The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 26-September 1
The Last Man on Earth (1960)
Directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow
Last Man On Earth gets derided for making a hash of one of the greatest horror novels of all time, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. It should get credit for creating an aesthetic B-side to the work of the Italian modernists of the early 60s. Despite a generic American (generican?) setting, it plainly transpires in the same Italian landscape where Antonioni and Bertolucci discovered the dimensions of hell. Co-directors Ragona and Salkow, the former also the head of an Italian cinematography magazine, literalize the existential apocalypses of L’Eclisse or Fists in the Pocket. Vincent Price is our Last Man, and his daily grind involves sharpening stakes, looking for vampires to kill, fortifying his house against them, experimenting on a cure, going to bed with the sound of his adversaries screaming for his blood, and waking up and doing it all over again. The human condition in the mid-20th century as nightmare. Scout Tafoya (August 28, 9pm; August 31, 7pm at Anthology Film Archives’s American International Pictures series)