PHASE IV (1974)

Saul Bass’s Phase IV has no opening titles, and in fact, the text “Phase IV” doesn’t appear onscreen until the very end of the film—something that might not be particularly remarkable with most films but is surely significant here. Not only is it narratively meaningful (in the course of the story, we start to grasp an implication of the title that is more ominous and mind-boggling than we imagined at the beginning), but it’s also, surely, Bass trying to signal that Phase IV was a new departure for him.

Up to that point, the director—already in his fifties at the time of this, his feature debut—had been probably the most famous title designer ever (as well as an influential graphic designer outside of the film world), with credits including Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) as well as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960). He also edged closer to a directorial role by storyboarding some key sequences, for instance in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961), and again Psycho, where the extent of his contribution remains controversial.

Phase IV, though, is nothing like any of these. Though it has some affinities with the long cycle of horror movies about animals that reflected the ecological concerns of the mid-20th-century (first the potential effects of nuclear fallout, then the broader issue of man’s effects on the environment), at heart it’s a science fiction film whose strongest influence is Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Unconventional even by the standards of the period’s often trippy sci-fi cinema, with its uncompromisingly bleak implications and its strong emphasis on science over character and insects over people, it was not a commercial success—though it did receive some positive reviews—and largely slid from view until Bass’s original ending was rediscovered in 2012, in the archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Restoring about five minutes to the running time, this extended ending (which can be seen here) had previously only been shown to preview audiences. In all honesty, it doesn’t, I feel, add much to the movie beyond yet more psychedelia—the apparent evolution of humans into frogs at one point is especially mystifying, and the commercially released ending (which somewhat echoes the Star Child sequence of 2001 in feel) was already tantalisingly oblique enough.

Yet the restored ending did bring Phase IV the attention it deserved as one of the most genuinely innovative science fiction films of the era… and one that’s purely cinematic. Though it does bear some resemblance to literary sources such as H.G Wells’s short story Empire of the Ants (1905) and Carl Stephenson’s Leiningen Versus the Ants (1938, filmed as The Naked Jungle in 1954), Phase IV is a work where what we experience is guided by the camera far more than the words. (The novel of Phase IV, by the science-fiction writer Barry N. Malzberg, is based on Mayo Simon’s screenplay rather than vice versa.)

Phase IV begins with a screen full of stars, glowing bluish against the night sky, and the text “Phase I” in the kind of “computer” typeface that seemed so modern in 1974 and looks so antiquated now. We see what appear to be planets and the sun—again, a touch of 2001—and it’s clear that something unusual, an eclipse perhaps, is going on. “That spring, we were all watching the events of space,” a voiceover recalls, before continuing that “when the effect came, it was almost unnoticed because it happened to such a small and insignificant form of life”.

By the end of the movie, we’ll appreciate the word “insignificant” is deeply ironic, but for now it comes across as mundanely descriptive when the perfect circle of a heavenly body is replaced by a circular hole in the ground, and out crawls an ant. After an extended sequence of ant shots lasting some five minutes—a foretaste of Phase IV’s most remarkable and memorable achievement—the movie finally enters the human-scale world with a shot of a truck approaching the camera through a heat haze. The place is Arizona (although the exteriors were shot in Kenya) and the two men who emerge from the truck are an entomologist, Hubbs (Nigel Davenport), and a cryptologist, Lesko (Michael Murphy).

They have, the voiceover explains during the long opening section, come to the desert to trial a new method of exterminating ant populations, after concerns that ants were starting to do “things ants don’t do… meeting, communicating, apparently making decisions”. Their predators are disappearing, too.

Setting up shop in a high-tech geodesic dome (very 1970s), Hubbs and Lesko soon encounter disquieting further evidence of ant activity: a crop circle, for example, and pillars of earth resembling the 2001 monolith (and also recalling the Easter Island statues; later ones resemble the facets of the dome, too). Equally worrying is an assault on a local farming couple (Alan Gifford and Helen Horton) and their teenage granddaughter Kendra (Lynne Frederick), in which a horse is gruesomely slaughtered.

Eventually, Kendra ends up inside the dome with Hubbs and Lesko as Phase II begins, with Lesko using cryptological techniques to decipher the ants’ language and Hubbs spraying a poisonous yellow substance to kill them. The emphasis on the colour of this substance (and a later blue) may be an allusion to the herbicide Agent Orange notorious at the time for its use in the Vietnam War, though it wasn’t coloured orange.

But though the ants are, as Hubbs puts it, “so defenceless in the individual” they’re also “so powerful in the mass”, and by the time the film reaches Phase III we start to realise that despite the increased prominence given to the human story, these are not the phases of humanity’s response at all. They are the phases of the ants’ takeover of the world.

Perhaps appropriately, the human story (or at least the story of these particular humans, as opposed to the implied fate of humanity) is not especially interesting. Simon’s screenplay allows little space for the development of characters, with its strongly didactic approach more dedicated to getting across facts and ideas: through voiceover, through Hubbs dictating notes to himself or through Lesko explaining things to Kendra. These are well-explained, though—unlike in many sci-fi movies, the science (or purported science) is always quite clear here—and at least there is some development of interpersonal conflict between Hubbs and Lesko.

They rather resemble Richard Shaw’s Quint and Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), the former an insistent, emotionally driven individualist, the latter more of a rational, rule-following man. Lesko hopes for an “accommodation of interests” with the ants, a compromise, but Lesko wants the conflict to teach the ants their limits; the two men rarely see eye-to-eye and their relationship deteriorates as the movie progresses.

Given the lack of character depth, it’s no surprise that little of the acting stands out. Davenport and Murphy manage to make Hubbs and Lesko believable if not very nuanced, the latter somewhat hampered by the need to be puzzled and thoughtful so much of the time, and Horton as the farmer’s fatalistic wife adds a dark touch to her small part, although Frederick as Kendra tends to overact the helpless vulnerable female.

Rightly, it’s the visuals of Phase IV that are far more famous than the actors or even the story, and despite its frequent excursions into abstract psychedelia, what stands out—and makes this film almost unique—are the extensive sequences of live ant footage masterminded by the animal photographer Ken Middleham, who had also contributed to a 1971 Academy Award-winning documentary about the triumph of insects, The Hellstrom Chronicle. This material is often extraordinarily close-up—a single ant can occupy most of the frame—and takes plenty of time: although there is some use of speeded-up footage, for the most part, the pace is leisurely, allowing us to marvel at views of the insect world we could never have in real life.

Although the bloated queen with her eggs is said to be a type of wasp, used by Middleham in preference to an ant for practical reasons, we see ants killing a spider and (spectacularly) a mantis, ants emerging from a hole in a human body, ants performing unknown tasks which must—repeated millions of times—lead to such feats as the construction of the towers around the scientists’ dome. We see a dying ant in a scene which evokes unexpected pathos. In one astonishing scene, a series of ants carry a sample of poison through their nest, a new one taking over the job as soon as its predecessor dies; in many movies, this might be a metaphor for workers in human industry, but here it’s clearly showing how different the ants are from humans in their relentless, selfless dedication to collective objectives.

Other animals also feature briefly—a scorpion, a snake, a lizard, an owl—to remind us that the ants’ presumed bid for dominance is not aimed only at humanity. For the sections featuring human actors, meanwhile, Bass and cinematographer Dick Bush create a very different flavour with much brighter lighting. Although there are some rapid zooms, mostly they favour quite long-held shots with simple and often striking compositions. The organic shapes of the ant world are contrasted with the geometric punch cards and dials of the scientists’ equipment, and the two are combined when an ant invades a computer. The musical score by Brian Gascoigne also serves the ant-world especially well: twangy, shimmering electronic music complementing their luminescence, for example, or a mournful, foreboding passage on conventional instruments for a scene where the insects retrieve an ant corpse.

Bass wouldn’t direct another feature film after Phase IV (although he did make several well-received short features with his wife Elaine), and who knows what he might have come up with if he did. This is a movie so different from others of its time—and before and since—in its use of insect photography, yet also one which persuasively combines many elements of existing genres into something new.

On a superficial level, it belongs to a group of “creature features” such as Jeannot Szwarc’s Bug (1975), John Sayles’s Piranha (1978) and Irwin Allen’s The Swarm (1978), as well as Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in its use of animals which are threatening collectively rather than as individuals (as in Jaws). Like many such films, it also takes at least a slightly naturalistic approach to the animals themselves, unlike movies such as Them! (1954) or Damnation Alley (1977) which have resorted to giant insects (ants in the former, scorpions in the latter, in both cases as a result of nuclear holocaust).

However, it departs from the “revenge of nature” theme frequently found in these films—where man has brought about ecological imbalance and thus created a threat to himself. Whatever caused the ants of Phase IV to change is located beyond Earth, and although there is no overt suggestion of extraterrestrial origin or a conscious alien force, Bass’s film alludes to space repeatedly. The Arizona desert could be another planet; the protective gear that Hubbs and Lesko wear resembles spacesuits; even their food is powdered and dehydrated like astronauts’ (for no obvious reason—why couldn’t they have a refrigerator in the dome?).

The final voiceover monologue strongly resembles one from a movie about extraterrestrial contact; the huge hole into the ants’ nest towards the very end could be a portal into another world; Lesko’s attempt to understand ant communication recalls many alien films, not least Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). “If there’s an intelligence there, I want it to know there’s an intelligence here,” says Lesko.

Phase IV’s ending is ambiguous, even in the commercially released version. The final word, “told”, could be interpreted as meaning that humanity finally receives reassuring information from the ants, but it could also mean we receive orders. And though it still tends to be seen more as an oddity—the sole directorial outing of a great designer—than as a film in its own right, it deserves the acclaim it has been given in recent years since the rediscovery of the original ending and the renewal of attention to Phase IV.

Creature features are often not scary because they’re absurd; Phase IV may not be scary as such, but it’s not absurd, and it’s disturbing in a way that very little science fiction of 50 years ago still is. I, for one, welcome our (relatively) new insect overlords.

UK • USA | 1974 | 84 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Saul Bass.
writer: Mayo Simon.
starring: Nigel Davenport, Michael Murphy, Lynne Frederick, Alan Gifford, Helen Horton & Robert Henderson.