Woodyanders Review of No Blade of Grass

No Blade of Grass (1970)

A very brutal, chilling & potent end-of-the-world film

[8/10 · 20 May 2006]

Cornel Wilde, widely regarded as one of the truest and purest of cinematic primitives due to his blunt, sinewy, straightforward and nonjudgmental presentation of "civilized" man and his disturbingly easy capacity for violence given the correct stimulus, here depicts a very chilling vision of societal collapse in this ecology-minded sci-fi end-of-the-world movie. Mankind's gross polluting of the environment begets a lethal virus which kills off the earth's crops, resulting in famine, mass panic and hysteria, rioting in the streets, and the violent breakdown of society itself. Rugged, resilient and resourceful former military man survivalist Nigel Davenport, his equally strong and durable wife Jean Wallace (Wilde's real life spouse and frequent lead in his pictures), Davenport's fragile, virginal daughter ("Vampire Circus" 's adorable Lynn Frederick) and son, the daughter's nice guy fiancé, a loutish brute and the brute's slutty wife leave London and make a perilous pilgrimage across the desolate, dangerous countryside. Many wayward travelers join the group and form a ragtag army which fends off a savage gang of murderous rapist bikers. Wilde relates this grim premise with his usual stark, spare and no-frills muscular style (although the occasionally clumsy use of flash-forwards badly dates this film), keeping sentiment to a bare minimum, tautly maintaining a properly bleak tone, offering up an upsetting array of jarring visuals (i.e., a dry, barren landscape littered with animal corpses), and refusing to resort to cheap moralizing, but still clearly spelling out the harsh, albeit absolute necessity for killing in order to remain alive and persevere in a barbarous world. A bit crude and rough around the edges, but overall an extremely powerful and unsettling film.