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Harry (Ray Milland), his wife Anne (Jean Hagen), his son Rick (Frankie
Avalon) & his daughter Karen (Mary Mitchel) have just left LA top go on a
camping trip when the city is blown up in a nuclear blast (pretty much before
their very eyes), & seeing all the panicking people in the surrounding
area, & the greedy shopkeepers, diner- or gasstation owners who try to make
a tidy profit out of the disaster, Harry comes to the conclusion civilisation
has been suspended & it has become a dog-eat-dog world, & if he wants
to uphold civilisation he has to fend for himself & be more ruthless than
everyone else. So he & his son Rick soon hold up Johnson's (Richard
Garland) hardware store (with weapon´s they have just acquired from Johnson,
no less), steal galoons of petrol from the next gas station, & cause a
multiple car crash, just to be able to cross a highway ... much to the dismay
of Harry's wife, who sees him slowly turning into a beast, but he figures she
just doesn't understand. Later they take refuge in a large cave, & to
make sure they have no unwanted visitors, Harry & Rick (literally) tear
down the bridge behind them. However, it's not long before they find they are
in company just the same: aforementioned hardware store owner Johnson has found
reuge nearby, & he asks Harry for some help, maybe a little food ... which
Harry bluntly refuses. Enticed by his wife, Harry goes over to visit Johnson
& wife (Shary Marshall), only to find out they have already been brutally
murdered ... most possibly by Carl (Richard Bakalyan), Mickey (Rex Holman)
& Andy (Neil Nephew), teenage hoods who have put up camp in a farmhouse
nearby. But Harry is just happy they haven't picked his family to do some
killing ... yet. Soon though, the teenage trio rape Harry's daughter Karen,
& are only kept from becoming even more brutal by her mother Anne, who
finally finds a reason to lift a gun & shoot at human beings ... she misses
though. So Harry & Rick go to the farmhouse to retaliate, & Harry
shoots Mickey & andy in cold blood, their ringleader Carl though is out ...
instead they find Marilyn (Joan Freeman), whose parents owned the farm before
the teenagers had killed them, & who has since been their loveslave. Rick
persuades his dad to take her with them ... Soon though Rick & Marilyn
are in the woods alone, which is when Carl finds them & naturally he wants
to repossess Marilyn ... & only after a fierce fight can Marilyn & Rick
kill him, but Rick gets shot in the leg & hurt bad ... as a matter of fact
so bad that Harry is forced to leave his secluded cave to return to the
dog-eat-dog world, & soon a doctor (Willis Bouchey) tells him it's so bad
that the boy needs a blood transfusion ... & soon, too. & on their
way to the nearest hospital they find out that civilisation is to be restored,
when they stumble over the army who offer them their help. It could
have been a film with so many possibilities, a story about a man who, in a
futile effort to uphold civilisation, becomes the most savage creature of thgem
all (at least that's what I would have read into the plot) ... instead the film
is just full of wasted opportunities: Every now & again, Harry's efforts to
force his will upon others by the way of the gun are justified, inasmuch as the
rapist teens turn out to be 3 hoods he refrained from killing earlier in the
film, & even his most ruthless actins (like causing the multiple car crash)
are somewhat excused. Eventually even his wife, initially shocked by his
actions, sees he was right when trying to shoot Karen's rapists. &
how is civilisation Harry tried so ruthlessly & savagely to defend
reintroduced in the end ? By the army, with their superior weapons ... well,
who was it then that fought the nuclear war with even more superior weapons
(the atom bomb) in the first place ? Hardware store owners ? Actually it's a
pity the message of the fim is so reactionary & essentially totally wrong,
as it creates a fittingly dark, almost nihilistic post-doomsday atmosphere not often found in
other end-of-the-world films of its time.
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