A decade before The Last Man on Earth and its updated remakes, The Omega Man and I am Survivor, this apocalyptic film came along to describe the day after tomorrow. Missing special effects, silly soap opera and stars, it focuses on how people try to change old habits and temptations, dealing with the deadly consequences of a nuclear attack. The one key sequence in this that helps it rise into something unique is when two antagonistic survivors make a tentative truce, citing the realization that this is important for continuing peace. A disturbing scene has the pregnant heroine venturing into a city which was obviously a target. More profound than the silly science fiction films with radio-active monsters, it suffers as a result of too much silence which makes these five face a fate worse than annihilation: isolation.

A quintet of people have to work together to stay alive and persevere in the wake of a nuclear holocaust that has killed off everyone else on the planet. Writer/director Arch Oboler relates the engrossing story at a steady pace, creates and sustains a properly bleak and sober tone throughout, puts a firm emphasis on interaction between the well-drawn characters over cheap melodrama or heavy-handed moralizing, and ably crafts a strong mood of despair and hopelessness. The fine acting by the capable cast holds the picture together: Susan Douglas as the pregnant, shell-shocked Roseanne Rogers, William Phipps as kindly intellectual Michael, Charles Lampkin as the genial, soft-spoken Charles, James Anderson as arrogant troublemaker Eric, and Earl Lee as polite old gentleman Mr. Barnstaple. Moreover, this movie gains considerable strength and impact from its low-key and unsentimental evenly balanced portrait of a dismal and distressful situation that brings out both the best and worst in humanity. The sharp black and white cinematography by Sid Lubow and Louis Clyde Stoumen provides a stark film noirish look (the shots of empty streets littered with skeletons are especially striking). Henry Russell's moody score does the brooding trick. Worth a watch for fans of end-of-the-world cinema.

I had been in Los Angeles on August and went around Arch Oboler's house. It was amazing! I saw FIVE more than 50 years ago and the place is still there, maybe assuring to me that the world won't end, in spite of men's irresponsibility. The silence and the sounds of FIVE are in my memory since I was less than 10 years old. I have it and use to see it very often. When I came back home I noticed the visit to the location opened my eyes and my mind to details I haven't seen and heard before, as the stairs, the poem "Creation" and the music of Henry Russel. What a movie! I have no doubt: my very favorite sci-fi. There are only two other movies that fixed the same discomfort in me: THEM! and the first PLANET OF APES.

I thought this was a fascinating and gutsy film made only six years after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its almost documentary feel made it most realistic and the script was very intelligently written (per Oboler's radio background). Having toured the structures depicted in the movie that were designed in 1940 by world famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright (those were Wright's actual blueprints and architectural model for the house that appeared in the scene of the office that belonged to "Steven Rogers A.I.A." - American Institute of Architects). A suspenseful little movie that one has to wonder how it would have looked had it been directed by the likes of Hitchcock or Welles.