Bronson always struck me as the unlikeliest of stars, and Man with a Camera is something of a case study in how his frozen visage and monotone voice can produce a kind of anti-charismatic charisma.  Whatever his deficiencies as an actor, Bronson had confidence, and he's surprisingly loose when the opportunity presents himself.  In "The Bride," for instance, Kovic briefly poses as a naïve, heavily-accented immigrant negotiating a mail-order marriage, and the fun that Bronson has with this goofy scene is contagious.

Based on the little I had read, I wasn't sure exactly what form Man with a Camera would take.  Newspaper drama?  International adventure?  It turns out to be a de facto detective drama, one of those shows in which people with no business fighting crime nevertheless do so.  Johnny Staccato, a Greenwich Village nightclub owner/unlicensed private dick, was a contemporaneous figure, and they still crop up on TV now and then - Hack (2002-2004) starred David Morse as a Philadelphia cab driver who doubled as a vigilante for hire.  These series make one wonder: why not just make a show about actual private eyes (or cops), instead of burdening the writers with the chore of explaining every week how a photographer or a restaurateur got himself into this mess?

In the case of Man with a Camera, the first dozen or so episodes tell plausible, if cliched, stories consistent with actual photojournalism, at least if you grant that Kovic is the rush-off-to-battle-zone macho-adventurer type of photojournalist.  Kovic tries to snap a shot of an Appalachia-style gangsters' summit ("The Big Squeeze"), gets accused of doctoring a pic of a bigwig politician ("Turntable"), and exposes crimes while covering a boxing match ("Second Avenue Assassin") and the testing of a new military plane ("Another Barrier"). 

Over time, the number of actual photographers credited as technical advisors dwindled from three to one, and later scripts barely attempted to justify why Kovic was investigating Mexican drug smuggling ("Missing") or bodyguarding an arrogant movie star in Cannes ("Kangaroo Court").  "But there's a picture angle!" insists a client as he begs Kovic to investigate a blackmail ring preying on adopted children in "Girl in the Dark."  Thanks for the reminder.

A little more often than most fifties crime dramas, Man with a Camera varied the standard mystery-plus-fisticuffs equation.   The most unusual episode, the lynch mob story "Six Faces of Satan," is essentially The Twilight Zone's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" minus the science fiction angle.  The earnest script, by David P. Harmon, is as subtle as a brick against the back of the head, but director Boris Sagal stages it with a claustrophobic fervor that never allows the tension to subside.  It's all tight angles, angry faces shoved into the lens, crowds converging and dispersing as the camera probes the tiny interior New York street set. 

The milder pleasures of "Hot Ice Cream," an amusement park murder story, chiefly stem from the oddball pairing of guest stars Yvonne Craig (delightful as a precocious teenaged camera buff) and Lawrence Tierney, the latter's bald dome, if not his surly disposition, concealed by a jaunty ice cream vendor's cap.  And speaking of guest stars, does anyone recognize this actor, who makes a very early, and uncredited, appearance in the episode "The Bride":

*

If Man with a Camera stands out as an above average example of the sort of undemanding escapism that was becoming the bread and butter of late-fifties network TV, then Tate (1960), the entire run of which has also been disgorged on DVD in a single chunk, is a more exciting kind of revelation: a serious, important, and unjustly forgotten western.

Tate was created and story-edited by Harry Julian Fink, a talented writer who probably received a deal for his own series on the strength of a number of thoughtful Have Gun Will Travel episodes.  Fink's show is a western which confronts directly the one aspect of the generally very adult Have Gun that was gussied up a little for television: the hero's profession.  Have Gun's Paladin sought and carried out assignments that made use of his skill with a firearm, but in practice the show was never as mercenary as its title.  The tone of the stories varied from grim to frothy, and Paladin (and the series' writers) took pride in concocting intricate, non-violent forms of conflict resolution.  Tate, on the other hand, is simply and bluntly a hired killer, something about which he has no illusions and makes no apologies.  He doesn't live in an ornate San Francisco hotel suite or savor expensive cigars.  Tate is dusty and beat-down and often wears a serape to conceal his handicap, a useless left arm that he keeps holstered in a mean-looking, elbow-length leather glove.

The first episode, "Home Town," is a near-perfect examination of masculine stoicism and obligation.  In it Tate returns to the town of his birth to help his mentor, an aging marshal (Royal Dano), protect a prisoner from a lynch mob.  It's a futile endeavor, of course, in the sense that the unrepentant murderer will likely hang anyway, and that's the point.  Fink seems to challenge himself to convey Tate's backstory as unsentimentally as possible.  Here's an exchange that includes the only explanation we ever get for Tate's dead arm:

MARSHAL: How long's it been?

TATE: Ten years.

MARSHAL: The war and then some.  Where'd it happen?

TATE: Vicksburg.  I didn't run fast enough, Morty.

MARSHAL: You're home, son.  What do you think of it?

TATE: The same.  A little smaller, a little dirtier.  Just a memory, Morty, it doesn't exist any more.

Tate's wife is buried in the same town, and again Fink conveys this element of the character's psychological makeup obliquely.  There's a lovely scene between Tate and a waitress (Sandra Knight) who turns out to be his wife's cousin.  They discuss the girl's resemblance to Mary Tate, but Tate never tells her that Mary was his wife.  All the emotion remains unspoken.  The scene ends with an iris into the cousin's face: a technique from the silent cinema so powerful that, by 1960, it was often used ironically.   But here it's perfect, a way of releasing the pent-up sadness of the moment through form instead of dialogue.

"Stopover," the second, and perhaps best, episode, is even more avant-garde.  Fink, who wrote the script, underlines a local law officer's disgust when Tate rides into town with a corpse across his saddle.  While the sheriff executes some bureaucratic maneuvers to delay the payment of the bounty, Tate cools his heels in a saloon where he runs smack into a twitchy punk who wants to test his gun against him.  It's a familiar setup, but Fink fills it with unexpected ideas: an emphasis on money (the bounty is $2,080, and Tate insists on the $80); the extreme lengths to which Tate goes to avoid a gun duel that won't yield a profit; the lack of ambiguity concerning a saloon girl's actual profession (she charges five dollars to bring the guests an "extra blanket").  Smith, the young gunslinger, is not just an analogue to the modern juvenile delinquents of the fifties (a common notion in films like Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James and Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun).  He's quite clearly a psychopath in a clinical sense.  Fink makes this point mainly through the young man's speech, which is fanciful to the point of incomprehensibility.  At one point, he refers to man Tate has killed as "a magical person," an anachronistic, New Age-y phrase that startles one into thinking of Smith more in terms of Manson worship than of western villainy.

Indeed, "Stopover" is about language, or the failure of communication.  Tate and the young gun talk past each other throughout their encounter: the gunman wants to know who he's challenging, but Tate won't tell him his name, while Tate keeps probing to find out the relationship between Smith and the dead man.  He can't wrap his mind around the idea that there might not be any connection between them - that violence can occur without a rational motive.

Television westerns were, of course, plentiful in the extreme during the fifties and sixties, a fact that necessitated as much differentiation as possible.  A wide range of generic traditions and storytelling approaches characterize the major TV westerns: The Virginian told sweeping, epic tales which emphasized the vastness of the effort to settle the frontier; Wagon Train was a dramatic anthology in disguise, eschewing western naturalism in favor of character-driven stories; The Rifleman was a bildungsroman that reduced the west to a canvas for illustrating life lessons; and so on. 

I think the most productive model for the TV western, the one best suited to the limitations of the small screen, was the sort of spare, unsentimental ultra-minimalism that characterizes Budd Boetticher's and some of Anthony Mann's film westerns.  The two key series in this mode were Sam Peckinpah's quirky The Westerner and Rod Serling's blatantly existential The Loner.  Tate belongs within this tradition, although it's not quite at the same level as those two masterworks.

One problem is David McLean, who plays Tate ("Just Tate," incidentally, the missing first name a midpoint marker on the way to Eastwood's Man with No Name).  McLean has the right world-weary look and gruff voice for the role - he was later famous as a cowboy-styled cigarette pitchman.   But his performance lacks depth; as the series progresses it becomes evident that McLean is cycling through the same four or five line readings, and the guest stars nudge him off the screen.  (It doesn't help McLean that Tate's uncredited but canny casting director paired him with an unusual number of future stars: Louise Fletcher, Martin Landau, Robert Culp, James Coburn, Warren Oates, and, in small but showy roles in two episodes, Robert Redford.)

But the primary failure of Tate was a lack of sustainability.  Unlike Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone or Stirling Silliphant on Route 66, Harry Julian Fink fumbled the critical step of finding gifted, complementary voices to fill in the gaps between his own contributions.  The six Tates written by Fink, all but one of them gems, and the seven episodes penned by lesser writers might as well be from two wholly different series.  By the last episode, Gerry Day's "The Return of Jessica Jackson," there's a lamentable scene in which Tate pulls out a Bible and proselytizes to the distraught heroine.  This Tate is a far more conventional TV hero than the Tate of the pilot, a terse pragmatist of uncertain morality, adrift on a sea of grief and regret. 

Not that it mattered much: Tate ran as a replacement series in the summer of 1960, meaning that NBC had likely abandoned any plans for renewing it even before the series debuted.  Just like The Westerner and The Loner, both of which were short-lived, Tate was too cerebral and too downbeat for the mainstream.

(A brief note for the Corrections Department: One frustrating bit of misinformation which has proliferated across the internet, even on the official page for the Tate DVD, is that the series was videotaped.  In fact, the quickest glimpse at any Tate episode reveals that it was shot on film, not with the clunky video cameras of the era, which were limited in both resolution and range of motion.   I'm not sure how that idea got started, except perhaps that the show carries an onscreen copyright in the name of Roncom Video Films - Perry Como's production company.  But the term "video," at that time, was an industry synonym for television.)

*

At the other end of the scale is Laredo (1965-1967), which lives down to its reputation as one of the least distinguished of nineteen-sixties westerns.  In fact, it's one of the worst TV shows, period, and perhaps a minor benchmark in the dumbing down of the medium.

Laredo concerns the adventures of three rowdy Texas rangers, played by Neville Brand, Peter Brown, and William Smith.  (Philip Carey, cashing a paycheck, delivers a scene's worth of exposition in each episode and then disappears, just as Rick Jason had taken to doing in the later years of Combat.)  It's distinguished from the glut of other westerns of its time mainly by its strident efforts to maintain a would-be comedic tone.  Mainly, this means that, in the midst of carrying out the usual lawman's duties of leading posses and fighting Indians, the heroes incessantly needle and play elaborate pranks upon one another.  It's the first, but by no means the last, TV show I can think of in which adults behave like hyperactive pre-teens for no discernible reason - except, perhaps, kinship with a target demographic.

What's startling about Laredo is how cruel and violent its prank subplots are.  In the first episode, for example, Reese Bennett (Brand) retaliates against the other two rangers for their earlier mockery by leaving them bound in an Indian camp, where they're later tortured.  In that instance, Reese gets the upper hand, but in most episodes Cooper (Brown) and Riley (Smith) outfox him.  Brand's performance makes this dynamic extremely uncomfortable.  I can imagine that Brand was trying to create a Paul Bunyanesque caricature - a Texan who was so dumb that he, et cetera, et cetera.  But Reese is so helplessly stupid, and his chums are so smug and superior, that the experience is akin to watching schoolyard bullies taunt a retarded child.  Laredo unavoidably implicates the viewer in its peculiar brand of cruelty - never is civility imposed on any of the characters - and I, for one, didn't feel like playing.  Perhaps I've just lost my capacity, over the last, oh, eight or so years, to be amused by imbecilic Texan authority figures whose chief character traits are a cartoonish understanding of violence and an utter absence of basic human empathy.

*

If Laredo weren't so awful, it would be a shame that Timeless's two DVD collections (which contain the entire first season) cram five hour-long episodes onto each disc, coating Universal's serviceable if slightly drab video masters in a thick blanket of artifacts and edge enhancement.  Tate, also from Timeless, looks a little better.  But  it was Infinity's Man with a Camera package that really impressed me.  The episodes are transferred from 16mm, but the prints - from the collection of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, also the source of Mister Peepers and hopefully more classic TV gems to come - are in excellent condition, and they have been rendered onto DVD with about as much detail as one could hope from that format.

<<Come out, Neville!>>

Chiunque abbia letto "I Am Legend" ("Io sono leggenda", Fanucci Editore), difficilmente dimenticherà il grido tetro di Ben Cortman, che ogni notte striscia via dal suo nascondiglio per tormentare colui che un tempo era suo amico, Robert Neville, l'ultimo uomo della terra.

Il romanzo di Richard Matheson (per la prima volta in Italia nel 1957 - ovvero a tre anni di distanza dall'edizione originale - su Longanesi, nel 1989 all'interno della collana Urania Classici col titolo "I vampiri" e successivamente ristampato come "Io sono leggenda", dulcis in fundo riproposto da Fanucci) è una pietra miliare della letteratura fantastica e della narrativa americana degli anni '50, costante fonte di ispirazione per il cinema (di genere) e per tanti altri scrittori (King, furbescamente citato in copertina, è solito indicare l'autore tra i suoi maestri più importanti).

"I Am Legend" nasce tra le ombre di una sala buia al cui interno viene proiettato un vecchio film del 1931, "Dracula" (Tod Browning), l'idea è però quella di rovesciare in maniera speculare il mito del Vampiro, o meglio del diverso: il protagonista non è infatti l'altro, l'affezione che contagia gli esseri umani, al contrario Robert Neville è l'unico essere umano ancora in vita, l'anomalia in un mondo abitato da una nuova forma vivente. La storia prende il via da un'epidemia di origine sconosciuta che annienta sempre più velocemente il genere umano, alla morte segue però un ritorno, i contagiati si risvegliano dal loro sonno e si comportano proprio come i vampiri descritti da Bram Stoker. Robert vede così morire amici, colleghi, moglie e figlia, ritrovandosi definitivamente solo. A questo punto si attiva un circuito inesorabile: al crepuscolo il protagonista è vittima di un costante assedio, all'alba invece deve bruciare i cadaveri rimasti sul prato, rimettere a posto gli specchi e l'aglio, controllare la macchina e stanare altri vampiri. Un po' alla volta la sua umanità sbiadisce, perfino la voce (oramai inutile) diventa un elemento estraneo alla sua nuova condizione, angoscia, orrore, disperazione e solitudine prendono spesso il sopravvento su Robert, che alterna il whisky e le visioni della moglie Virginia allo studio della malattia che ha colpito l'intero genere umano. Egli è convinto infatti che scavando nella superstizione del vampiro sia possibile arrivare ad una soluzione, dunque a una cura. Quando incrocerà in pieno giorno un cane (prima) e una donna (poi) la storia volgerà ad uno splendido ed inaspettato finale...

L'intreccio prende corpo sul grande schermo prima in "L'ultimo uomo della terra" (Sidney Salkow/Ubaldo Ragona, 1964), girato in uno spettrale Eur, accreditato alla coppia di registi ma probabilmente diretto solo dal primo ed interpretato da un magistrale Vincent Price, poi nel minore "The Omega Man" ("1975: occhi bianchi sul pianeta Terra", Boris Sagal, 1971), infine nel disastroso "I Am Legend", con Will Smith ("Io sono leggenda", Francis Lawrence, 2007). In realtà la pellicola che più di tutte ha raccolto le ispirazioni di Richard Matheson è, per stessa ammissione dello scrittore, "The Night Of The Living Dead" di George A. Romero ("La notte dei morti viventi", 1968). Da segnalare l'episodio numero 77 di Dylan Dog intitolato "L'ultimo uomo sulla terra" (Sclavi e Roi, febbraio 1993) e la graphic novel omonima adattata da Steve Niles ed Elman Brown.

<<Ora sono io l'anormale. La normalità è un concetto di maggioranza, la norma di molti, e non la norma di uno solo>>

Antonio Bra Smiraglia

El último hombre vivo sobre La Tierra (The Omega Man)

Año: 1971
Duración: 98 min.
Género: Ciencia Ficción
Director: Boris Sagal
Actores: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash...
Más datos en la IMDB

Minisinopsis: Robert Neville, un militar y doctor, experimenta con una vacuna que debería resolver la plaga que el mismo Hombre ha extendido sobre La Tierra con sus guerras bacteriológicas. Cuando está de camino para llevar la bacuna que crée es la definitiva, el piloto de su helicóptero enferma, haciendo que el aparato se precipite hacia el suelo. Robert ha contraído también la enfermedad, pero no muere en el accidente y aún le queda tiempo de inyectarse la vacuna.

Si ya has visto la película, puedes seguir leyendo.

Para empezar, The Omega Man se trata de un remake de una película de 1964, The last man on Earth, dirigida por Ubaldo Ragona y protagonizada por Vincent Price (que, confieso no he visto y tengo ganas de ver), que a su vez está basada en una historia del escritor y guionista Richard Matheson (que tampoco he leído). Para finales de año, creo, está previsto que se extrene el nuevo remake, I am a legend, dirigida por Francis Lawrence y protagonizada por Will Smith. Con lo que, si queremos ver una película en tres versiones diferentes, sólo tenemos que esperar hasta Diciembre de este año.
Yo tengo una ligera repulsión personal por Charlton Heston, pero es por su afición a las armas en la vida real y por su dentadura, que parece un tiburón cuando pone cara de malote, el tipo y cuando sonríe dan ganas de hacerle un molde. Pero, sin más, son cosas personales.
Lo bueno de la película es que no recurre a "moderneces idiotas". Quiero decir, que como la película transcurre en una Época Contemporánea devastada por las armas biológicas, no hace falta crear efectos extraños y supermodernos. Así, Heston recorre calles y calles que podrían corresponder a cualquier ciudad de la época; éso sí, como es una peli de los 70, el Heston tiene que ir a lo pecholobo o con un chandal Adidas... cuánto landismo hay en el cine americano...

En una peli como esta sólo hay dos tipos de efectos: el de los muertos y el de los malotes. El de los muertos es genial: esqueletos cuyos huesos se sostienen sin carne, ni músculos, ni nada, como en los que se pueden ver en un museo, con sus hilos atando un hueso a otro para que no se separen; vamos, como en la vida real, que si te mueres de pie y pasa el tiempo sin que te toquen, cuando te quedas en los huesos tu esqueleto se queda de pie...
Y el maquillaje de los malotes... ¡Dios, qué maravilla! Se supone que los malotes ("La familia", se hacen llamar, como si fuese el preludio de El Padrino) sufren de albinismo. Pero es que ¡dan ganas de pasarles el dedo para quitarles el maquillaje! ¡es tan sumamente cutre! Como si los hubiesen encerrado a todos en una habitación y un gracioso hubiese tirado un saco de harina abierto, genial.
Hay una escena muy destacable y es que, a mitad de película, cuando todo parece perdido para el personaje de Heston porque lo van a quemar vivo en un estadio y, de repente, se encienden las luces de éste, los de la familia se echan al suelo porque se supone que la luz les hace daño; pero es que se echan al suelo hacia el lado contrario a Heston, o sea, hacia las luces.

Pero lo realmente grande es la interacción del personaje de Heston con el de la actriz Rosalind Cash. Primero, tienen una escena de amor estúpida en la que, al parecer, como Heston es el único hombre que existe, no puede sino caer rendida ante él... recuerdo, para quien haya visto la película, que cuando Cash y Heston se encuentran en el estadio, Cash vive junto con otro hombre y un puñado de niños en un refugio... vaya el otro tipo debía ser gay porque, atractivo, era más atractivo que Heston.
En la escena en la que "intiman" por primera vez, Cash va a casa de Heston porque Heston quiere llevar a su hermano que tiene la plaga para que éste le cure. Va a su casa, digo, con una ropa, y se saca de la manga un camisón tipo 70's, de ésos de seda vaporosa. Heston le pregunta que de dónde ha sacado éso y ella le responde que del mismo sitio que él su ropa. Sí pero, ¿de dónde lo ha sacado en ése preciso momento? Delirante.

El último hombre vivo sobre La Tierra es una película bastante entretenida, con una línea argumental buena, un guión peor tratado que la línea argumental, y en la que uno se puede echar unas risas bien echadas con determinadas cosas.