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The Facts

Written by Sean Forestal, Cornel Wilde, based on the novel The Death of Grass [No Blade of Grass, US edition] by John Christopher [pen-name of Samuel Youd]
Directed by Cornel Wilde
Produced by Cornel Wilde
Music: Burnell Whibley
Cast: Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, John Hamill, Lynne Frederick, Patrick Holt, George Coulouris, Wendy Richard
Running time: 96 minutes
Also Known As: The Death of Grass

The Plot

When wheat crops fail due to a virus, society collapses worldwide: can one makeshift ‘family’ survive and get to sanctuary…?

The Lowdown


For many years author John Christopher was only known as the man behind The Tripods novels (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire), but his hardest-hitting novel was probably The Death of Grass, an apocalyptic drama published way back in 1956.

Adapted under the US title of No Blade of Grass, the film is different to the book but just as grim in atmosphere and incident. It’s a still-timely attack on Western complacency as a technological society collapses due to a shortage of one basic staple: bread. The virus that attacks wheat crops worldwide is based upon a real, still potentially threatening situation (in the novel it is sourced to biological warfare).

The initial response to the crisis in the UK is middle class stoicism and a kind of weird racism (“It’ll be worse here than in Africa: they’re used to famine”). Things quickly move, though, to armed police on the streets, queues and rationing before launching into madness with a Government plan to gas the big cities to reduce the population by 50 per cent, followed by the rise of cannibalism.

It’s grim stuff indeed, a harsh Survivors-on-wheels drama, some of it pure agit-prop and filmed in an impressionistic style. It chronicles the brutalising effect of survival where it can come down to a choice to kill or be killed. There’s much psychodrama among the group, while an attack from outside leads to a tough-to-watch rape scene (even more brutal and explicit in the uncut version).

Desperate to appeal to the youth audience at the end of the 1960s, MGM were seemingly happy to back this offbeat, very political film. The cast are not flashy, and neither are the locations. No Blade of Grass is not easy viewing, and Wilde’s very 1970s experimental flourishes (dramatic flashforwards, negative images) sometimes get in the way, but the message of the book survives and deserves our attention.

Cult Cast

Nigel Davenport featured in many British TV series of the 1960s and 1970s, including The Avengers, and appeared in such cult films as The Mind of Mr Soames (1970), Dan Curtis’s Dracula (1973, as Van Helsing) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977) and Greystoke (1984). He played the leading role (once more opposite Lynne Frederick) in the weird ants-take-over-the-world movie Phase IV (1974), directed by Hitchcock title sequence designer Saul Bass.

Lynne Frederick might be better known as the wife of Peter Sellers and David Frost than for any of her film roles, partly due to her early death at the age of just 39 in 1994. She appeared in the children’s classic The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972), directed by Lionel Jeffries. Her final role was opposite Sellers in The Prisoner of Zenda (1979).

Director’s Cut

Cornel Wilde began as an actor, appearing in 1940s swashbucklers and film noir such as Road House (1948), Shockproof (1949) and The Big Combo (1955). He played a dodgy surgeon in the 1971 Night Gallery episode ‘Deliveries in the Rear’ and appeared in the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles. His directing career began in 1966 with The Naked Prey in which he played a man hunted by an African tribe. He died of leukemia in 1989, three days after his 77th birthday.


WTF? Moment

The Government plan to murder up to half the population so the others can survive, while the Cabinet flee to Canada, is quite shocking — all the more so because they shamelessly steal the idea from genuine totalitarian regimes…

The attack of the wild bikers is a bit weird as they keep coming when it is clear they’ve lost the fight — it’s like Indians versus Cowboys in an old Western. Circle the wagons!

Behind-the-Scenes

Wendy Richard (Are You Being Served?, EastEnders) appears in the first half of the film as Clara, the sexy wife of psycho Pierre (Anthony May). She refused to wear see-through tops as the director wanted, but did agree to don a long black wig. She welcomed shooting in the Lake District as a chance to get out of London, and became something of a chaperone to 15-year-old Lynne Frederick, whom she described as “a very headstrong young lady”.

Apparently American director Cornel Wilde didn’t get on with his British crew as he failed to understand their sense of humour.

Creators Talk

“I think that a cut [an edit] from one scene to another should have an impact, should carry you from a certain degree of involvement and excitement to something else without letting you down... I really think that a good deal of happenstance editing still goes on, and part of my style is that I like to feel there is a reason and impact to every frame of film. Nothing should be wasted.” – Cornel Wilde, Films & Filming, October 1970


Availability

An out of print VHS version (the edited US cut) can be found for about £50 online. No sign of a DVD release.

Online Resources

Forgotten Films write-up [http://johnnyvengeance.net/2009/07/forgotten-films-the-4-no-blade-of-grass]

Psychotic Cinema review [http://psychotic-cinema.blogspot.com/2010/07/no-blade-of-grass-1970.html]

Remake

Adapted (as The Death of Grass) recently as a five-part serial for Radio 4, this story is as timely as ever. A big-budget, suitably updated retelling could make a great thoughtful blockbuster.

The Bottom Line

Chilling and grimly realistic, No Blade of Grass is a cautionary tale that we should all heed.

Brian J. Robb