To race and sex add another problem the last man on Earth thought he left behind — class conflict. The first adaptation of Matheson’s I Am Legend, the low-budget Italian production The Last Man on Earth, wasn’t a great movie but might be the most faithful version of the book. It starts with the usual haunting montage of deserted streets (Antonioni’s Rome filling in for LA), this time littered with the corpses of living-dead plague victims impaled with wooden stakes by a lugubrious Morgan, the only human untainted by the disease. In this version, he’s a research scientist who spends the daylight hours exterminating the brutes and dumping the bodies into a perpetually smoldering crematoria pit. At night he drinks while listening to the feeble poundings of the vampires, brooding over flashbacks to the epidemic (no cause is specified, though in the novel Matheson mentions germ warfare) and the deaths of his daughter and wife.
Boo hoo. Morgan doesn’t know when he has it good. He is the elect, lording over the benighted hoi polloi who strive to overturn the social hierarchy. He should take a tip from the title architect of doom and survival in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, released the same year. The end of the world is an opportunity to start over. The surviving elite entrenches itself in mineshafts, preserving the patriarchal system of power until it can emerge when the radiation clears. Then it can establish the old tyrannies again — and this time get it right. The last man’s first duty is to enjoy the omnipotence of the elect, to party like there’s no tomorrow, and to become God, just like folks today behind their computer and video-game screens.
What becomes a legend most?
No such problem for Colonel Robert Neville, played by Charlton Heston, in the second adaptation of Matheson’s story, The Omega Man. Tooling through downtown LA in a red convertible, Percy Faith’s “A Summer Place” playing on the 8-track, he stops abruptly to rake a passing plague victim with a machine gun. Back at his fortified penthouse, appointed with artworks and finery and racks of weapons (perhaps a replica of Heston’s own residence), he pours himself a Scotch, admires his image in a close-circuit TV (“I’m a narcissist!”), and proceeds to play chess with a bust of Julius Caesar.
Before he even dons a uniform, before a convenient flashback reveals him to have been an army researcher working on a cure for the self-inflicted disease that has backfired and wiped out the world, it’s clear Neville is as much part of the problem as he is the solution. He epitomizes the military-industrial complex that has ruined the world and now profits by it. Countering him are the mutated plague victims, black-robed Luddite hippies (the only surviving movie theater plays Woodstock) called “the Family.” (Charles Manson had just been convicted for his own family’s murder spree around the time the film was released.) The Family is led by the fanatic Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who describes his opponent as “One creature . . . nothing to live with but his gadgets, his cars, his guns, gimmicks . . . and yet the whole family can’t bring him down from that, that . . .”
To which an African-American follower suggests, “Honky paradise, brother?”
