Omega Man, The (1971)

• Directed by Boris Sagal
• Written by John William Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, based on the novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Starring
  • Charlton Heston
  • Anthony Zerbe
  • Rosalind Cash
  • Paul Koslo
  • Eric Laneuville
• Produced by Walter Seltzer

I said in my review of The Last Man on Earth (1964) that any film version of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend must must must have a commanding performer in the lead role, because that performer will be alone on screen for roughly half the movie. Charlton Heston is the epitome of the commanding performer, whatever you think of his acting ability — from what I’ve seen, he played one role extremely well, that of “being Charlton Heston” — so I suppose it makes perfect sense (or perfect Hollywood sense, anyway) to change the movie around to show him off best.

How much was changed from the book and previous movie is shown up front by the character’s name: he’s Robert Neville, and he’s a far different character from the fatalistic Robert Morgan of previous incarnations. None of this morose, plodding vampire-staking business while driving a station wagon. No, Neville tools around the deserted streets of Los Angeles (shot on the weekend early mornings, which is why only a few locations are artfully decrepit – and no, you’re not supposed to notice the traffic signals still being on, or the occasional pedestrian in the background who didn’t get the memo) in a convertible, Batman-style utility belt around his waist and a sub machine gun in the passenger seat, listening to Max Steiner’s instrumental version of “Theme From ‘A Summer Place’” on the car’s 8-track. This is I Am Legend filtered through the sensibilities of a contemporary men’s adventure magazine. This is apocalypse swank.

Test tubes? Of colored liquids? But that must mean… there’s SCIENCE going on here!

As the last human survivor, he does what any of us would do: he reviews and relives the pinnacle of human society by watching Woodstock (1970) in the cinema, powered by a gas generator. Apparently he’s done this several times, because he can mouth the words along with the film, especially those about everybody living together and getting along. It’s irony, see? Because Neville has for three years been the last man alive. He’s the last man… and he is not alone. There is also the Family.

That’s what they call themselves, a few dozen survivors left mutated by the plague that claimed everyone else. Now albinified, pocked with sores, and white-eyed, they scurry around in black robes under cover of darkness at the instruction of Matthias (the always entertaining Anthony Zerbe), a former newscaster who now runs the family as a fundamentalist sect, condemning machinery and progress and all of those evils of the dead world of which Neville is a symbol.

“Brother Matthias, I feel so… honky.”

In fact, they probably don’t know just how much of a symbol he is; he was formerly Colonel Neville, a physician and scientist in the military researching defenses against germ warfare. He was a little behind the curve, alas, and when a bioweapon gets released in a Sino-Russian conflict and becomes contagious worldwide, he and his crew desperately try to find a cure while people die. When he becomes infected, he injects himself with a sample of an experimental vaccine, and dies because it’s too late to use a vaccine once you’re already exhibiting symptoms. I kid! He’s now the one man with immunity, in a Los Angeles populated only by himself and the Family.

So how does he spend his time? Trying to find the nest in which the Family hides during the day, hoping to wipe them out. Why? Why not just move out to the country where he can grow some crops and leave the dwindling supplies in the city to the foraging Family? Macho pride, mostly. So he’s transformed his apartment house into a barricaded pillbox where he spends the night, playing chess with and talking to a bust of Caesar (hey, it’s better than a soccer ball) and “dressing for dinner” in clothes so frilly that no one less manly than Charlton Heston could pull it off.

Look, I’m not blaming the man. Everyone gets lonely sometimes.

The big question, of course, is this: Why does he bother staying cleanshaven? The answer is that they don’t want him to look like his character in Planet of the Apes (1968), his previous opus in which they blew it up, damn them, damn them to hell. Neville is cut from the same cloth as Taylor, a worldweary and self-sufficient man who discovers to his surprise a nugget of affection in his soul for his fellow man only after there are no fellow men to be affectionate toward.

Well, that’s not entirely true. While “shopping” for some new clothes, he catches sight of a young and fleet-footed African-American woman – the first non-Family human he’s seen in years. And when Taylor slips and allows the Family to capture him, his intended execution is interrupted by said young lady, Lisa (Rosalind Cash), and her companion Dutch (Paul Koslo). They are the two adults leading a group of a dozen children. Youth are only slightly less susceptible to the plague, and in fact they all currently have it; it can manifest itself suddenly, turning them from outwardly-normal humans to “tertiary” cases like the Family in anywhere from weeks to minutes.

And this, finally, gives Neville some purpose. The Family doesn’t want to be cured, but these few survivors do, and Neville’s blood could provide the serum to wipe the plague out of their bloodstreams once and for all.

Of course, it’s not going to be that easy…

Hey, all you “movie stars” who desperately need to man up — I’ve got just the injection for you…

There are some movie fans who look down on The Omega Man because of the liberties it takes with its source material, jettisoning all but a twenty-five-word TV Guide synopsis to build from. On the other hand, it’s so different from the novel that even Richard Matheson wasn’t bothered by the movie, because he realized that it was an entirely different story that took no more than its initial inspiration from I Am Legend. (Again, comparisons to Planet of the Apes and how much that movie diverged from the original novel are apt.)

But that also means that the movie’s problems are all its own. Most of them center around the Family, which replaced the original concept of zombie-like vampires as the end-product of the plague (though most of the population was simply killed outright in the initial outbreak). Why are the Family members so willing to follow Matthias? Is there some kind of bacteria-induced hive mind at work, with Matthias ruling as the strongest-willed of them? Where did they get so many deep-hooded robes? (My hypothesis is that they were all wearing choir robes and hoodies until they discovered and scavenged the abandoned Church of Satan.) “The Family” is, of course, what Charles Manson called his followers, and the murders at the Tate ranch in 1969 were still fresh in Hollywood’s minds when this movie was made; The Omega Man’s Family is the Manson Family intensified by an order of magnitude, a murderous bunch of fundamentalists who are left inhumanly zealous by bacterial causes. It allows the movie to feature bad guys functionally identical to those still in the news while neatly avoiding any exploration of the sociology behind the cult mentality. “The germs made them do it.”

There’s a passing nod to the novel’s central and climactic conceit of Morgan having become a larger-than-life figure in the infected’s mythology; Lisa reveals that they hadn’t approached Neville before because he, assuming that anyone else he glimpsed was members of the Family, had become trigger-happy. That’s not nearly the level of boogeyman-style mythology which prompted the title, I Am Legend, but Heston’s character exchanges one mythology for another. I mean, a man who’s blood has the power to save? In case we miss the religious overtones in that, the movie ends with Neville dying (whoops, spoiler) with his arms outstretched to either side. DO YOU GET IT YET??? There’s something to be said for the combined chutzspah of comparing the protagonist in a post-apocalyptic action yarn to Christ and the anxiety that we might not get it unless the film reaches down off the screen and shakes us by the shoulders. (I guess Heston could say that, along with playing Moses, Brigham Young, and — by some accounts — the voice of YHWH, he also almost played Jesus.)

Oh, I soooo love subtlety…

The best way to appreciate The Omega Man is the way that Matheson did, and that most viewers always have: by dissociating it from the novel I Am Legend, and appreciating it on its own terms. It’s not great, but it’s good.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 33
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 18
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Anthony Zerbe (Matthias) played “Vice-Admiral Dougherty” in Insurrection
  • Brian Tochi (“Tommy,” one of the surviving children) played “Ray” in the classic episode “And a Little Child Shall Lead,” and “Ensign Kenny Lin” in the TNG episode “Night Terrors”