On Thursday 5 November, Victoria Price will introduce a special live performance of Animat's blistering electronic score to the classic sci-fi
The Last Man on Earth, at The Islington in north London, kicking off at 7pm.
Tickets still available so grab them here.
To celebrate the event, here are 10 things you might not know about the 1960s sci-fi classic.
1) It was written by the legendary author Richard Matheson
The film is based on the American writer’s first novel,
I Am Legend,
for which he got a $3000 advance from Gold Medal Books. Published in
1954, its paranoid post-apocalyptic scenario struck a chord with a
Middle America in the grips of McCarthyism. The first modern vampire
novel and this first film version also proved a huge influence on George
A Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead. It was later filmed as
The Omega Man with Charlton Heston in 1971 and as
I Am Legend starring Will Smith in 2007.
2) It could have been a Hammer film called The Night Creatures
Following the success of
The Quatermass Experiment (aka
The Creeping Unknown) in
1955, Hammer Films paid Matheson $10,000 to adapt his novel for the
British studio, with Val Guest lined up to direct. However, the British
censors turned the script down fearing it would be too graphic. Hammer,
however, kept the title rights and later used it for their 1962 period
adventure
Captain Clegg.
3) B-movie producer Robert L Lippert brought it to the screen
Lippert wanted to film Matheson’s script in 1959 under the title
Naked Terror.
But ended up securing a co-production deal with Produzioni La Regina in
Rome for parent company 20th Century Fox who retitled it
The Last Man on Earth.
Like Hammer, Lippert ended up using his title for a 1961 documentary
about Zulu tribal practices, narrated by… Vincent Price. Matheson,
however, was upset by the rewrites and ended up taking his name off the
credits and using a psedonym, Swanson. Lippert was also responsible for
Hammer's 1954 noir thriller
House Across the Lake (check out my review here).
4) It gave Vincent Price a long holiday in Rome
At the end of his first contract with AIP (which had preventing him from
undertaking any other horror roles), Price scored a three-picture
back-to-back deal in Italy in 1961. So, while filming the swashbuckling
pirate adventure
Rage of the Buccaneers and the sword and sandals intrigue
Queen of the Nile, he and wife Mary got a long stay in one of their favourite cities ‘digging around’ the ruins and art troves.
The Last Man on Earth was filmed in January 1963 (according to Lucy Chase Williams in
The Complete Films of Vincent Price).
5) Price gives one of his most underrated performances
As the soiled suited 50-year-old scientist Robert Morgan, Price might be
light years away from the Matheson’s 30-something everyman factory
worker hero (Robert Neville) in the novel, but he lends his shabby
sophisticate a subtle sense of restrained dignity that emphasizes
Morgan’s displacement in the film’s zombie vampire infested wasteland.
6) It was shot in the dead of winter
The film’s eerie post-apocalyptic look was achieved by the film’s
cinematographer Franco Delli Colli shooting in the early hours and
Vincent Price hated it. ‘I never was so cold in my life as I was in that
picture. I had a driver, and I used to tip him a big sum to keep the
car running so I could change my clothes in the backseat’, recalled the
actor at the 1990 Fangoria Weekend of Horrors.
7) It was filmed at the legendary Titanus Studios
The film is supposed to be set in Los Angeles, but the landscape is
unmistakably the outskirts of Rome. That’s because it was shot entirely
on location and at the
Titanus Studios.
The 100-year-old family run studio established by Gustavo Lombardo is
as much a part of world cinema history as the famed Cinecittà , and has
been home to peplum and classics like Visconti’s
The Leopard.
Today it serves as a television production facility and was recently
honoured at the Locarno Film Festival. There's even a museum dedicated
the studio in Torino (
check it out here).
8) Vincent Price visits the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the EUR district of Rome
An icon of Fascist architecture, the
Square Colosseum,
as its known, was constructed in 1935 by Mussolini for his planned 1942
world exhibition, and was intended as a large scale image of how urban
Italy might have looked had his fascist regime not fallen. The iconic
building can also be seen in films like Federico Fellini’s
Boccaccio 70 episode, Peter Greenaway’s
Belly of an Architect, and the 2005 sci-fi
Equilibrium. From 2015, it will serve as the new HQ for the fashion label Fendi.
9) The Paul Sawtell soundtrack is pretty cool, too!
The film is highly praised for its moody soundtrack, which is
quite collectable now, and is by Paul Sawtell, who did heaps of 1950s
sci-fi movies, including the two Fly movies starring Vincent Price, as
well as the theme tune to TV’s
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which Vinnie once guest starred. Order it out (
here).
10) It’s in the public domain…
There are lots of bad prints streaming on YouTube and cropping up in
many a DVD collection, but I've found the best looking one so far.
There's even a colourised version available (but I prefer the original
black and white). So? What are you waiting for?
