on Sci-Fi once in a while).
5. Peter Graves. Around this same time Graves played a secret agent in Dead Man on the Run, a retired cryptozoological big-game hunter in Scream of the Wolf, and Lew Archer in The Underground Man. It was the post–Mission: Impossible era, and Pete needed another regular paycheck.
Where Have All the People Gone? wasn’t the first time, of course, that Peter Graves faced the end of the world from extraterrestrial sources. There was The Beginning of the End (which I always thought was called The Beginning or the End?, but maybe that’s a different movie), It Conquered the World, and Killers from Space, and that was all in a three-year period! God knows how many alien invasions he foiled in his downtime.

The TV movie… Writing this post has made me nostalgic! Once a reliable, ninety-minute delivery system for thrills and chills, as an art form it’s gone the way of scrimshaw, ships in bottles, and regurgitation on demand. But Athens and I won’t forget! Here’s to you, Killdozer! Here’s to you, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and The Horror at 37,000 Feet! Here’s to you, Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Summer of Fear, and Satan’s School for Girls!

The Blue Dahlia

The Blue Dahlia is a Raymond Chandler mystery without Philip Marlowe, unfolding in a corner of tawdry Los Angeles away from the watchful gaze of that tarnished knight. And that makes it kind of awesome! Athens and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite the copout of an ending. Alan Ladd is heroic flyer Johnny Morrison, returning home from the war to find an unfaithful wife who, worse, confesses that she killed their son while driving drunk. Johnny decides his wife isn’t worth killing, but somebody else thinks she is. The only people who believe he’s innocent of the murder are war buddies William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont (!) and Veronica Lake, the estranged wife of nightclub owner Howard da Silva, Johnny’s wife’s lover and Johnny’s main suspect in her murder.

The Blue Dahlia came out in 1946, the same year as The Best Years of Our Lives, and it’s the Chandleresque dark mirror to that classic. Like Dana Andrews in Best Years, Ladd’s Johnny also comes home to a crumbling marriage; and like multiple amputee Harold Russell, William Bendix’s Buzz comes back an irrevocably changed man—in Buzz’s case, with a plate in his head that leaves him prone to fits of rage, particularly when there’s “monkey music” (that crazy big-band swing!) playing on the jukebox. Athens and I are reminded, as with others of the movies we watch here at the Athens Film Festival, that the war and its aftermath is always a subtext of film noir’s morally askew, fatalistic, violent vision of the world.

I mentioned a copout, and without giving away too much, I’ll just observe that The Blue Dahlia goes to absurd lengths to exonerate poor, demented Buzz of the murder, despite clearly heading in that direction. Somewhere I read that Chandler had intended him to be the killer but that it was decided that a disabled returning vet couldn’t have done it. (By the 1960s, of course, the crazy-returning-vet-killer would be a cliché.) Instead, the murder has more venal, but in context slightly less plausible, origins than the madness of war.

Still and all, The Blue Dahlia is one of the highlights of the AFF so far, with nice chemistry between Ladd and the doll-like Veronica Lake, great villainous turns from da Silva and Don Costello, and pungent LA atmosphere. Athens and I would be remiss not to mention Will Wright, Scroogey old Ben Weaver from The Andy Griffith Show’s Christmas episode, who’s been in several other AFF features: All the King’s Men, as the crooked sheriff and Willie Stark’s first political rival, and Act of Violence, another fine thriller that engages the moral morass of the postwar era, in which he has a small (but memorable) part as “Boat Rental Man at Redwood Lake.” The Blue Dahlia has to be one of the standouts of his movie career, as corrupt, passive-aggressive house detective “Dad” Newell. House detectives—this is such a hard-boiled concept to me. With all due respect to the honest, hard-working house detectives out there, what possible function could this person have other than to cover up crimes that occur in a hotel, and then blackmail the guests involved?

The Dark Past

Today Athens and I watched a sort of Freudian take on
The Desperate Hours, with Lee J. Cobb as a psychology professor and William Holden as the fugitive convict holding Cobb, his family, and their weekend guests hostage. Cobb comes to realize that if he can just unlock the secret of Holden's recurring nightmares, then--then--well, it's unclear what he hopes to accomplish, actually. But they spend several not particularly desperate hours free associating, playing chess, and throwing darts before solving the riddle. Holden has his breakthrough as the cops arrive to surround the house--he finds he doesn't have it in him to shoot his way to freedom anymore. "Al Walker never killed anyone again," Prof. Cobb relates to the cop who's been listening to his story. I should hope not! Presumably he went to the chair.

Since Al Walker and his gang don't turn out to be that threatening, and Walker's neuroses are pretty thin stuff, The Dark Past is mostly devoid of dramatic interest. It's 75 mins long but still feels slack--a subplot about Cobbs's visitng friends, a married couple and the wife's lover, that goes nowhere. It kind of reminded me and Athens of a training film for forensic psychologists: Cobb is ostensibly telling the story to explain how he came to work for the police, but the movie doesn't bother to stick to his point of view. Our favorite part has Walker's moll, played by Nina Foch, describe Walker's recurring nightmare, which we the audience get to see in a sort of expressionistic, reverse negative style. So we get to see a dream described by somebody who didn't have it, in a story being told by a third person.

One other moment I'd like to mention: early on we see a night's arrests being lined up in front of an entire police squad, and one by one the crooks (which of course they are--nobody innocent is going to get hauled in) stand in front of a microphone and our interviewed about their crime, record, etc. Another movie in the Athens film series, The Sniper (dir. Edward Dmytryk), had a similar scene, where some usual-suspect sex offenders were paraded before a detective squadron and grilled embarrassingly. I think if I were a policeman, this would probably be the best part of my day, and I'd be as proud as a parent at a Christmas pagaent when my collar stepped up to the mic. I'm guessing that some unfortunate Supreme Court challenge put an end to this showy procedure.