MS Cinemania 1994: Leonard Maltin Review:

Sober-sided film trying to drive home ecology message is just an update of films like Panic in Year Zero, with family fleeing virus-stricken London for Scottish countryside, facing panic and attack along the way. Based on John Christopher's popular novel.

The Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction:

Cereal crops all die and society breaks down. A family journey across chaotic England, battling armed groups of marauders who are searching for food, and reach sanctuary in the Lake District. [Cornel] Wilde had previously dealt well with the stripping away of civilized instincts in The Naked Prey, so this story must have attracted him, but No Blade Of Grass has an amateurish quality, reinforced by poor acting, though the depiction of anarchy is zestful. The film is disjointed, partly due to drastic cutting (96 mins cut to 80 mins) before release.

Iain McLachlan:

Former Olympic fencing hopeful and fight instructor-cum-actor Cornel Wilde became best-known for roles in period costume dramas and swashbucklers, after gaining an Oscar nomination portraying Chopin in Charles Vidor's A Song to Remember (45), typical of these being George Sherman's Bandit of Sherwood Forest (46), Lewis Allen's At Sword's Point (52) and Delmer Daves Treasure of the Golden Condor (53). Growing weary of the projects he was being offered by the mid-1950s, Wilde established his own production company to producer his own projects with him as star and director, the first of eight such films being the thriller Storm Fear (55). Of the remaining films as director three in particular stand out, the gruelling survivalist adventure The Naked Prey (66), which is probably his best known and most highly regarded work behind the camera, and the anti-war drama Beach Red (67). This adaptation of 1956 novel The Death of Grass by British novelist John Christopher is the only one of his productions he does not appear in and is part of a cycle of films produced from the early to mid-1970s and featuring some form of ecological/environmental catastrophe, among them Michael Campus's Zero Population Growth (71), Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green (73) and William Girdler's Day of the Animals (77).

A narrator informs the audience that despite much rhetoric from world governments on the subject, by the late 1970s pollution levels around the planet were out of control, with the result that the population's supply of food, air and water was irretrievably contaminated, leading to the total collapse of social order around the globe. Thanks to a friend in the government, a biologist, an architect and his family have made contingency plans to escape from London before the military seal off the city. Early one morning the friend alerts them that the military operation has begun and so they go to collect him before heading out of London via a series of unguarded side roads. An air of panic has gripped the capital as rumours spread of a plan by the authorities to gas the populations of major cities in order to conserve vital supplies for the rest of the country, and soon the travellers come face to face with a major riot. When the riot breaks up after shooting erupts between the rioters and the police, the father realises the need for weaponry and calls on a nearby gunsmith he knows. When attempting to buy more guns than is the usual quota, the gunsmith refuses to co-operate and so the architect and the scientist hold him up. They are then confronted by the gunsmith's assistant and his wife. When the older men explain the situation to him, he cold bloodedly shoots the gunsmith dead. Although shocked by his actions it is agreed that he can accompany the travellers. On the outskirts of the city, the group face their first army road-block. With the scientist causing a diversion, the younger man kills the soldiers. The architect plans to head to the North of the country and his brother's farm, but first they have to travel to his son's boarding school...

While considered to be part of the 1970s "ecological" cycle, Cornel Wilde's No Blade of Grass influences go farther back than this. The most obvious is the post-holocaust "survivalist" film typified by the likes of Arch Oboler's Five (51), Ranald MacDougall's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (59) and especially Ray Milland's Panic in the Year Zero (62). Like that work, Wilde's movie has a principled man (Nigel Davenport, Phase IV 73) forced by a cataclysmic change of circumstances. in the earlier production, a nuclear war, here environmental collapse. And like Milland's film, despite initial qualms he soon finds himself condoning the use of violence by others, such as that employed by the obviously psychotic gunsmith's assistant John Hamill (The Beast in the Cellar 71), before taking up arms himself, when he guns down a farmer's wife who won't share her supply of foodstuffs. The screenplay by Jefferson Pascal and Sean Forrestal highlights Davenport's background as a disillusioned former army officer who must now don the rank of officer again to fight a new war in order to save his family.

The other big influence on No Blade of Grass is that branch of British SF known as catatstrophism which not only featured the works of this movie's source novelist John Christopher but also notable talents such as John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids 62) and J.G. Ballard (Crash 97). Perhaps unfairly, the type of post-apocalyptic scenario portrayed in this subgenre has been described as a "cosy catastrophe", because the usually white, middle class and male professional protagonists in these novels not only find the dystopian situations they find themselves in a challenge, but one to be relished. In the worst examples, this is especially true since their public school background and values make them the rational choice to take charge of the situation and restore some semblance of power over the lower orders. To some extent, this admittedly oversimplified criticism can be levelled at Wilde's film.

The characters found in this film certainly echo the stereotypes found in many examples of the catastrophic novel, including the dedicated father, the concerned and loyal mother (Jean Wallace, Wilde's wife at the time and co-star of several of his films) and the prim daughter (Lynne Frederick, Schizo 76). Their biologist friend, Anthony May (Murder by Decree 79), is similarly a middle class government professional. Added to this group is the obviously unstable John Hamill who, with his choice in clothes and strong working class accent, stands out from the rest of the group along with his equally coarse wife (Wendy Richard). To reinforce the point that he is different from the other travellers, he is the first to kill and seems to enjoy the act. Later on he murders his wife and lays claim to Davenports's daughter. The majority of the antagonists that Davenport and his companions come across during the course of the film, such as rapists and looters, all come armed with strong cockney or Northern English accents, easily identifying them as proles.

To be fair to the director and his screenwriters do play around with this clich. Although initially presented as the "loose cannon" in the entourage, it becomes apparent that Hamill is, to some extent, being manipulated by Davenport's character to act as some sort of regulator. This is best illustrated when the younger man is used to take control of another group of travellers by force. While vocally abhorring the violence Hamill orchestrates, the father still allows him to shoot Richard, apparently merely for appearing to be unfaithful. Davenport's character is portrayed as being something of a hypocrite, relishing the opportunity to return to his military past and having the younger man carry out various atrocities while speechifying about the horror of the circumstances he and his family find themselves in.

Also where Wilde departs from many of his models is his determination to show the harshness of the scenario they now occupy. At the start of the movie the director goes out of his way to show how badly the environment has deteriorated, due to man's wanton pollution, thanks to a very effective montage involving a mixture of rather disturbing found footage of rivers and skies clogged up with noxious chemicals, starving children and overcrowded cities. This is followed by more documentary footage (along with some staged scenes) of animal carcases floating in English rivers and streams, open sewers and blackened grasslands. He then goes onto address, in a confrontational manner, some of the basic problems encountered by survivors from this type of disaster including how and where to defecate, the eating of much-love family pets and the abandonment of the old and the weak along with the disposal of the dead (including a new-born baby). Some people may find this approach heavy-handed.

The bleakness of the various characters' situation is underlined by the exceedingly harsh cinematography of H.A.R. Thomson which makes the countryside in Westmoreland, Yorkshire and Northumberland seem a truly alien and inhospitable place. Also of note is the way art director Elliot Scott (Eye of the Devil 67) redresses familiar urban and suburban locations (as well as Borehamwood Studios) to create a convincing air of decay and atrophy. Interestingly, although American, the director seems aware of the North/Side divide in England along with the inherent rivalry and hostility between these two parts of the country. The point is made, albeit obliquely, that to someone from the South-East, even in ideal circumstances, as far North as Yorkshire would be seen as virtually a foreign land.

As already mentioned No Blade of Grass shows a literary and filmic influence on its content. Style-wise the director shows another source of inspiration, namely that of the British docu-drama movement of the 1960s, which began in TV but later moved into cinema. In a number of key scenes it becomes apparent that Wilde was at least aware of the work of one of the leading lights of this movement, Peter Watkins (The War Game 65). Among those scenes echoing the British director, are shots of a British bobby patrolling the streets of London while armed with a machine gun and where a group of squaddies turn on their commanding officer. What is notable in these sequences and several others is the use of very obvious hand-held cameras, jump cuts and improvised dialogue (which some of the actors are clearly uncomfortable with). Another sequence showing a strong Watkins influence is where the travellers walk past an abandoned Rolls Royce while a commercial for the same is heard on the soundtrack.

Wilde also throws in a few directorial quirks of his own, which some viewers may find distracting or possibly annoying such as the extensive use of flash-forwards (and the occasional flash-back). Other stylistic excesses include solarisation visual effects and freeze-frames at moments of dramatic importance, like the death of Davenport's brother, Patrick Holt (Psychomania 72). On the positive side, one really effective image is used to show the state of the world as it now is, when a group of children as seen playing cricket in seemingly idyllic surroundings only to have one of them face the camera, revealing himself to be wearing an anti-pollution face-mask.

The way the opening and closing narration is used, along with the extensive use of documentary footage and indeed the sober docu-drama style in which the narrative unfolds, suggests that No Blade of Grass was a personal project for Cornel Wilde. However, he was also a commercial director and aware of the more exploitable elements required for a film like this. Thus at the climax the protagonists and other travellers have to battle a horde of Hell's Angels. While not really keeping in tone with the rest of the film, this is an excitingly handled action sequence with much pyrotechnic activity and stuntwork, which the director shows a real flair for. Also featured are such exploitative elements as a very graphic rape of Wallace and Frederick with very brutal and bloody deaths for some other characters.. Also, apparently even at the start of the 1970s, birth of a baby footage was still considered commercial.

Even compared to the rest of the film, its conclusion is bleak indeed. In a final battle, Davenport has to kill his own brother in order to obtain entry to his farm. There he finds food and water in short supply and looks forward to a very uncertain future for him and what remains of his family. Meanwhile the remaining grassland around the sanctuary continues to wither and die.

Not surprisingly No Blade of Grass was not a great success, especially when it was made at a time its studio MGM was going through one of periodic difficult phases. In the UK the film was extensively cut (by some 15 minutes), probably to fit on the bottom half of a double-bill, and has only appeared sporadically on TV schedules.

Although Cornel Wilde had various projects in development until his death in 1989, including a sequel to The Naked Prey, he continued to act in very films and only directed one more, the lame adventure Shark's Treasure (75).