Five
1951
Cast Includes: William Phipps, Susan Douglas, James Anderson, Charles Lampin, Earl Lee
Director: Arch Oboler
MS Cinemania 1994
Leonard Maltin Review: Intriguing, offbeat film by famed radio writer-director Oboler about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Talky (and sometimes given to purple prose) but interesting. Filmed in and around Oboler's Frank Lloyd Wright home.
The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction:
The first 'after the bomb' film, Five concerns five US survivors - a mountaineer, a pregnant girl, a token Black, a cashier and an adventurer. This is a gloomy art film with low-budget, grainy photography, a scientifically bogus explanation for the five's survival, much talking, a racial murder and two deaths from radiation, but the theme itself retains some power. Oboler had worked extensively in radio before entering the film industry in 1945 with Strange Holiday and Bewitched, both based on his own radio plays. Five is basically a sermon against the prejudices and insanities that may lead to atomic war.
The Primal Screen:
....one of the first of the 'warning' movies was Five, written and directed by Arch Oboler who was then famous for his radio plays. It's a talky, moralizing film concerning five survivors of an atomic war who gather in a cliff-top mansion and discuss why 'it all went wrong'. For a time these five symbols of humanity - a pregnant woman, a murderer, an embittered idealist, a dying man and a black man get on peacefully but when they visit a deserted city (apart from a lack of people this post-nuclear war world appears remarkably undamaged), the Fourth World War breaks out, leaving only the girl (who has lost her baby) and the idealist. The film's message is pretty obvious - that people should learn to live in peace together - but as usual with such messages, the how is missing.
The Radio Times Guide to Science Fiction:
Former radio producer turned exploitation merchant Arch Oboler has some interesting gimmick-laden films to his credit, most notably the first movie in 3D, the notorious Bwana Devil. The gimmick here is both the title and the plot, which deals with the last five survivors after the Earth has been devastated by a (the topical) A-bomb blast. The trouble is, it's all rather static and cheap looking, and it's awfully hard to care about these particular survivors, a group of unknowns who have remained as such. A story like this really needs star-power, as was the case in such post-apolalyptic movies as On The Beach and The World, the Flesh and the Devil. However, the dialogue is clever and the situations, though contrived, are nonetheless intriguing. The bizarre whole is certainly a rare collector's item, although perhaps better suited to the radio
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updated february 2010