Panic in Year Zero!

A family struggles to survive the anarchy in a world devastated by nuclear war. This is a believable story by the standards of the time it was produced; the possibility of a nuclear winter had not yet been considered. There are no bands of mutants roaming around eating the survivors, just ordinary criminal types. Yes, I'm afraid that circumstances like that do bring such people out of the woodworks. Ray Milland's character makes intelligent, and sometimes hard, decisions to ensure his family's survival.

Los Angeles family vacation is interrupted by nuclear war. Now they must escape into the mountains to avoid the radiation, the panic, and the rapists.

Despite the insipid nuclear holocaust effects (looks more like a thunderstorm), this is a surprisingly effective movie. Milland elicits effective performances from each and every member of his cast (Frankie Avalon has never been better). The menace, humiliation and sheer terror of rape has never been more poignantly depicted on the screen, and all without nudity. A minor classic.

Sure it didn't have a huge budget or major-league stars, but it's a bleak and realistic little drama that has an authentic tone and a sense of desperation that feels utterly genuine. There's undoubtedly a "you-had-to-be-there" reaction that I had to it, being from Los Angeles and knowing the mountain area and easily being able to imagine seeing that mushroom cloud in my own mind. I was eight when this originally came out -- not sure if I saw it in the theater but it's possible -- and that creepy Conalrad radio tone is still in my head after all these years.

Nobody -- except maybe Charlton Heston -- can look quite so anguished and masculine and bearing-the-weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders-in-the-face-of-civilization 's-downfall as Ray Milland does in this movie.

It looks like we dodged the nuclear war bullet back in the 1960s, but I'm sure that anybody living today can still identify with the terrifying prospect of a devastating nuclear war and what could happen if you were one of the lucky/unlucky survivors. This may not be "The Day After" but it's a plucky low-budget version of the same theme and worth seeing alongside other 60s nuclear nightmare movies.

Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland), his wife Ann (Jean Hagen), son Rick (Frankie Avalon) and daughter Karen (Mary Mitchell) leave L.A. for a camping trip out in the country. They see nuclear blasts hitting the city. While Ann wants to go back to find her mother, Harry foresee a coming chaos and set off with ruthless survival instincts.

It's a well-made B-movie. The biggest takeaway is Harry's callous ruthlessness. He both foresees and bring about the lost of civility. The movie doesn't make him a heroic lead. It is dark, exploitative, and melodramatic. It works.

This is a genuinely enjoyable example of a "post-nuclear holocaust survival

film." It may seem a bit campy by modern standards, but is actually well thought- out and acted. The early 60's were an era in which it seemed possible to

contemplate a nuclear war that broke down civilization's normal function

withOUT reducing the entire countryside to rubble. A man takes his family out into the country to escape the chaos, still clinging to the hope that normalcy and order will soon return. His wife is horrified at his newfound ruthlessness, and the kids seem willing to go with the new rules of the jungle.

Ray Milland was at one time an acclaimed actor, but his academy award for

"Lost Weekend" seems to have cursed his career. Now regarded as a "serious"

actor, suited only for "down" roles, he wasn't given much chance to work in the more "up" big-studio roles of the fifties. By the time he wound up at AIP, he was little more than a "has-been" to the public. But he retained real talent, as his directing and starring in this and other Sci-fi pictures of the period shows. When given a free hand, as in "Panic In Year Zero!" he took on challenges others

would have shied away from and showed that he still had a lot to offer. Sadly, big time directors continued to ignore him and the end of his life was defined by roles in "Frogs" and "The Thing With Two Heads" - films far worse than anything with Corman's name on them.

"Panic in Year Zero!" displays the basic conflict of compromise: Ray's character must compromise his beliefs and code of behavior in order to preserve what he cares for. His constant conflict with his wife displays the conflict between

differing ideas of what needs to be preserved - to her, saving the family by acts of savagery is unacceptable, and the only way to preserve civilization is to apply its rules in every situation. The ending seems to redeem Ray, but the fact is that the questions raised are answered by each viewer in the course of the film in his or her own way. Events in the film are not one-sided, and Ray's relation to the hardware store owner calls into question his position and correctness: perhaps by allying himself earlier with other decent people trying to survive, Ray could have saved his family from some of what it endures.

As we now re-acclimate ourselves to an era in which the possibility of "limited" nuclear attack (from national or independent terrorist groups) seems more likely than Mutual Assured Destruction, it is possible that films such as "Panic in Year Zero!" offer us important ethical problems. Problems we hope never to have to solve in real life, but which the screen offers a means to wrestle with in a safe environment.