The facts from IMDB: 1 hour 15 minutes, 5.7/10 from 814.
The Russians are coming! But some citizens have slept through it. What an advertisement for Serta.
Backup. This is one of those Empty City/Earth movies. Where have all the (other) people gone? A few scattered individuals emerge to find…silence, more silence, and each other.
First they have to accept the situation: They are alone. Next they have to decide what happened? Where is everyone else? Third, what shall we do?
Tensions arise at every step.
One of the tropes is leadership. Will a leader emerge from this random assortment of individuals? If so, will there be rebellion. This premiss provides rich pickings for a screen writer.
It all goes pretty much according to formula, but if formulaic it is nonetheless creative. The opening scenes of the quiet cityscape at street level are arresting. The inserts of stock footage reinforces the abandoned look of this large city. (Chicago in the original story, but filmed in Lost Angeles. On that more later.) The beginning is very eerie and promises much.
The camera cuts to a Kathleen Crowley gradually awakening. There is no sound. None. She does not moan or groan. There is no street noise, yet it is hot, there is sheen of sweat on her, and the window is open to a slight breeze on the curtains. Silence. She fumbles around and gets dressed. We hear snaps, clicks, and snicks as she dresses, opens, and closes drawers and doors but nothing else. On the way out of the apartment building she knocks on a couple of doors to no reply. She meets no one but she seems inwardly preoccupied, as though late for a 360-degree review with a McKinsey-speaker. We notice the empty silence but she does not, quite. She hurries along the empty street and gradually realises this is not right. She comes across a dead woman lying on the street. ‘Gasp’ is the first sound. Definitely not right!
This silent opening was daring indeed, and given the attention-span deprived audiences today, no film maker would dare do it now. Everyone would reach for the iPhones in boredom to check-in on Facebook. Yet it offers mystery, tension, eerieness, the more so because the audience realises the silence before Crowley does.
Now she hurries on, we know not where, and the silence remains, until…. she turns a corner and runs into Richard Denning. Say his name with respect because he did not survive ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon.’ Later Denning was the 5-O governor of Hawaii with an office in Iolani Palace. Some CV, gobbled up by the Creature from the Black Lagoon, but making a come back as governor, and in that palace.
She is fearful and Gov slaps here around to tell her he will not hurt her! This is 1950s man-logic. Smack! See, I won’t hurt you! Smack! (Remember Denning did not write it that way and enjoyed a reputation as a gentleman professional.) After she has been beaten into submission, they club together and head for mid-town on the assumption there will information, if not people, there. Along the way they establish that the telephones are out, and no one has a iPhone. There is no electricity for radios.
Then in silence they hear sounds and trace them to a bar where a couple are carousing, devil may care. Virginia Grey and Richard Reeves are the players both instantly recognised from countless supporting roles, but here getting a lot of camera time. She has chiseled cheek bones and he is a man-mountain. Now the team is four and clearly Governor Richard is in charge. Off they go, and find automobiles have been purposely disabled. By this time Gov has concluded that there have been an evacuation.
Having just got in from Detroit, travelling eighteen hours, he slept through it. Crowly was comatose from an OD of sleeping pills. Grey and Reeves were sleeping off an alcoholic stupor before starting the next one.
It must be W A R. Yet there is no rain of bombs or missiles, just empty streets. They find another corpse.
Then there appears another citizen, frazzled, clothing askew, like he just came from a frat party, who says he has run away from the invaders on the North (Korea) Side of town, where there is indeed destruction. He is hysterical, a duty usually consigned to a woman. Nice change.
While the characterisations have been changed from the original story the narrative so far is consistent with it.
Now it diverges. For while the five gabble, a shadow falls on a building. A giant shadow. They take cover. The shadow wobbles. Is this the Amazing Colossal Man on the loose again! or The Fifty Woman who got rid of Abbot and Costello (I wish). Mr Hysterical runs amok into the street and the Shadow, a tin man, zaps him with a Gort eye-ray. Poof! That is some hysteria cure! Oh oh.
They hide in a hotel on the assumption ‘they’ will not search all the rooms just yet, because this is an advance patrol moving in from the North. Bloody Canadians! The weather has finally driven them south, and this big thing, must be an armoured polar bear. What other explanation could there be, Erich? Although how this giant will enter and search a hotel is a question best left unasked.
The deviation from the story is showing the Big Tin Man. In the story the invaders are unseen. Given how clumsy and awkward Tin is, that might have been better. Tin is slightly more agile than Chani from ‘The Devil Girl from Mars’ who tripped over his own size twenty-two shoes. This robot is stunt man Jack Calvert who make robots a speciality. This outing must have been early on that career path before he perfected a technique.
Enter Tin Tin
The second deviation is that about now we get cross cuts to a military operations room with lots of extras in mismatched uniforms from an Army Navy Store. They know nothing except that something has happened. Well that confirms the street cred. Solution? Bomb it!
Much stock footage of war planes taking off, retracting landing gear, assembling in formation, flying off in great numbers. They fly over the city observed by our team, and then they are blasted out of the sky in a sun burst. Not very well done but we got the idea. Kaboom! No more airplanes. That eye-ray is a killer.
The colonel at HQ is flummoxed. ‘Bomb’ was the only play in his playbook. By the way would a chicken colonel be in charge of bombing Chicago, Lost Angeles maybe, but ChiTown? As per usual there is no indication that there has been any effort to communicate or negotiate with the invaders, say, by offering them Mexico, Russ Limbaugh, or Paris Hilton.
Despite radar, telephones, underlings, fruit salad, and pips, the colonel knows nothing about the invaders. On the street, we know they are tin men. Well there is only one Tin Man, but that is enough with that eye death-ray. (In high school there was a rumour that Mrs Picks who taught Latin had a death-ray called the ablative case. No one every dared test the myth. Or if they did, poof, there was no report.)
The happy campers four do not offer the screen writer enough tension so he added a psychopathic killer to the mix. He has a gun, of course, and is addled. He is also a relative of the moneybags who invested in this celluloid, and so he is a must. His inexplicable behaviour leads to the final confrontation with Tin, and it is a good thing they found can opener in time.
The invaders are technologically superior because they got there, though Canada is not that far away, are brought low by merciless Yankee ingenuity, whereby they play Bing Cosby singing ‘White Christmas’ repeatedly and this cracks the robots eye, and the cyclopes go down, down, down. Who would not? Hard as it is to believe, bombing is not enough. By the way, the ever reliable Whit Bissell came up with sound effect. Well done, Whit.
The survivors begin stockpiling more Der Bingle records because THEY will be back. These inhuman invaders were Russians in tin cans, right? Only team work and w(h)it can defeat them. Oh, and Der Bingle.
Richards Denning and Carlson hunt the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Denning did an MBA and went into business which he found a bore and he dabbled in amateur theatrics where he was encouraged to enter a radio contest, which he did and won. The sponsor of the contest gave him a screen test but rejected him because he looked too much like an actor already under contract. But by now Denning wanted to escape spreadsheets and pitched himself to Paramount and was born his B-movie career, for despite his good looks, easy manner, and professionalism he never ascended the heights, but he always had work and retired early to Maui, showing his good sense.
He was lured out of retirement for 5-O on condition that (1) he never had to leave Hawaii and (2) that he would not be required for every episode. That was agreed. (The rumour is that when Jack ‘Look at that Hair’ Lord quit 5-O he chose to stay on Maui, too. In our visits to Maul we have been unable to confirm this story. The search goes on.) Knowing Denning’s commitment to Hawaii caused his star to rise further in my cosmology.
The cynics think that the advertising department demanded that the Tin one be inserted into the movie to appeal to the creature feature market. Tin certainly does not add to the action, since he is largely immobile. Nor is the death ray all that exciting. More like a blurred screen that a mighty, crackling zap. Maybe he needed lessons from Gort.
The empty city is in fact Lost Angeles. This tip jar budget did not run to securing a police license with accompanying fee to film on the city streets, so it was done on the QT with a skeleton crew in a van going here and there in the very early morning. The film was then edited to remove any environmental sound and cut out passers-by. It is well done and the more intriguing for knowing how it was done.
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