Five

I have been searching for a copy of this film on video for ten years. Like others who have commented, it has haunted me since seeing it as a l7 year old when it was originally released. In recent years I learned that the set was Oboler's own home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I would be quite interested to see it as newly built compared to some recent color photos of the structure available in various FLW collections.

This movie starts off with a mushroom cloud and pictures of what were the greatest cities on earth. It then shows a young woman named "Roseanne Rogers" (Susan Douglas) in a disheveled condition walking down a lonely road in a state of shock and disbelief. She happens to see a cabin perched upon a mountain top and decides to take shelter there. Once inside she meets a man named "Michael Rogan" (William Phipps) who is as startled to see her as she is to see him. They think they are the last two people on earth. Until two more men show up and then a third. One of these men, "Eric" (James Anderson), believes that they have developed an immunity to the radiation and that they should drive to a city a few days away to look for more survivors. Michael believes that the city is dangerous due to high levels of radiation and unsafe. Now, rather than give the entire plot away I will just say that this is a surprisingly good movie for its time and it is rich in drama and tragedy. Definitely worth a watch for those who enjoy dystopian films of this nature.

Post-nuclear-war dramas centering on a small group of survivors now constitute an entire genre in science-fiction films. All of them, in some way or another, can be traced back to this seminal film from 1951 in which five people deal with the possibility they are the only human beings left alive on the planet.

While most of the later movies exploited this possibility for B-movie thrills, "Five" adopts a quiet, contemplative tone which some may find dull but which thoughtful viewers are more likely to find, for want of a better word, haunting. There is something about this movie which gets under the skin and which lurks in the corners of the mind long after it's over.

Especially memorable is the trip to the city made by two of the survivors. The images of skeletons sitting in cars and buses still have an impact with their silent, disturbing, even horrifying beauty.

Some of the musical score now seems obtrusive and the dialog tends, at times, toward the pretentious -- perhaps a lingering effect from Arch Oboler's radio background -- but this low-budget, no-name, black-and-white production remains a landmark film which richly deserves to be rediscovered and honored.

Enjoyed viewing this black and white film from 1951 dealing with a few people who were able to survive a nuclear war which killed millions of Americans. William Phipps, (Michael) lived in New York City and witnessed the entire city's population killed and he traveled to the West and was able to find a town where he could obtain food and shelter. As the film develops he meets up with a young woman named Roseanne Rogers, (Susan Douglas Rubes) who is pregnant and Michael takes her under his wing and tries to comfort her and he begins to fall in love with her. However, Roseanne wants to find her husband in the city and keeps her distance. There is three men and one woman who remain alive in this film and all these people begin to get on each other's nerves and this story takes on some very mysterious twists and turns.

I 'd never heard of this movie, so I was surprised at how good it was, shoestring budget or not. The acting isn't that bad, although James Anderson (Eric) has one of the strangest accents I've ever heard (It's somewhere between London, Bombay and Berlin). One fascinating 6th surivivor in the movie is the house itself that most of the scenes take place in. It is a cliff house designed by the great American Architect , Frank Lloyd Wright. Somehow the house and scenery add an extra sense of elegance to the movie that would have been lost if it was set in another setting. The characters are frequently filmed against the spectacular views from the house's large glass windows, emphasizing their loneliness in a world now so large and unpopulated. The pacing is glacial and seems to dwell on the (frequently depressed) moods of the characters, bringing to mind Bergman films like Persona (although Arch Oboler is no Igmar Bergman). The most likeable character is Charles, played by Charles Lampkin, who would go on to appear in films as varied as 'The Man', 'Islands in the Stream' and 'Coccoon' as well as a semi-regular character 'Ralph' on Mayberry RFD. He has a sweetness and naturalness that makes his paraphrasing of the beginning of Genesis one of the high points of the movie. It's a pity that he wasn't born later, or we would have seen more of him than the string of uncredited appearances in movies throughout the 60s and 70s.