PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962)

Difficult as it might be to believe today, there was a time when our screens weren’t full of post-apocalyptic stories. From big-name TV shows and movies like The Walking Dead (2010-2022) or I Am Legend (2007), to smaller and often better ones like The End We Start From (2023) or Leave the World Behind (2023), to verging-on-arthouse fare like Time of the Wolf (2003), the iconography of collapse—looted supermarkets, abandoned cars, overgrown buildings—has become almost wearisomely familiar. But the genre only really became widespread in the 1970s, and perhaps only escalated to the level of mass obsession in the current century.

Still, the actual end of the world came as close as it ever has to reality in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so it’s appropriate that one of the first films that can be described as fully-fledged post-apocalyptic, Ray Milland’s Panic in Year Zero!, dates from earlier that year. Its rather strange title, surely selected as an audience-teasing ploy by the marketing-oriented studio American International Pictures (AIP), may make it sound more like a caveman movie than one about nuclear war, but its working title (Survive) and its 1965 re-release title (The End of the World) together encapsulate the premise that has since become so commonplace: the world you knew is gone, so what do you do next?

Of course, there had been end-of-the-world films before, but such few as there were tended to be oriented toward threats from space, particularly alien invasion—though natural phenomena were sometimes to blame too, as in one of the best of the early apocalyptic films, The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961). But a small sub-genre of films about nuclear disaster slowly developed (and to be fair, the aliens who invaded us in some films also appeared in others to warn us against using nuclear weapons), notable among them On the Beach (1959) and The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959).

Five (1951) and Day the World Ended (1955) both deal with post-nuclear survival; This Is Not a Test (1962) looks at the run-up to apocalypse, something which Invasion, U.S.A. (1952) and The Lost Missile (1958) also address in different ways. Others used nuclear weapons as a pretext for stories that aren’t really about the risks of the mid-20th century at all: Captive Women (1952), World Without End (1956) and Teenage Caveman (1957) are all set in worlds long, long after a nuclear holocaust, while in The Atomic Kid (1954) hilarious consequences ensue when Mickey Rooney is caught in a bomb test. More serious films about the nuclear threat would soon follow, from Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe (1964) and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983) and beyond, though few of them were about survival as such: the TV films The Day After (1983) and, from the UK, Threads (1984) are notable exceptions.

Panic in Year Zero!, then, came pretty much at the year zero of the nuclear survival movie. And though it is not a good film by the standards of today or the standards of 1962, it’s an interesting one on several counts—as such an early example of the sub-genre, as a reflection of the worries that were so real at the time, and as one of the few films directed by Ray Milland, who of course is far better known as an actor today.

Milland had reached the peak of his acting career in the 1940s and had even retired for a brief period after that, before directing five films (as well as much TV) between 1955-1968. They spanned a variety of genres—besides Panic in Year Zero! there were crime, courtroom and western stories—but they all tended to be grim affairs, often featuring the director himself in a loner role, and Panic in Year Zero! is no exception. Indeed, the central character of Harry Baldwin (Milland) is so irritable, aggressive and unlikeable that it’s difficult to avoid the impression that his more reasonable moments were forced into the screenplay in an effort (largely futile) to make him a bit more palatable to audiences.

The film begins with a close-up on a radio—foreshadowing the great importance of the radio in supporting plot mechanics later on—before cutting to a scene early one morning at the Baldwins’ home in suburban Los Angeles. This is actually a backlot set, although a few locations around L.A. were also used for later scenes; AIP, a studio now mostly associated with Roger Corman, was very tight on budgets and Panic in Year Zero! was shot in a fortnight, so production had to be as cheap and efficient as possible.

The family—Harry, his wife Ann (Jean Hagen) and their children Rick (Frankie Avalon) and the slightly younger Karen (Mary Mitchel)—are about to head off on a fishing trip, which like nearly everything else in their lives appears to be largely something they’re doing because dad wants to do it. Still, it’s clear that Harry and Ann are a happy couple, and tolerant of their kids’ complaints.

Off they head, caravan in tow. But they’re not far out of the city when the car and its occupants are illuminated by what seems to be a giant flash—a doubtless low-cost effect that looks like over-exposed film, but is nevertheless striking. “It came from behind us”, in other words from the city, says Ann; and now the radio gives off only static. At last the family turn round and see a giant mushroom cloud (again, probably just a painting, but again very effective) rising where Los Angeles ought to be.

The script suffers from a brief spell of incoherence here when Harry suggests heading back to the city—-it’s difficult to imagine why, especially when he will soon be arguing against Ann’s pleas that they return to rescue her mother. But it soon gets back on track when, at a gas station, they meet another man from L.A. who describes the destruction there. He has no money to pay for his fuel and punches the attendant instead, the first sign of the lawlessness which is so familiar to us jaded post-apocalyptic viewers, but which might have carried more of a frisson in 1962.

With Harry now in the full-on bossy, lecturing mode where he will remain for most of the film, they head next to a diner, where prices have doubled and supplies are already running low. “Two and two doesn’t make four any more,” concludes Harry—the old certainties can no longer be relied on—and he decides the family should hide out, avoiding others, until the crisis is over. “When civilisation gets civilised again, I’ll rejoin,” he says, and it’s noticeable that despite Panic in Year Zero!‘s portrayal of rather rapid societal collapse, the film also never suggests that the collapse might be permanent.

The family visit a grocery store and a hardware store; at the latter there is a dispute over paperwork, and Harry eventually takes away their goods at gunpoint, but insists on paying for them all the same. Stocked up on supplies, they set up camp in a cave—a reference perhaps to the “bombed to the Stone Age” concept, or even a cheeky one to those post-apocalyptic cheap-thrill films of the period that posited a return to prehistoric conditions. Either way, though, Harry remains adamant that “the law will come back”, while simultaneously pouring cold water on Ann’s belief that there might be a society to fall back on right now.

Panic in Year Zero!‘s writers Jay Simms and John Morton (who partially based the film, without crediting him, on two mid-1950s, Biblically-inspired stories by the sci-fi author Ward Moore) again want to have their cake and eat it too here. They want society to disintegrate for their purposes of their tale, but they don’t want to suggest it might do so permanently. Indeed, when an emergency radio broadcast names the many cities destroyed in the attack by “European and Asian” (presumably Russian and Chinese) enemies, Washington D.C. is glaringly and unbelievably absent from the list.

It’s around this point, too, that Harry himself slugs another gas station attendant, just as the stranger had near the beginning of the movie. Later, in one of the film’s rather unconvincing attempts to make him a decent man after all, he will confess—in relation to this and other incidents—to his sadness that “I looked for the worst in others and I found it in myself”, and a half-hearted effort is made to give him some spiritual dimension by showing him saying grace at a family dinner, but for the most part he seems bleakly satisfied with the new, harsher order of things.

He kills two unarmed young men in cold blood (though they are, admittedly, rapists—and without actually showing it, Panic in Year Zero! milks their crime for maximum shock value). He is aggressive towards the young woman Marilyn (Joan Freeman) who’s been kept captive by these men, even though she is every bit as much a victim as his own family; it is his son Rick who has to intervene and point out her situation.

Tellingly, when some of the family want to leave their cave and go to a refugee camp, he overrules them with the words “I have some measure of control here”, while away from the cave he has none. Is it really just survival, or control too, that motivates him? One very much gets the feeling that the writers and Milland are much more committed to the violent, dictatorial Harry than to the milder, more reasonable one, and it can lead to confusion in the writing: why, for example, does he shield Rick’s eyes from a dead body even though he has previously encouraged the boy to shoot to kill?

The “year zero” of the title is, it turns out in a rather unlikely revelation, a designation that the United Nations has given to the year of the nuclear war, the implication being that it’s not the end of everything but the beginning of rebuilding a better world. Indeed, the movie ends by asserting that “there must be no end—only a new beginning”, even if one gets the impression that Harry (and perhaps some of the film-makers) would not be averse to nuclear war culling a few of society’s undesirables along the way. In this respect it is more confident than many post-apocalyptic movies, and in its title it is more confident even than one of the very first films about nuclear weapons, The Beginning or the End (1947); to what degree this is intentional it is difficult to say, but Panic in Year Zero! definitely pushes the view that nuclear war is survivable, and therefore winnable. There is, in fact, very little mention of casualties.

Milland dominates the cast, in a grumpily assured performance that just occasionally seems almost too dour to be believed—it’s difficult to credit that the post-bomb Harry is the same man as we saw at the beginning. Avalon gives a much better performance than you might expect from one of the many young musicians of the period put on the screen in an effort to attract a youth audience (with numerous charting singles in the late 1950s, he was now trying to concentrate on acting). Hagen is believable as Harry’s wife and the kids’ mother, although the role is essentially passive; Mitchel’s role as the daughter is even more thinly written, however, her main functions being to whine (“this whole thing is a bore”) and to be threatened.

These are the most important parts by far (with Milland, Hagen and Avalon being the only performers billed on the trailer), although among the supporting cast Richard Harland (as the hardware store owner) and Freeman (as Marilyn) acquit themselves well. The young men who hold her prisoner (Richard Bakalyan, Rex Holman and Neil Nephew) and also threaten Harry’s family are little more than ciphers of dangerous, disrespectful youth; their dialogue is of the “hey man, dig” variety.

Les Baxter’s music score has come in for much criticism, and rightly so. Though there is the odd nice touch—a hint of unease in the early rural-idyll music before the bombs drop, for example—there is some crude Mickey Mousing too, and more importantly his jazz score (combining big band and more modern idioms) is simply too assertive. Doubtless it was also part of AIP’s attempt to make a film that would appeal across the generations: younger audiences would appreciate Avalon and modern jazz, older audiences would recognise Milland from his heyday.

The American Film Institute catalogues Panic in Year Zero! under “Looting, Rape, Survival skills, Murder, Caves, Los Angeles (CA), Criminals, Nuclear warfare” and on one level that pretty much sums it up. But though nobody could claim it to be an especially insightful film, let alone a subtle one, it has its moments—a set-piece where a fire is lit across a highway to stop incoming traffic is well-handled, for example—and a few touches of imagination: Harry’s insistence that he and Rick must shave every day, even in the cave, shows an unexpected recognition that routine and mental health would be just as important as gunning down marauders in their situation. Scenes like a rubbish-strewn street and a citizens’ roadblock on the outskirts of a town, meanwhile, precisely anticipate the tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre as we know it now.

None of it is particularly believable, of course—on the one hand most of the evidence from real disasters suggests that people in fact tend to cooperate rather than tear each other’s throats out (at least in the short term), on the other hand an actual nuclear attack in the 1960s would not have been as easily recovered from as that in Panic in Year Zero!, where the destruction of major cities seems little more than a temporary inconvenience.

Even so, for a film of its time it is relatively clear-sighted about the practical realities of “the day after”. And if the bombs do fall or the dead rise, I’d marginally prefer to be stuck with Harry Baldwin than Rick Grimes.

USA | 1962 | 93 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Limited Edition Blu-ray Special Features:

• HD presentation mastered from the 35mm positive. The quality of the widescreen b&w is not the reason to buy this disc, but it’s clear and sharp enough not to be distracting. 
• Uncompressed mono PCM audio.
• Optional English subtitles.
• Audio commentary by Richard Harland Smith. Panic in Year Zero! has been available on disc for a while, and this commentary by the film writer and historian Richard Harland Smith (made for Turner Classic Movies) dates from 2016. However, it’s the best thing about Radiance’s reissue—chatty and packed with trivia (right down to the make of the Baldwins’ caravan) but also perceptive about the historical context of the film and its relationship to post-apocalyptic literature (there was a novelisation, and Smith makes an interesting comparison to John D. MacDonald’s Cape Fear). As in so many Blu-ray commentaries, there is perhaps an over-reliance on filmographies, but there’s plenty of wide-ranging discussion to compensate, including the surprise of Smith’s own perspective as a prepper.
• NEW Interview with Kim Newman. A new, 21-minute talk by the omnipresent Kim Newman with a lot on Ray Milland and relatively little on this particular film, though Newman clearly admires it.
• Ray Milland archival interview. A 31-minute 1970s interview with the University of London—one of a series with different interviewees—that’s mostly about the filmmaking process in general, although there’s a brief discussion of Panic in Year Zero! where Milland names it as his favourite among the movies he directed.
• Atomic Shock!. The Gremlins director Joe Dante provides a decent general introduction to Panic in Year Zero! and some personal recollections in this 9-minute short.
• Original theatrical trailer.
• Reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters.
• Limited-edition booklet featuring new writing by film critic Christina Newland.
• Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip.

Cast & Crew

director: Ray Milland.
writers: Jay Simms & John Morton (story by Jay Simms)
starring: Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchel, Joan Freeman, Richard Bakalyan, Rex Holman, Richard Garland, Willis Bouchey, Neil Nephew, O.Z Whitehead & Russ Bender.