Panic in Year Zero

B-movies have always been a reliable fixture of the Hollywood celluloid mills, flicks made on the cheap to cash in on a current craze or cater to formulaic audience expectations. Welsh-born actor Ray Milland made some doozies. But his career didn’t begin on such a back lot trajectory. Groomed as a romantic leading man through a steady series of comedies in the 30s and early 40s, he hit the big time with a Best Actor Oscar win for his portrayal of a dipsomaniac writer who swims to the bottom of the bottle in The Lost Weekend. I don’t know much about Milland’s biography, but a not-so-fictional case of that affliction may have had some part in the string of bad choices that dogged his career in the ensuing decades. Amidst indefensible dreck like Frogs and Quick, Let’s Get Married Milland made a film that still stands out today as a unique entry in the hard to corral corpus of B-cinema.

Financed by the notoriously penny-pinching American International Pictures, with Milland occupying the director’s chair and pole position on the marquee, Panic in Year Zero is a flawed, but undeniably entertaining artifact of its era. It’s one of the few post-nuke films to openly explore the aftermath of such an event in at least semi-realistic terms. On the Beach still wins the prize for fatalism, but Panic contains a fair share of creepy and even harrowing moments along with a few unintentionally hilarious ones. The rice-paper thin funds preclude any direct indications of the cataclysm other than a few overturned cars and debris-strewn residential streets, and the ‘mushroom’ cloud that engulfs the Los Angeles region looks more like a glowing bonnet of cotton candy than a death-dealing radioactive miasma. There’s also an inordinate amount of footage of cars racing recklessly down highways, presumably meant as emblematic of the hysteria gripping the American populace after the attack. And the film’s chief antagonists end up being a trio of dope-smoking beatnik delinquents instead of dreaded Kalashnikov-toting Communists.

Milland directs with a lean style and a notable attention to atmosphere. The characters are mostly cardboard cutouts and the plot doesn’t carry much weight either, but given the catastrophic circumstances at the root it doesn’t really need to. It’s the simple set-up of a family-of-four vacation gone to hell when the Russian missiles hit. Milland plays Harry Baldwin, an average Joe who takes the onset World War III in stride and responds as if he’s spun a copy of If the Bomb Falls LP to the point of the stylus cracking, quoting survival tips regularly like scripture. The truly atypical thing is that he’s far from a sympathetic character, a guy who responds to stress by becoming an irascible jerk much of the time. Also in the core cast: Jean Hagen as Baldwin’s perpetually distraught wife (panicky yin to his cool-headed yang); cherub-faced Frankie Avalon(!) as son Rick; and Mary Mitchel as largely disposable daughter Karen. The four head for the hills in their trailer-towing sedan, encountering example after example of unraveling social order along the way, but curiously always have enough pomade and hairspray on hand for perfectly-styled coiffures.

The film’s budget and its adherence to Conelrad-era dogma, not to mention the suspicious absence of any real nuclear-related danger (fallout and radiation-poisoning are mentioned, but neither ever appears a true threat), further undermine its realism. Also weird is the score by Les Baxter, which blends lasciviously bombastic ‘crime’ jazz with moody orchestral interludes dominated by flutes and strings. The use of the former music during a scene describing an assault on Baldwin’s daughter amplifies the melodrama to the point of inadvertent parody. But what is unexpected and consequently unnerving is how ruthlessly Baldwin carries out the tenets of his armchair survivalist training, resorting to petty crime and even murder in the quest to ensure his family’s safety. One of his most quotable lines: “when civilization gets civilized again, I’ll rejoin.” In that sense the film feels very much like a slice of Social Darwinist propaganda, suggesting that under extraordinary circumstances ends inherently justify means. The moral quandary isn’t explored all that profoundly in the 90+ minutes, but given the film’s pedigree it’s peculiar to see it addressed at all.

When I was twelve, The Day After frightened the pants off me, feeding a fear that had been gestating for years. Panic is that film’s benign, black & white 60s cousin, but it still makes me wonder what sort of reception greeted the release. Were the kids catching it at the drive-in chilled and sobered by the possibilities it portrays? Or did they laugh it off like the sensationalistic entertainment it was primarily intended as? Either way it’s an appealing antique aperture to an era when the average American believed that an atomic war was not only a survivable, but a winnable, proposition.