Ray Milland packs his wife and two teenaged children into the family camper and sets off early in the morning for a fishing trip. A few hours into the mountains around Los Angeles, the family suddenly sees a bright flash behind them. When they stop to look, an enormous mushroom cloud is spreading over the city. The family at first turns back towards Los Angeles, but soon Milland begins to have his doubts about this course of action. As more and more panicked people pour out of the city towards the mountains, they first seek out a grocery store and hardware store in a small town for supplies, and then head off into the wilderness.
All does not go smoothly, however. A misunderstanding in the hardware store ends with Milland pulling a gun on the proprietor and making off with a stash of goods without paying for them. Later, another confrontation on the highway escalates until son Frankie Avalon wounds a man with a shotgun blast. Even after arriving at the secluded fishing camp, the family finds they’ve been followed by both the hardware store owner and the hoods they shot at on the road. With no law for miles, the family finds itself harassed with no choice but to fight back with deadly force. But when one of them is wounded as well, they must risk leaving the relative solitude of the wilderness and venture back to the cities again for medical treatment.
Is it any good?
I don’t know an awful lot about Ray Milland, but he was a well respected actor in the 1940s (even winning an Academy Award for THE LOST WEEKEND) who ended up acting in a lot of low budget sci-fi and horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Milland once reportedly said that he didn’t particularly enjoy acting, and he considered it simply a way to pay the bills. In light of that, it’s tempting to look at his transition from romantic leading man to B-movie icon as the career move of a cynical or apathetic actor. But in addition to starring in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!, Milland also directed the picture. And he once said that the movie he was most proud of besides THE LOST WEEKEND was the Roger Corman cheap and quick sci-fi thriller X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). So regardless of what motives were primarily behind the switch to genre pictures, he clearly had some interest in sci-fi above and beyond collecting a paycheck.
It’s hard to tell exactly where PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! wants the sympathies of the audience to be. As law and order break down around him, Ray Milland’s character pretty quickly crosses the line from law-abiding citizen to single-minded desperado doing whatever he must to protect his family. He holds up a hardware store, causes a multi-car pile-up on the highway, almost runs down a group of men trying to defend their town, and ultimately ends up blowing away two unarmed no-goodniks with a shotgun. Less egregiously, he also refuses to trust anybody outside of his family -- going so far as to turn away an abused girl looking for help before his son points out how heartless he’s being. Presumably we’re meant to think that Milland is doing what he has to do to protect his family, but that his single-minded objective obscures his judgment from time to time.
PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! doesn’t have much interest in the nuclear war other than as a vehicle for creating the lawless situation that Milland and his family must survive. There is no attendant Soviet invasion and no secondary effects from the nuclear blast beyond the destruction of Los Angeles and several other cities -- no fallout, no radiation sickness, no hint that this is anything except a temporary disruption of normalcy. The movie is surprisingly bleak in places, and it’s pretty surprising to see the “good guys” so willing to level shotguns at everybody they meet. Even the idea that Ray Milland would put a gun in Frankie Avalon’s hands and tell him to blow a guy away if he makes a wrong move is kind of crazy.
On the other hand, the dialogue and story are not that deep. The mother particularly gets the bad end of the script -- she spends much of the beginning of the movie as a kind of ineffectual conscience before her big conversion when she gets a few rounds off at the hoodlums trying to rape her daughter. Speaking of hoodlums, kids get a bum rap in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! too. Even Frankie Avalon is depicted as far too trigger happy -- he enjoys toting around a gun too much and Ray Milland seems to think he is teetering on the verge of running wild like the hoodlums who terrorize them. Add to this the fact that the attempted rape is disturbingly scored with hep jazz music, and it starts to seem like part of this movie’s agenda is a “get off my lawn” message from a cranky old man.
