Chinatown is what the writer Robert Towne will be remembered for, rather than Last Woman on Earth, a cheap and short B movie cranked out by one-man movie-making machine Roger Corman in 1960. But it’s worth a look, not just because it was Towne’s first screenplay but also because he acts in it, under the alias Edward Wain. The screenplay is credited to Towne, though, which says a lot about where his priorities lie.
Corman and Towne open the action at a cock fight in Puerto Rico, where rich but dodgy businessman Harold Gern and bored trophy wife Evelyn meet Harold’s accountant, Martin Joyce (Towne). While the men chat, Corman’s camera lingers on the cocks as one is killed by the other, which keeps on pecking even though its opponent is motionless and obviously dead.
It’s both a metaphor and a herald of what’s to come. The next day the three – mixing business with pleasure – go scuba diving. When they surface everyone on Earth is dead. A temporary disappearance of the planet’s oxygen has seen to that. Now, Towne’s screenplay wonders, how’s that going to alter power dynamics? (The oxygen does return, and pretty quickly, a turn of events Towne can barely be bothered explaining – something to do with plants).
And that’s what the rest of the film is about – cocky Harold and dweeby Martin, the boss and the employee, the rich man and the wage slave, the husband and the bachelor, walking around each other in increasingly stiff-legged poses with Evelyn as the meat in this testosterone sandwich. Given that Martin is the younger man, and the nicer man, and Howard has been taking his wife for granted for, ooooh, quite a while, allegiances may switch. It is all to play for.
A film about a woman who exists only in relation to the men around her isn’t going to pass the Bechdel test, obviously, but Betsey Jones-Moreland puts on a good show as the flighty, drinky, flirty end-of-days Eve(lyn) and Antony Carbone is effective as the big fella whose assumptions about what’s rightfully his are about to be challenged. Towne/Wain, meanwhile, seems at first a touch light when it comes to acting talent but his performance gets better as Martin grows in confidence, and watching Martin – who is much smarter than Harold – immediately starting to assert himself against his “boss”, in micro-gestures only at first, is one of the film’s fascinations and makes Towne all the more watchable.
Towne’s screenplay works in another angle. Harold, the sort of self-made man who gets things done, versus the much more laidback, beatnik-y Martin, discipline versus laxity. This adds a nuance to the relationship. There is something in the brusque and bullish Harold to be admired. It’s tempting, and probably stupid, to see this as a mirror of the Corman and Towne relationship – the famously productive producer/director who always squeezed at least two movies out of every location (this was shot back to back with Creature from the Haunted Sea, which had the same cast) and a writer famous for being incapable of getting stuff finished. No? It’s there for the taking, if you fancy it.
It is a short, (71mins, though there are shorter versions out there) efficiently made film with enough substance to keep it going but it is probably good that it stops where it does, with a final showdown between the two men. Unless you get the restored edition (linked to below) it is likely that the film you watch will be in poor condition, with terrible colour casts caused by fading over the years.
For Corman this is almost arthouse. The sensationalist set-up apart, the film stays away from genre conventions. As for Towne, he has introduced a subject – woman caught between competing notions of masculinity – that would re-emerge most famously in Chinatown, where Jack Nicholson, John Huston and Faye Dunaway filled the roles.
Last Woman on Earth – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
