The ant and the grasshopper

"Harold, I'm not sure I feel any inborn need to work.  Now, maybe there's something wrong with me."

"I don't think so."

---

The Last Woman on Earth (1960)

Grade: C+



Hard to pigeonhole this Roger Corman effort, filmed (and set) in Puerto Rico. The title leads one to expect an Armageddon/end-of-the-world flick, and it fits that mold to some degree.



But at heart it's really a love triangle between a man who vaguely resembles Humphrey Bogart, a woman who looks a bit like Kate Mulgrew (crossed with Kate Hepburn), and a guy who has one of those agreeable, familiar faces that make you sure you must know him from somewhere (but you probably don't, unless you've seen Creature from the Haunted Sea).



Yet if it's a love triangle, it sure is an odd one. None of the principals seem all that into each other; if anything the ensuing drama seems like a diversion to distract them all from the meaninglessness of life after the apocalypse.

Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, and maybe Corman's famously strict budgets, which precluded spending a lot of money on cataclysmic effects (or even just hiring extras to scream and die), led him to take this film down unconventional paths.



For The Last Woman on Earth is really quite a cerebral film, worlds apart from the shock, awe, and gore usually associated with movies where, to quote Stephen Sondheim, "everybody dies". (Well, almost everybody.)



Like many cerebral films, it drags in places, and doesn't always offer enough to sustain the viewer's close attention. And like many Roger Corman films, there are loose ends and narrative threads that don't really make sense, and might well have been inspired by the exigencies of production.



Actually, the whole damn film was inspired by the exigencies of production: they only made it to take advantage of the fact that they were already in Puerto Rico after filming Creature from the Haunted Sea!



There's a strange logic to the pairing, since the wacked-out dadaism of that spy spoof pairs rather well with the morose nihilism of The Last Woman on Earth. Of course, Corman (or Robert Towne) doesn't quite have the balls to go whole hog into the abyss, but it was only 1960 after all.