This car should have gotten a credit. I think it had more screen time than the daughter.
Panic In The Year Zero! (1962, aka End Of The World) is a remarkably steady and believable look at what might happen if a limited nuclear war had taken place in the 1950s. It features the Baldwin family, driving from Los Angeles into the mountains on a family vacation trip. Midway up the mountains, a series of flashes of light catch their attention, and soon father Harry has guessed the truth, even if the telephone operators are merely saying the lines are down: Los Angeles has been hit in a nuclear attack.
He immediately switches into survival mode, buying and taking supplies at gunpoint, and driving further up into the mountains, looking for a cave his son has mentioned in the past. His goal? Family survival. His obstacles?
Everyone else.
Along with the usual friction one might expect, a gang of no-good young men, taking advantage of the situation, becomes their biggest external obstacle. They know no decency, have no respect except for raw power, and soon enough, after his daughter is assaulted by them, he and his son are forced to hunt those they can find and kill them.
But there are internal obstacles as well. His wife cannot quite believe that mankind will descend into savagery, and his daughter disconnects from what’s happening, as might be expected from a self-centered teenager. But when Harry kills the men who assaulted his daughter, with neither remorse nor pity, and then nearly leaves one of their victims behind, he awakens to the fact that he’s becoming the man he warned his son not to become: killing without thought, living without pity nor generosity.
So, in a sense, when his son is desperately wounded by the last survivor of the gang, it’s his lifeline, a reminder that there’s more to life than vengeance and survival. Word has arrived that civilization is beginning to return in a town not too far away, and the climax is the desperate drive towards civilization and hospitals.
And finding the US Army sitting in the way.
Some of the special effects are substandard, but fortunately they left the nuclear attack as simply flashes in the sky and a couple of mushroom clouds. The close investigation is of the psychology of all the survivors, the authorities dead or distracted by the catastrophes in Los Angeles and other cities, and I think it’s well done.
I can’t say you’ll enjoy this movie if you run across it – there’s not a lick of humor in it – but it’s a sobering reminder of another era in American history, when we lived under the shadow of the Cold War, and how that affected much of the population’s psychology.
The worst part of this movie may be its title.
