SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Walter Sloane Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

edantheman An anonymous woman traipses from place to place, searching for any sign of civilization in the aftermath of nuclear devastation. Upon reaching a hillside house she finds another survivor, Michael Rogin. After some initial shock, she introduces herself as Roseanne Rogers and explains that the hillside house was her aunt's. He was trapped in an elevator on the Empire State Building, while she was being X-rayed in a lead-lined room. They soon become friends, though Roseanne resists Michael's attempts at intimacy, revealing that she is pregnant. Soon enough, the smoke from the fire Michael lights beckons fellow travellers Charles and Mr Oliver P Barnstaple, who were fortunate enough to be locked in a bank vault when the bomb detonated. The picture moves along languidly as our 'five' of sorts live off the land.Skeletons slouching against the door jambs of cars; ghost-town church bulletins urging Sin_ers to R_pent and evocative shots of lonely landscapes: yes, they were all here first in inglorious monochrome way back in 1951. Although later entries in the genre would offer fighter jets, radioactive mutants and Red-baiting gun-toting American heroes, Arch Oboler's seminal black-and-white feature has an eerie atmosphere and a far more believable form of threat.When the delusional Barnstaple (who believed he was on holiday) passes away peacefully on the beach, the balance is immediately restored by Eric, who washes ashore after his plane crashed at sea on the flight back from a climbing expedition on Mt Everest. He soon reveals his disdain for their communal lifestyle and discomfort in living with Charles, an African-American. After he drives their jeep through the crop they had cultivated, Michael orders Eric to leave but he pulls a pistol on him, telling him he'll leave when he's ready to. Meanwhile, Roseanne gives birth to her baby, a boy. One night, Eric kills Charles when he stops him for stealing supplies. He offers to drive Roseanne into the city where she can discover her husband's fate and, unable to resist, she accompanies him. After finding what remains of her husband, she returns to the jeep to find that Eric has used the day out to loot jewellery. She tries to return to the group but he refuses to let her go. A struggle ensues, whereupon his shirt is torn open, revealing radiation sores all over him. He runs away despondently.Roseanne's baby dies in her arms on the long walk back but Michael finds her, and they return home to replant their crops and begin life anew. Collectivism as expressed in the Bible is celebrated here as the aboriginal and final stage of human development. As Charles soliloquizes, "And God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said "I'm lonely --I'll make me a world." James Weldon Johnson's The Creation assumes an altogether different subtext in a nuclear holocaust. Has the Judeo-Christian God punished them or abandoned them due to boredom? It is a tragic ending, for if Michael and Roseanne are the Adam and Eve of the end times, then any children they may conceive will be the last (with two eyes/ears etc).It's surprising that Arch Oboler avoided the Hollywood blacklist given that his movie is so discernibly Red. Charles Lampkin portrays the first intelligent African-American character in Hollywood history, and not in an unconscious way. They all subsist happily in their commune until the gun-pointing racist with the German accent arrives, representing the fascist enemy he sought to destroy entirely in his wartime propaganda films. For him, 1951 wasn't too late to drop Henry Luce's vision of the 20th century for Henry Wallace's. It's no wonder he had to finance the film out of pocket considering the tone, and a shame it received such a limited distribution. Arch Oboler would go on to break new ground with the first 3D colour feature 'Bwana Devil' and 'The Bubble', the first to use the more economical Space-Vision 3D system. But never again would he reach the zenith of 'Five'.

bob-790-196018 In authoritative books about science fiction in the movies, Five is generally dismissed as crude and simplistic. There is justification for this, but somehow I found the picture interesting anyway. The fact that it was shot on a shoestring may even have helped. Being forced to use only five actors and a single ready-made set--his own Frank Llloyd Wright house in the California hills--director Arch Oboler created an intimate self-contained world.This narrow focus increases the intensity of the drama, which, as an end-of-the-world story, has its own inherent interest.The plot doesn't bear much looking into. The way these five people--out of the entire world population--came to be together amounts to wild coincidence. There is a certain amount of sermonizing of the why-can't-we-all-get-along variety. And so on--it's hardly a great movie.But it's interesting nonetheless and worth looking into.

Chien_Noir Set against the backdrop of the director's own starkly beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright home, five survivors of a new type of nuclear bomb try to put their lives back together.Those looking for blast effects will be disappointed. Like _Testament_ and _The World, the Flesh, and the Devil_, this film is a character study. It skips the firestorm and focuses on the psychological aftermath.The five survivors include Roseanne, a pregnant widow; Michael, a reclusive poet; Eric, a European adventurer; and Charles and Mr. Barnstaple, two coworkers from a bank. Each has escaped the deadly radiation by coincidence, and all come together by chance as the story unfolds.Conflicts erupt as the survivors attempt to reconstruct some sense of normality. Roseanne remains stuck in the past, unable to grasp the uncertainty of her husband's fate. Michael is burdened by the guilt he feels at finally getting to enjoy a solitary existence. Charles, probably the most level-headed of all the characters, is locked in conflict with racist Eric, who cannot get past the now-irrelevant fact that Charles is black. The elderly Mr. Barnstaple simply cannot acknowledge the scope of the tragedy and thereby, in a particularly bittersweet scene, ends up being able to live his dreams.The film is marred by several glaring inconsistencies. Though the war was only several weeks prior, the bodies of the victims have been reduced to dry skeletons. Eric has somehow managed to "walk across Asia," find a plane, fly across the ocean, and arrive on the beach in California. Surely the budget could have included some tweaking of the script and the hiring of a few extras to lie there in place of the skeletons.Despite these flaws and a saccharine, too-predictable ending, _Five_ is a thoughtful, historically relevant diamond in the rough.

calvinnme The subject of this film may seem commonplace - the world destroyed by nuclear holocaust, one woman and several men the only survivors, - but it was the first to tackle this subject matter, and it does it very well. This one does have one interesting catch - the woman survivor is pregnant.I hadn't seen this one since the third grade - Thanskgiving 1966 - and it made quite an impression on me at the time, so I thought I'd purchase it and see if it lived up to my memories. It did and then some. I can't really share any details of the story without giving anything away, except perhaps the character of the survivors. The woman is understandably obsessed with returning to the city and finding out for sure if her husband is dead or alive. Of the four men one is disqualified as a suitor because of his age, and another is disqualified because, after all, this is 1951 and he is African American and the woman is white. Of the two actually eligible suitors by 1951 standards, one is a brutish slob and the other is thoughtful and forward thinking, setting up a Cain and Abel dynamic between the two. Highly recommended for fans of 1950's sci-fi.