In short: Star of India (1954)

After five years of war in India, French country squire Pierre St. Laurent (Cornel Wilde) returns to his home only to now find it the property of a widowed Dutch countess named Katrina (Jean Wallace). Governor Narbonne, the man responsible (and clearly evil because he is played by Herbert Lom) took Pierre’s home and estates for unpaid back taxes and sold them off, or so he says. He also offers no recourse (and certainly no apologies) to the rather incensed soldier.

Katrina, on the other hand, does. Apparently, another bit of bad business instigated by the Governor not only left her husband dead in a duel with the man, but also put the villain’s grubby hands on a family jewel that means rather a lot to her. Right now, it is hidden in a pretty tacky looking “Indian” statuette in Narbonne’s office. If Pierre would agree to, ahem, reacquire the jewel for Katrina, she’d pay him by giving him back everything that belonged to him. Obviously, the good lady might by leaving out some pertinent facts Pierre will learn in due course while swashbuckling, and sometimes scheming his way back to his proper home and hearth, and of course into Katrina’s heart.

While not a top tier swashbuckler, this Cornel Wilde vehicle directed by Arthur Lubin is often very good fun, featuring very satisfying amounts of fencing and intrigue, though not quite enough romance, for Katrina is basically non-existent for much of the plot between the first act and the finale.

The plot is mostly a somewhat obvious developed series of moves, feints, and reversals of exactly the kind you’d expect from a genre in which the plotting does quite appropriately tend to take on the quality of a fencing match. Yet despite being obvious, it’s also nearly always fun and develops in a good pace.

Rather more surprising is that this is a movie about a swashbuckling hero acquiring foreign loot to put it in the hand of a group that wants to put it back where it belongs (apparently to guarantee peace in India), not at all a move typical for this sort of thing, and certainly rather likeable.

As is much of the film, really. Wilde, despite generally getting a bit stiff in the intrigue and dialogue bits (as usual), was the kind of actor at least putting extra effort into those parts of his performances that didn’t come natural, and always did some convincing swashbuckling, too. Lom is always a delightful villain, in this particular case a guy who always seems completely outraged by the idea that anyone could try to pull any of the sort of dirty tricks he enjoys on him, which is the sort thing that makes a villain fun.

In short: No Blade Of Grass (1970)

Humanity's finally done it. The Earth's natural resources have been wasted and poisoned, and now a new disease is destroying all grass-type plant life like rice and wheat, promising food shortages in apocalyptic dimensions.

While China is gassing its own population centres to reduce its population to a survivable number, the UK hasn't quite been reached by the catastrophe yet, but it's only a question of time until it does.

Architect John Custance (Nigel Davenport) plans to take his wife Ann (Jean Wallace), his teenage daughter Mary (Lynne Frederick), and their youngest child David (Patrick Holt) to his brother's farm far away in the countryside, for he's cultivating plants that aren't (yet) touched by the disease there. Plus, the farm's naturally situated so it can be easily defended once the expected anarchy breaks out.

Warned by Mary's boyfriend Roger (John Hamill), who works in some scientific capacity for the government, that a state of emergency will be declared shortly, the Custance's and Roger begin to make their way towards safer pastures. The situation deteriorates quickly, though, and soon enough, the group kills and steals its way to survival, not so much slowly losing its civilized veneer but throwing it away with great enthusiasm.

Cornel Wilde's No Blade of Grass (based on a novel by John Christopher whom you may know for his - also post-apocalyptic - YA book series The Tripods) is an early, desperately bleak example of the post-apocalypse movie that not only predates most of this particular genre (at least on screen), but is also much grimmer than many of its successors.

Seldom have I seen a film this willing to make no particular moral difference between the way its protagonists try to achieve survival, and those the groups they encounter do. In No Blade of Grass's world, barbarity seems to be humanity's natural state that it only too happily falls back into again once civilization gets into trouble. However, it's clear that Wilde, unlike a representative of the survivalist bend of post-apocalyptic fiction would be, may be deeply pessimist about human nature, but isn't perverse enough to celebrate this state of affairs. So there's an - often blunt, sometimes quiet - sense of desperation running through the film I found particularly moving.

On the directorial side, No Blade Of Grass (at least in its newly restored full-length version) is a bit of a schizophrenic case. Half of its emotional punch is based on laconic, semi-documentarian shots of people wandering through the empty English countryside, polluted nature, and action sequences that are suspenseful yet devoid of action hero behaviour. This mood is regularly broken up by strange stylistic flourishes like flashbacks and flashforwards, negative shots and freeze frames (most of this stylistic excess is completely missing from the film's shorter versions, making that version more easily digestible, and weaker) that can seem awkward and blunt, yet also help emphasise that the film isn't meant as a man's adventure movie. Wilde doesn't want his audience to be excited by the action, so he's undermining the normal build-up of suspense for this sort of movie. It's a rather bizarre way to go about it, but it works.

 

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