9/12/06: The Omega Man (1971)This one isn’t perfect. There are some cornball lines and technical flaws. Still,
The Omega Man is easily one of the most interesting films of the ’70s. The story is set in an apocalyptic 1977, after the culture wars are hastened to an end through Soviet chemical fallout. Charlton Heston is Robert Neville, a scientist who injected himself with an experimental vaccine right before the eve of destruction. Now he’s a walking dawn of correction, attempting to survive in a Los Angeles overrun by diseased weirdos called The Family.
By day, Neville stalks a deserted city. At night, he barricades himself while The Family takes to the streets. Chalky white and covered with lesions, the members of The Family wrap themselves in black robes while pillaging museums and libraries. They look like the ash-covered Los Angelenos at the end of the relentlessly p.c. disaster film
Volcano. In that film, a little kid gleefully shouts, “We all look the same!” In
The Omega Man, The Family wants Neville dead for looking different.
This is an obvious forewarning of Jesse Jackson’s chants of “Western culture, it must go!” Screenwriters Joyce and John William Corrington had a remarkable grasp on the future, as seen in the celebration of Neville as a sardonic square. He watches
Woodstock while reciting along with a stoned idiot’s talk of peace. When he finds a small commune of folks who haven’t yet succumbed, he sets out to make a serum of his “100 percent Anglo-Saxon” blood.
And when The Family grabs Neville for a trial, he’s condemned as the “last of scientists, of bankers, of businessmen.”
The casting of Rosalind Cash as Neville’s interracial love interest may seem like an obvious device. But the script never exploits this, and leaves the only racial reference to the Family leader’s ex-militant crony. (He calls Neville’s humble home a “honky paradise.”) Cash’s no-nonsense character isn’t above reminding Neville that he’s already lost 200 million patients. Neville has less patience when she complains about his old habit of shooting everything that moves “I had to stay alive,” he says, and he has the blood to prove it.
In the most insightful touch, Family leader Matthias (Anthony Zerbe) isn’t some maniac whacked out by the plague. He’s actually in his element: the guy was originally a network news commentator. When gullible young Richie (played by
Room 222’s Eric Laneuville) approaches The Family with news of Neville’s cure, Matthias patiently explains that they have no desire to return to the days of the old. Like most progressive liberals, Matthias doesn’t want to improve the world. He wants to make the world more equal at the expense of others.
Richie is rewarded with the highest honor liberals can imagine for a young black man. He ends up as a sacrificial corpse. Before Richie leaves to his doom, however, he tries to convince Neville to share his cure with The Family. “They’re vermin,” Neville explains. The note that Richie leaves for Neville perfectly sums up youth culture’s quest for self-annihilation: “I had to find out who’s right.”
Like any good American father figure, Neville sets out to save Richie. For his trouble, Neville gets to strike a Christ pose after Matthias nails him with a tribal spear—though not before Neville hands the few survivors a container of that precious Anglo-Saxon blood.
Hopefully, it won’t seem frivolous when we say that 9/11 always gets us thinking of
The Omega Man. There’s also a remake currently filming in New York City, under the source novel’s title of
I Am Legend. (The first film version is 1964’s
The Last Man On Earth.) We walked past one of the
Legend sets right after last week’s
Jinx Magazine debate.
Expect more than a change in locale. We’ll be surprised if the lead villain isn’t a former television evangelist. There’ll be a different soundtrack, too. The hero of
The Omega Man cruises the dead streets of L.A. while listening to 8-tracks of elevator music. As scholars of the genre know, this is the one school of modern music that contains no trace of Afrocentric culture. This doesn’t mean that Neville’s a racist. He’s just not cool. But will we be hearing similar tunes cranked up from the bitchin’ sports car being driven by Will Smith? Oh, hell no.
Make it your own: Available
on DVD, although we’re hoping for a superior reissue when
I Am Legend is released in 2007. Maybe you’re better off with
a cheap VHS tape for now. Sadly, any new DVD can’t offer commentary from the late director Boris Sagal—who, in addition to
The Omega Man, also fathered
this masterpiece.
