The Last Woman on Earth

The Last Woman on Earth is not one of my favorite films. It's not even my favorite Roger Corman film - how could it be, in a world in which The Intruder exists?

But! This 1960 much-maligned cheap-o horror film about three people alone in the world is, in a very real way, one of the most important movies in my life.

In 2010, I made a movie. It was about two men and one women who wake up one day to find New York City totally deserted. With no clues to understand their situation, a creeping paranoia overwhelmed them all, especially Roger, the odd man out of their trio.

I think it's a pretty good little movie. It's rough as hell and a bit too dark and close-hearted to be a crowd pleaser, but I'm proud of what I did.

I was inspired by a lot of things - the isolation I saw many of my friends slipping into, the deserted feeling you get in certain areas of the Bronx which were built for foot traffic that never came, and of course, about a billion movies from Target Earth! to 28 Days Later. There's a whole genre dealing in isolation anxiety and I think even the great ones get it wrong sometimes. They compromise, add extra characters for the climax, or linger on explanations nobody wants to hear.

One film stood above the rest - The Last Woman on Earth.

Scripted by Robert Towne, who a decade later would pen the uncompromising Chinatown, and shot on location in Puerto Rico alongside two other Roger Corman films (he had just learned about their tax incentives), it's the story of a pushy businessman, his wife, and their lawyer sharing a villa after "something"temporarily burns all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, killing everyone else on the planet. The film's explanation of what happened is ingenious, caustic, and dismissive: "an act of God or bigger and better bombs, what does it matter?"

That cynicism is at the film's core. There's a worn-out vibe to it all, tropical lounging and unresolved tension over the growing impossibility of their living situation. The end of the world narrows the world to a love triangle. I find that biting and beautiful.

I saw The Last Woman on Earth for the first time in early high school, and the contrast between the beauty of the world and the ugliness within us really struck me. Its visibly low budget and unabashed willingness to exist despite that, hit me the way punk hits teeangers. This film, as much as any, as much as Detour, sparked my interest in low budget DIY film.

The Towne script has a lot of meat on its bones, more than many realize, I think. It predicted a lot of the Cold War malaise that would define the sixties - the patriarch lashes out when his "system" breaks down and his money loses its allure - and there are some strong character beats. We even open at a cockfight, a fitting symbol for everything that comes next.


Anyway, I think it's a film very much worth the watch, and the reason I bring it up is because I just learned now that this movie that I've seen a half a dozen times over ten years was made in color. This is a bit of a surprise because Corman's other Puerto Rico films (Battle of Blood Island and Creature from the Haunted Sea) are both black and white. I guess he splurged on this one.

See all the public domain DVD manufacturers are struck from a black and white print because it was the highest quality image available. The colors on this surviving color print have faded and faded harshly. So for a decade or so I watched it in black and white, blissfully unaware that that wasn't the intention. Feels like a throwback to my parent's generation watching stuff like The Fly on their little black and white TVs.

I just got wind of the color version on YouTube, though, so for the first time in years I sat down to watch one of the Movies Of My Life, to use Truffaut's term. The movie itself was better than I remembered. It's heavy handed and the musical score is unambitious as is often the case with Corman, but it's really brisk and acerbic and, man I borrowed a whole lot from it huh?.

The color added a lot. I could distinguish the faces better. In color, the age difference between the men is much more apparent. In the black and white print the men are both just white blurs with black hair. It also feels warmer now, there's a real tropical langour that was present in the old print in word but not in image. The faded nature of the print helped in this regard, actually, because the colors faded unevenly and the green of the leaves pops.

I feel like I've rediscovered this film, like it had more in store for me than I ever knew. Movies are pretty great sometimes, aren't they? Just another chapter in the weird history of unrestored cinema. Movie fans often talk about how much we'd love to "watch something again for the first time." I just did!

If you're interested, y'all can watch the b/w version here:

and the color version here:

The Sunglasses and the Alien

Not Of This Earth (1957)
dir. Roger Corman

They Live (1988)
dir. John Carpenter

a hell of a catch from Hundu

Some Actors You May Not Have Noticed in The Godfather

Boy, the cast of the Godfather series is overwhelming, isn't it? From Brando to De Niro, and all the little points along the way like Sterling Hayden and Bruno Kirby (pictured above about to ice a cop), it's almost certainly the greatest cast of actors ever assembled.

Everybody remembers Talia Shire and James Caan and all, but it's easy to forget about the terrific one scene, two scene performances that enliven the films. The spices on its Al Pacino pasta.

So here's a list.

Some Actors You May Not Have Noticed in The Godfather Trilogy:

The Godfather

Al Martino

I'm sure y'all remember Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra-esque lounge singer who incited the horse-head incident. He was played by real-life Italian crooner Al Martino, who made it into the record books with his 1952 song Here In My Heart, which was the number 1 hit on the first ever UK Singles Chart. "Here In My Heart" topped the charts for 9 weeks, a record that's only been beaten 5 times, and Martino's works stayed on the UK charts for the entire year of 1952, a feat which has never been repeated.

Randy Jurgensen & Sonny Grosso

These are the dicks that killed Sonny, my favorite Corleone. On the far left there, rocking a serious mustache that can hardly even be tamed by Gordon Willis's face-obscuring lighting, is Randy Jurgensen, who acted as one of the film's technical advisors. William Friedkin turned Coppola on to the man, who legend has it flicked on his siren so they could shoot that car chase in The French Connection on active streets. Jurgensen broke The Bag Murders, a real-life string of grisly homicides that was adapted by Friedkin into Cruising.

The other technical advisor was this guy: Sonny Grosso, pictured here trying to get Sterling Hayden's Captain McCluskey to leave Michael alone - the voice of reason against the punch that would send McCluskey to his grave and Michael to the head of the Mafia. Grosso not only worked with Jurgensen on The French Connection, he was one of the two cops who actually cracked the real French connection - the inspiration for Roy Scheider's character in the film.

Lenny Montana

Everyone knows that the scene of Luca Brasi rehearsing his speech to the Don was added because of the actor's real-life nervousness about acting with Brando, but did you know that Lenny Montana, the man who played Brasi, was an actual mob enforcer before going straight? He was a convicted arsonist!

The Coppola Family

This here baby, the one baptized during Michael's climactic murder spree, is played by Sophia Coppola, which makes her one of very few people to play two different characters in the series.

The Godfather: Part II

Coppola was pretty slick about including his family and here his son Roman Coppola plays a young Sonny Corleone. This little goofball went on to write Moonrise Kingdom.

And here, somewhat morbidly, is Italia Coppola, Francis Ford's mother, playing the deceased matriarch of the Corleone empire. She's also on Coppola's Mammarella tomato sauce jars:

Danny Aiello

This guy pulling a garrotte on Pentangeli is Danny Aiello, a wonderful actor best known as Sal in Do the Right Thing. This was only his third acting gig, and his ad-libbed "Michael Corleone says hello" was a hell of a premonition of the great career ahead.

Gary Kurtz

The pivotal Senate hearing is a cavalcade of interesting cameos. That guy down at the bottom right with the beard and the camera held out is Gary Kurtz, the producer of Star Wars who contributed much of the mystical elements, crafted the darker tone of The Empire Strikes Back, and who famously left the series over objections to the toy commercial tone of Return of the Jedi.

Somewhere in this crowd are producers William Bowers and Phil Feldman, who have between them two of the best westerns ever made: The Gunfighter and The Wild Bunch. Feldman was also Coppola's agent for a time. Unfortunately, I don't know what they look like so I can't ID them.

Roger Corman

But I do know what legendary producer Roger Corman looks like! He's the fellow in the center whose clean-cut looks belie the gritty films he spearheaded. Corman produced Coppola's directoral debut, 1963's Dementia 13. If you're ever strapped for something to do, read up on all the filmmakers Corman got off the ground - Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, John Sayles, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro, Robert Towne, among others. He may have done more for American film than any other single human being.

There's a rumor that the guy on the left is writer Richard Matheson, but alas, that's just a rumor.

Joe Spinell

On the other end of the Senate's table, at right, is Joe Spinell. He's a minor icon to horror fans for his lead role in the ultra-violent Maniac, a project he also wrote. Fun fact about Maniac: Michael Sembello's theme for Flashdance was originally written for the film. It wasn't used, so he changed the words up to be about a "steel-town girl on a Saturday night" and made history.

Spinell, who died in 1989, was good friends with Sylvester Stallone and appears in the first two Rocky movies as Tony Gazzo, that surprisingly nice mobster Rock worked for. In reality, Spinell took care of Stallone while the man went broke trying to get Rocky made, and it's likely the film wouldn't have happened the way it did without Spinell.

Lee Strasberg

Kingpin Hyman Roth looms over everything in Godfather 2, just as Lee Strasberg loomed over all of the actors of its generation. Strasberg was head of the Actor's Studio in New York, which has since been converted to the James Lipton Institute for Weird Pointless Interviews. He worked with Elia Kazan, Tennessee Williams, and Sidney Lumet in creating a new concept of "acting from the inside out," a technique Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Julie Harris, and Paul Newman considered gospel. That's young Vito and Michael Corleone under his wing, but not The Godfather Don Vito himself - Marlon Brando hated Strasberg.

Harry Dean Stanton

Hey look at that! Squeezed between his Monte Hellman films Two-Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter, four years before his unforgettable death in Alien, famed character actor Harry Dead Stanton pops up in Godfather 2 as one of the FBI men assigned to protect state's witness Frank Pentangeli.

The Godfather: Part III

Gregory Corso

I'm sorry to bring Godfather 3 into this. The Michael Corleone story is better concluded in The Devil's Advocate. Godfather 3 is a bad film, but there are some absolutely bananas cameos, like Beat poet Gregory Corso here protesting the Corleone family. Corso was the youngest of the Beat poets, 8 years Kerouc's junior, and 16 years Burroughs's. The kid had it where it counted, crafting perfect lines like "know that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born," from his 1958 "Bomb," a poem cherished by a young Bob Dylan.

Mickey Knox

On the left here playing New Orleans crime boss Matty Parisi, we have the famous blacklisted writer/actor Mickey Knox. Knox had a storied life - among other highlights: he was in Norman Mailer's inner circle during the era he would turn into The Deer Park, he fled to Italy because of the blacklist where he witnessed the suicide of Al Mulock on the set of Once Upon a Time in the West. That's the famous story about Sergio Leone rushing towards the body yelling "save the costume!" Woody Harrelson's character in Natural Born Killers was named in his honor.

Catherine Scorsese

Remember Pesci's mom in Goodfellas? "Why don't you get yourself a nice girl and settle down?" I'm sure you know that was Martin Scorsese's real-life mother. She's a hell of a charming presence, and it's wonderful to see her here in Godfather 3 yelling at Andy Garcia. This was the same year as her son's much superior Goodfellas, so can you blame her?

Ron Jeremy

It's a weird leap from Al Martino to here, but the very first shot in the third film's San Gennaro sequence (a pale imitation of that masterpiece San Gennaro scene in 2), porn star Ron Jeremy makes his Mafia debut. He's the guy looking towards the camera in this shot. Big sunglasses, chewing on a toothpick. Isn't that something?


There's a ton more - it's like every scene is overstuffed with interesting actors, so feel free to add some in the comments.

The Wizards

The Raven (1963)

dir. Roger Corman

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
dir. John Carpenter

The Klan

Compulsion (1959)
dir. Richard Fleischer

The Intruder (1962)
dir. Roger Corman

The Skull

 Westinghouse Studio One (unknown episode) (1948-1958)

The 3rd Voice (1960)
dir. Hubert Cornfield

X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963)
dir. Roger Corman

The Lynch Mob

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
dir. John Ford

The Intruder (1962)
dir. Roger Corman

The Sickbed

O. Henry's Full House "The Last Leaf" (1952)
dir. Jean Negulesco

The Intruder (1962)
dir. Roger Corman