Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen three times. Only one was based on a screenplay by the author and remains the most faithful to the original work, that being The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price as the title character, I've seen one of the other two, the 2007 version featuring Will Smith kept Matheson's title and had a chance to go with his original intentions on the ending but which wussed out before the theatrical release. That alternate ending is still available as a DVD extra, which can make the movie-as-released a lot more frustrating since the alternate ending actually made a hell of a lot more sense with everything that came before. 1971's The Omega Man I haven't seen yet, but it looks like your sort of prototypical 70s pre-Star Wars sci-fi, with Charlton Heston doing his screenchewing best, so I'll be sure to check that out in the future to see how it turned out.
That said, Last Man was the first to reach the silver screen, and if you need a go-to guy with a creepy voice back then, you hired Vincent Price, long before he was terrorizing either the Brady Bunch or Scooby Doo. He's unlisted for his two lines in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though if you don't know he was the Invisible Man at the end of the movie (a role he played elsewhere), then you just plain have never heard the man speak. His voice is that distinctive.
This is a good thing too, because one thing I didn't know about Last Man is that it was a joint American/Italian production and Price seems to be the only American cast member in the movie. Everyone else was an Italian actor with obviously dubbed dialogue. On the plus side, Price is alone for the first third to half of the movie, aside from the occasional mindless vampire/zombie lurking outside his fortified house, trying to get in and calling him by name. Price's voiceover explains the situation quite well as he goes about his business acquiring food, garlic, gas, and disposes of the motionless bodies on the side of the road when the sun is out. No doubt due to budgetary limits, these vampires don't die in sunlight: they merely stop moving like a bunch of corpses until Price can either stake or burn them, which he does. Without exception. Or mercy. Even when he finds a small dog, the only living thing he's seen in ages, he ends up staking the poor mutt and burying it somewhere.
But then the flashbacks come along, and the dubbing becomes more obvious. Dubbing is one of those things that a moviegoer might have to deal with, but many (myself included) would rather deal with subtitles. Of course, the characters here are all supposed to be Americans speaking English, so maybe this doesn't work so well, and I have to wonder how well I'd take rewatching some of those Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns now. More often then not, dubbing is more of a distraction than an aid. Here, it's too obvious and doesn't work too well.
As it is, Matheson reportedly didn't care for this movie and had his name removed in favor of a pseudonym. The basic plot of his story is usually the same no matter what the film. The hero is a man who, somehow, has avoided being infected by some kind of plague that has turned everyone else into vampire-like creatures. By day he goes around, conducting experiments on the monsters, gathering supplies. There's usually a dog and/or a dead wife and child. At some point he finds a woman and figures out something that explains Matheson's title...or else it should. Price's version goes for a more action-filled Hollywood ending, though not as over-the-top as Will Smith blowing himself up to save some people from the CGI horrorfests that have broken into his house. Matheson's story itself is, in my opinion, only so-so except for the ending, so I might have to check out Heston's version at some point to see if any of these stick the landing better than Price and Co. did.
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