Last Woman on Earth (1960)

Simply A Masterpiece

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The acting in this movie is really good.

"Last Woman on Earth" was produced and directed by Roger Corman for American International Pictures in association with his own company, Filmgroup (one word, though an Allied Artists TV reissue spelled it as "Film Group"), and was based on a script by Robert Towne - who was also in it, more on that later. Towne went on to a distinguished career as a writer and a less distinguished one as a director - his best known credit was probably the screenplay for "Chinatown" (though Towne was disgusted when director Roman Polanski changed his ending), and he's one of the many talents both in front of and behind the camera who went from a Corman apprenticeship to a major career. "Last Woman on Earth" was apparently a project Corman threw together because he was already organizing a location trip to Puerto Rico to shoot "Creature from the Haunted Sea" and he wanted to get the most bang for his buck while there by making a second film - the way he would allow Francis Ford Coppola to shoot his first film, "Dementia 13," with the same cast and crew as his own production "The Young Racers;" and why he would squeeze two days' extra work out of Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson by finishing the 1963 version of "The Raven" early so he could make another film with them, The Terror. It helped that Towne's plot features only three on-screen (live) human characters: New York financier Harold Gern (Anthony Carbone), his wife Evelyn (Betsy Jones Moreland) and his tax attorney Martin Joyce. The performance of the actor playing Joyce is credited to "Edward Wain," but that was actually a pseudonym for ... Robert Towne. It seems that he hadn't yet finished the film by the time Corman and his crew were set to leave for Puerto Rico, so Corman had to bring him along so he could finish the script on the spot. Rather than pay for two people to come to Puerto Rico, Corman decided to save plane fare and living expenses for one by drafting Towne to play the part himself. Like Blake Edwards in Frank Wisbar's 1940's "B" "Strangler of the Swamp," Towne's performance proves that his real talent lay in writing, not acting. It also is an early indication of the flaw that would sink a lot of Towne's later major productions: a gift for pseudo-profundity which led him to write things that pretend to intellectual sophistication but really don't achieve it. One suspects that Corman told Towne, "Write me an Ingmar Bergman script - only make sure I can slap an exploitation title on it so I can sell it to the drive-ins." What Towne came up with was a profoundly uninteresting romantic triangle between Harold, Evelyn and Martin that turns into a post-apocalyptic movie when, vacationing on Puerto Rico while Harold's latest IRS investigation gets sorted out, Harold takes Evelyn and Martin deep-sea diving with SCUBA gear - and while they're underwater a sudden interruption in Earth's oxygen supply takes place, just long enough to wipe out all other humans and land-based animal life. They come to life but keep breathing through their diving masks until they realize that whatever happened to the air that annihilated the rest of humanity is over and they can once again breathe safely - and the rest of the plot deals with Harold's attempts to lord it over the other two and insist that Evelyn doesn't have sex with Martin even though she's been clearly restive in her trophy-wife status and genuinely attracted to him. The main problem with this film is that the three people are relentlessly uninteresting and we really don't like any of them. It's possible Corman could have improved this film greatly if he'd been willing to pay salary, expenses and travel for an actual actor to play Martin, and it's pretty clear whom that should have been: the young Jack Nicholson, who was under contract to Corman at the time and could have brought an explosive romantic and sexual intensity to the character that clearly eluded the writer playing him. "Last Woman on Earth" is yet another bad film in which one senses a good film struggling inside it to get out.

This "end of the world" low-budget sci-fi has a three person cast, with Betsy Jones-Moreland as a sexy wife, Antony Carbone as her domineering wealthy husband and Robert Towne as his best friend who realizes his playboy days are practically over when everybody, at least on the island of Puerto Rico, dies as the supply of oxygen disappears from the planet. Fortunately, they were scuba diving at the time (wasn't anybody else in the Caribbean?), so like the kids who survived "the night of the comet" 20 something years later, they are left alone to hopefully re-populate the planet should the rest of the world suffered the same fate. The tension rises as the two buddies fight over the surviving woman and their fights threaten to leave her all alone, probably the greatest fear that any woman could ever have.Low-budget corn of the silliest kind (from the mind of low-budget king Roger Corman), this has its moments of social relevance but ultimately resolves on Corman's seemingly own sexual fantasies of two men left alone with two women where nobody is going to be the winner. It reaches the heights of silliness when the two men start slapping each other with fish (shades of Monty Python) which results in an ultra-violent fight that leaves one of them with a head injury that may certainly be fatal. The acting is amateurish, the photography and sound dull, and it is obvious that if this was filmed on location, they must have gotten up at the crack of dawn to find beach-front locations to film without the disturbances of the natives or tourists who flocked to the islands on vacation. The chase sequence at the end leads to a showdown in a church which suffers from the most outlandish dialog ever written.

If the first 20 minutes or so of this movie had been cut I'd have rated it even higher. Those first 20 minutes, which give us some of the background of the 3 main characters - a married couple (Harold and Evelyn Gern, played by Antony Carbone and Betsy Jones-Moreland) and Harold's lawyer (Martin, played by Robert Towne) - seem strangely disconnected from the rest of the movie. The background basically lets us know that the Gerns already have trouble in their marriage because Harold is obsessed with his business, which apparently he doesn't always run honestly - thus, the presence of his lawyer. But that 20 minutes could have been cut out - or at least cut down dramatically - and it wouldn't have negatively affected the rest of the movie, because it's only after that first 20 minutes that this becomes interesting. And at that point it is interesting.The three go off on a boat trip off the coast of Puerto Rico. Strapping on oxygen tanks, they go diving for less than an hour (because it's established that the tanks hold an hour's worth of oxygen) and when they come up - everyone's dead. The pilot of the boat, everyone in Puerto Rico, and apparently everyone in the world. Just dead. Something suddenly and briefly sucked all the oxygen out of the air and everyone asphyxiated. Just like that. There are three human beings left on the entire planet. Two men and one woman. You can guess where that's heading.Beyond that 20 minutes, I thought this was basically a good movie. The cause of the mass extinction is never explained beyond something taking the oxygen out of the air, but it really didn't have to be. That's just part of the mystery. Our three survivors didn't know what had happened. Why should we? I'm no authority on the work of Roger Corman, who directed this. I've seen a few of his movies. Some I've liked, some I haven't. This would certainly fall into the category of one that I liked. It's intriguing and it's generally well acted by the three leads. (7/10)

While vacationing in Puerto Rico "Harold Gern" (Antony Carbone), his wife "Evelyn Gern" (Betsy Jones-Moreland) and his lawyer "Martin Joyce" (Robert Towne) all decide to go scuba diving. While they are under water a strange phenomenon occurs which takes up all of the oxygen from the earth resulting in the death of all living animals. Fortunately, the oxygen in their tanks suffices until the atmosphere stabilizes. It's at this point that they realize that they are the only people remaining. Two men and one woman. At any rate, rather than spoil the movie by revealing what happens next I will just say that this wasn't a bad film for its time. The acting was adequate but nothing above and beyond that. And while I didn't especially care for the ending I still give the director (Roger Corman) credit for being able to put out a decent film in spite of the low budget allowed. Accordingly, I rate this movie as about average.