Panic in Year Zero! (1962)

Ray Milland, in career decline, entered a prolonged sci-fi/horror phase of which this is an early example. Milland actually directed as well as stared in this film about a suburban California family who are out on a fishing trip with there trailer (convent) when a nuclear war starts. Now this isn't any ware near The Day After, or Threads in terms of a realistic depiction of nuclear horror, but for its time its respectably grim. Milland's character is just the kind of guy you'd want leading you in a survival mode situation, he's preternaturally good at it. Milland knows just what to do when the family sees a bright flash and a giant mushroom cloud arising from Los Angels. First they fill up on gas, making sure not to inform the station attendant whats going on, next its to a roadside dinner to try get more information and maybe establish communications with the wife's (Jean Hegan) aging mother back home. The dinner is crowded with people, and price gouging has already begun, so they decide to go off the beaten path until they find a little town some distance from the freeway. Nobody in town knows what is going on yet, this is a different time, communication was not so instant and intensive, its possible you could go hours without hearing about a major world event. The family wakes up the local grocer, buys lots of supplies, and then goes to do the same with the local hardware store. Things go fine there until its ill fated owner doesn't want to let them take the guns until he finishes the paperwork, they don't kill the owner, but they incapacitate him and take the guns they need, he will turn up again later.

Milland's son (Frankie Avalon) proves quite helpful in everything that is going on, his daughter (Mary Mitchell) not so much. The family makes way for an isolated fishing ground they know, are briefly accosted by some punks, and then take up residence in a cave to wait out the chaos. Milland is confident that civilisation will come back, they just have to keep safe and isolated until it does. You see communication is not entirely down, there is improbably as days go by still a government broadcasting at regular intervals on the radio. For some reason the war seems to be a series of strikes on major cites, not an all at once nuclear Armageddon, instead it goes on for weeks, even months. In fact in the end there is still a president and secretary of state to negotiation things out, even a 'reconstituted United Nations' which decrees that from then on the year of the great nuclear conflict will be known to posterity as The Year Zero (it was defiantly worth spending time on that United Nations, nothing else you could have been doing).

In the coarse of the movie the family rescues a potential love interest for Frankie (Joan Freeman), and have several run-ins with the gang of young punks from earlier, there is even a surprisingly frank, though still veiled, implied rap of the daughter by the delinquents, who again it is implied did similar things to Joan, leaving her not instantly smitten with Frankie's good natured advances. The film ends with the family coming back into contact with national guardsmen and the reemerging presence of government and civilisation, there's even a rather quaint episode with a small town doctor who stays at his post waiting for his people to come back. This is a pretty good little flick, you really couldn't expect much more from it then you get, obviously it's dated, but intriguing, and with scattered hints at depth. I enjoyed it much more then I thought I would. **1/2