Blade of Grass (1971)

(Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I have a budding thesis that Hollywood SF grew up roughly at the same time as American civilization became aware of its mortality. It’s probably nonsense, but movies like Blade of Grass almost make the case for me (even if it’s a British movie)—as environmentalism became mainstream thanks to a string of horrifying events like Love Canal and, oh, rivers catching on fire, you also had movies considering the possibility of dystopian environmental collapse. Films like Blade of Grass go all-out on the catastrophe, to the point where humans are fated to extinction on a planet without any living plants left. The narrative has a band of survivors making their way from London to a possibly mythical farm out in the northern part of the country. Multiple deadly events occur before the ending, in an all-dancing parade of downbeat plotting, violence and humans being terrible to each other. This is clearly not fun viewing for the entire family, and my opening thesis may have been born out of sheer desperation in trying to escape the nightmarish world of the film. Still, there may be something to it—the post-WW2 years were characterized by the adult themes of noir, war movies emerged from the Vietnam defeat with a far more war-is-hell attitude, and while the 1970s saw SF become more than a genre for kids right about the time that prophecies of doom became commonplace thanks to the environmentalism espoused by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the gloomy overpopulation predictions of the Club of Rome (1968). Doesn’t it also hold true for people as well? Maybe you grow up when you realize that you’re going to die.