Not having enough room at home for all the physical media I own, I rent a storage unit for the overflow. Stuff I have yet to watch is at home, as well as the movies and shows I may want to rewatch at the spur of the moment at any time. I was recently looking in the archives for a couple of titles I wanted to revisit, and stumbled upon a Warner Archive DVD-R of 1970’s No Blade of Grass. I was aware of the picture per my interest in post-apocalyptic cinema but knew I had not watched this title before. And yet, there was an open case, so somebody watched this before. Perhaps it was a gift from the movie fairy. If so, the movie fairy knows the genres I like but not the elements I like or dislike about such pictures.
If there’s rape in a movie, it had better be essential to the plot and handled in a manner which best serves its reason for being here. It fails on the former, which means the latter is moot. A mother (Jean Wallace) and her 16-year-old daughter (Lynne Frederick, was only fifteen, in reality) are violated by bikers side-by-side while the husband/father and supposed protector (Nigel Davenport) has managed to get knocked unconscious by one of the brutes. Not that I want to see the two victims traumatized permanently, but there is no real reason for the scene and it does not result in any long-term character changes or drive the plot in any significant way. Also, it is tactlessly shot, with gratuitous shots of the girl’s breasts (or that of a body double—that the audience is supposed to be aroused by this is repulsive).
Maybe they simply acclimate quickly to the horror that is England after a plant disease kills all grasses. In flashbacks from presumably a recent time, there are people gorging themselves on meat and veg, so I wonder how food continued to grow while the crisis was well underway. In a different flashback, Wallace is lamenting some of her flowers in the garden succumbing to the blight. Davenport responds by taking a flamethrower to them. If flamethrowers can be used in gardening, then that may completely change my complete lack of interest inn yard work.
I found these flashbacks pretty annoying, but nowhere near as I much as I did the flash-forwards. You see, there will be brief glimpses from time to time of events that haven’t happened yet. It was unclear what the intention was with these intrusions. All I know is they nearly eliminate any element of surprise.
I was also unclear as to what the message of the film is supposed to be. At one point, I suspected the intention was to show us how “good” people could become monsters once the thin veneer of civilization is removed. There’s one bit I especially found laughable where Davenport’s small group encounters one magnitudes larger, he shoots their leader and that man’s followers just happily agree to join forces. Mind you, one of our heroes just killed somebody in cold blood. Not just that, but this huge group also goes with him back the way they had already been. It seems to me they were probably moving away from an area they already had deemed unsuitable for settlement.
One unambiguous aspect of No Blade of Grass is the overbearing environmental message. Pollution is said to be the cause of this particular apocalypse, and we get many, many, many shots of air and water contaminants, as if we weren’t paying attention before. Despite the unusual priorities of some people, nobody thinks of themselves as being pro-pollution, but the overly-earnest title song here by Roger Whittaker just might convert some to that curious mindset.
Dir: Cornel Wilde
Starring Nigel Davenport (really, has there even been a more British name?), Jean Wallace (who, I forgot to mention, has a very weird accent that I think is a Brit occasionally remembering she’s supposed to be from Canada), John Hamill, Lynne Frederick
Watched on a Warner Archive DVD-R which I’m still not sure how I came to own–but I won’t be owning it for much longer