Directed By: Boris Sagal
Starring: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
Tag line: "Pray for the last man alive. Because he's not alone"
Trivia: Warner Brothers originally wanted Diahann Carroll for the role of Lisa.
Ah, The Omega Man!
I go back a ways with this movie. Not to the beginning, of course; I was two when it first hit theaters. But I did see this 1971 film for the first time in the mid-‘80s, when it played on television, and I adored it. Whenever someone asks what's my favorite adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, The Omega Man is my answer, and while I now spot a few flaws that escaped my notice before, it has a lot going for it.
Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) is convinced he is the only person left on earth. Years earlier, a simple border conflict between Russia and China escalated into all-out war, during which one side resorted to using chemical weapons. Alas, the deadly toxin released into the air quickly spread around the world, killing hundreds of millions while turning those lucky enough to survive into near-crazed albinos with an extreme sensitivity to light, making it impossible for them to venture out during the day.
A military scientist at the time of the catastrophe, Neville injected himself with an experimental vaccine designed to combat the toxin, and as a result is now immune.
By day, Neville scours the abandoned streets of Los Angeles, looking for the hiding spots of some night-dwellers known as “The Family”. A group led by Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), The Family has, in turn, been harassing Neville every evening for years, in part because he’s killed a few of their own, but mostly because Neville represents a past that they believe failed mankind.
Each night, Matthias and his followers try to lure Neville out of the small L.A. flat he has transformed into a stronghold (complete with a generator, assault rifles, and all the liquor he can drink), only to be turned away time and again by his advanced firepower.
Then, one day, Neville makes a startling discovery: he is not alone after all!
Lisa (Rosalind Cash) and her brother Richie (Eric Laneuville) are helping former medical student Dutch (Paul Koslo) watch over about a dozen or so children, who have yet to suffer the full effects of the toxin. Using his blood as an antibody, Neville believes he can prevent Lisa and the rest from eventually “turning”. But will Matthias and his brood catch up with Neville before he can finish the job?
Without a doubt, the strongest scenes in The Omega Man come at the beginning, when Neville is cruising in his convertible down desolate roads littered with trash and decaying bodies. He pauses a few times: once to shoot at a shadow in a window, which he assumes is one of Matthias’ followers, and again to watch a movie in a derelict cinema (ironically, the film he sits through is Woodstock, a documentary featuring about 500,000 people!).
In one of the film's more intense sequences, Neville crashes his car late in the day and is forced to get a new one ("borrowing" it from a used car dealership). Speeding to make it home before sundown, he is attacked right outside his garage by members of The Family, and after shooting them dead heads upstairs, where he passes the evening playing chess with a bust of Caesar as Matthias and the others taunt him from the streets below.
Heston is excellent in these early sequences, displaying his usual strength but also adding a touch of comedy with his running monologue; after switching on a closed-circuit monitor in his apartment, Neville looks at an image of himself and says “Hi, Big Brother. How’s your ass?”.
But we also see how the years of isolation have taken their toll, causing Neville to hallucinate. During one of his trips through the city, he thinks he can hear phones ringing all around him. Along with setting up the story, these opening moments clue us in on the lead’s state of mind, and Heston handles all aspects of his character wonderfully.
Equal in every way is Rosalind Cash, whose Lisa is a bad-ass through and through, not to mention the perfect girlfriend for a guy like Neville. For the early ‘70s, this love affair was groundbreaking, and the movie features what is supposedly the first interracial kiss in cinematic history.
Where The Omega Man falters is in its depiction of Matthias and The Family. In the other film versions of Matheson’s story, notably 1964’s The Last Man on Earth (with Vincent Price) and 2007’s I Am Legend (with Will Smith), the night dwellers are more enigmatic, which, in some scenes, makes them downright creepy. By dedicating screen time to The Family, during which Matthias preaches how the illness has cleansed his mind, allowing him to see the evils of the “regular” world, the movie takes the edge off of him and his group. The make-up effects are fine, and Zerbe is quite good as Matthias. But when the chips were down, I wasn’t nearly as afraid of him or his followers as I should have been.
Regardless, I will continue to rank The Omega Man as my favorite I Am Legend adaptation, partly for sentimental reasons, but also because of Heston and Cash, as well as the convincing manner in which director Boris Sagal depicts the end of the world (making L.A. look like an abandoned city couldn’t have been easy).
Warts and all, The Omega Man is a fun movie!
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