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Losey the next year envisions the beginning of the end as children with ice in their veins (These Are the Damned), the sweltering opposite here sees the planet knocked off its axis and toward the sun. The bracketing images are tinted orange to convey pulverizing heat, the reporter (Edward Judd) ambles into his office to find a melted typewriter, the tale is dictated fatalistically. "What do you want, a slow build-up?" Climate anxiety filtered through the bustle of London's Daily Express (a banner reading "IMPACT!" hangs over the newsroom), an uncanny evocation of snappy American tabloid comedies courtesy of Wolf Mankowitz's dialogue. The puff piece that balloons into "the biggest jolt the Earth's taken since the Ice Age started," the engulfing fog that strands journo and switchboard operator (Janet Munro) in a foreglimpse of Il Deserto Rosso. Heat waves, forest fires, monsoons. "Why don't I just do 500 steaming words on how mankind is so full of wind, it's about to out-blow nature?" Val Guest runs a tight apocalyptic ship, his widescreen frenzies range from documentary views of peacenik demonstrations to Hitchcock miniatures to a splashing orgy at the height of water rationing. (In the most tingling sequence, the main couple embraces in bed with only a sheet separating the sweaty bodies and the camera backs out the window as a cyclone whips across the city.) Memories of the Blitz and prophecies of inconvenient truths, along the way a description of a "trick film" about planes and bombs that surely lodged itself into Kurt Vonnegut's brain. "It's a beautiful thing to watch a woman reform a man. Only needed the world to catch fire." The wry disaster-flick template leaves humanity on the grill to ponder its blunders. With Leo McKern, Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden, Gene Anderson, Arthur Christiansen, and Reginald Beckwith. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |