Gas-s-s-s: Corman's Youth Apocalypse

The full title is Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, which tells you the register before a frame rolls. Roger Corman shot it for American International Pictures in 1970. An experimental nerve gas escapes from a defence installation in Alaska and kills every human being over the age of twenty-five. The survivors — everyone young — inherit an America with no adults in it, and Corman sends a carload of them across the southwest to see what they build.

What they build, mostly, is high school. That is the film’s one real idea and it is a good one.

Gas-s-s-s also happens to be the most consequential film in Corman’s career, and almost none of that consequence is on the screen. AIP recut it without his consent. He left the company he had effectively built, founded New World Pictures, and spent the next two decades running the most productive talent pipeline in American cinema from his own lot. The picture that broke the relationship is a shaggy, uneven, frequently delightful comedy that hardly anyone has seen.

What the film actually is

George Armitage wrote it, and the script has the loose, associative structure of a revue rather than a plot. Robert Corff plays Coel and Elaine Giftos plays Cilla; they leave Dallas and head for a commune in New Mexico, picking up passengers and encountering micro-societies along the way. Bud Cort turns up as Hooper, a year before Harold and Maude made him famous. Cindy Williams is Marissa. Talia Shire appears under her birth name, Talia Coppola, before The Godfather. Ben Vereen is there. Country Joe McDonald and the Fish supply the music and McDonald appears on screen.

The episodic structure is the argument. Each stop is a different attempt to organise the new world, and every one of them reproduces something from the old one. A football team has reconstituted itself as a marauding army in helmets and pads, running plays on live targets. A golf-club fascism operates somewhere else. A media operation is up and running before anyone has solved food. The gag is consistent and it is not really a gag: hand a generation a blank world and within weeks they will have rebuilt the institutions they claimed to hate, because those are the only shapes they know.

Corman films it in a style that is best described as generous. The camera is loose, the actors are clearly having a lovely time, the desert light does most of the production design’s work. There is a recurring figure who rides a motorcycle and calls himself Edgar Allan Poe, with a woman named Lenore on the back — a private joke about Corman’s own Poe cycle for AIP, which had been the making of him as a director a few years earlier and which I wrote about in Roger Corman: the mogul of the margins.

Why the loose style works

The reflex is to call the shapelessness a fault. Watch it again and the looseness is load-bearing. A tightly plotted version of this premise becomes a thriller about survival, and survival is exactly the subject Corman has no interest in. Nobody in Gas-s-s-s is hungry. Nobody is really frightened. The apocalypse has already happened, off screen, in a sentence of voice-over, and the film opens on the far side of it with the corpses tidied away. That is a deliberate structural choice, and it clears the deck for the only question Corman wants to ask, which is sociological rather than dramatic.

The road-movie frame then does the rest of the work for free. A journey gives you an excuse to visit six societies in ninety minutes without explaining how anyone got anywhere. Corman had been running that economy for fifteen years — he understood better than anyone alive that structure is a budget decision as much as an artistic one. The picaresque is the cheapest possible way to survey a civilisation.

The performances hold it together where the script frays. Corff and Giftos play the leads as amiable and slightly dim, which is correct; the film would curdle instantly if its heroes were smarter than the satire. Bud Cort, even in a small part, is already doing the deadpan otherworldliness that would carry Harold and Maude — you can watch a star being assembled in real time.

The ancestor

Gas-s-s-s gets shelved with the acid movies, and the marketing invited that. Its actual ancestor is Lord of the Flies — the Peter Brook film of 1963 as much as the Golding novel — the same experiment run at a different scale. Remove the adults, watch the hierarchy grow back. Brook’s version is a tragedy filmed in monochrome on a Puerto Rican beach. Corman’s is the same thesis played as farce in colour on a New Mexico highway, and it arrives at an identical conclusion by a route that lets you laugh on the way.

The other useful comparison is Wild in the Streets, AIP’s own 1968 hit, which shares the premise of a world handed to the young and reaches a far colder verdict — there the revolution interns its parents and then eats its children. Corman is fonder of his kids than Barry Shear was of his. He thinks they will muddle through and probably rebuild the golf club. Shear thinks they will build the camps. Two films, one studio, two years apart, and the gap between them is the whole argument about what the counterculture was going to turn into.

Set it alongside The Trip, Corman’s own 1967 excursion, and you can see him working the material from both ends: the interior in 1967, the society in 1970. Both are the work of a man watching a movement with real curiosity and no membership card.

The cut that changed everything

Here is the production history, and it matters more than the film. AIP took Gas-s-s-s away from Corman and re-edited it before release, trimming material and removing, among other things, a recurring voice-of-God device that ran through the picture. Corman had spent fifteen years as the company’s most reliable director and had never had a film taken from him. He left AIP over it and founded New World Pictures, and New World is where Scorsese, Demme, Dante, Bogdanovich, Sayles and Cameron got their starts — the pipeline described in The Corman film school: everyone who started at the bottom.

So the causal chain runs: a nerve-gas comedy nobody remembers gets cut by a nervous distributor, and half of New Hollywood ends up with a training ground. Sam Arkoff’s edit is arguably the most expensive scissors work in the history of the exploitation business. AIP lost the man who had made them, and got a slightly shorter comedy for it.

The case against

The film is genuinely uneven, and pretending otherwise does it no favours. The jokes land at maybe a fifty per cent rate. Whole vignettes fizzle. The satire is broad enough that some of it barely qualifies — the football fascists arrive with their meaning stapled to their chests. Because the film has no dramatic engine, the moments where the comedy fails leave nothing running underneath, and the picture simply sits there until the next stop on the road.

The recut damage is real, too. Transitions land badly, a couple of sequences begin in the middle of themselves, and the thing has an unmistakable air of having lost connective tissue. You are watching a compromised object, and it is not always possible to tell whether a given wobble is Corman being loose or AIP being frightened.

There is also the awkwardness of a satire about the counterculture made by a company selling to the counterculture, and Corman’s affection blunts the blade. He likes these people too much to finish the job. Wild in the Streets has no such handicap, which is why it cuts deeper and feels worse.

The verdict

Gas-s-s-s is a minor film with a major idea and a career-defining backstory, and it deserves better than the near-oblivion it currently occupies. The idea — that a clean slate is a fantasy, because the people handed it are already carrying the old world in their heads — is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time, and Corman gets to it with more wit and less sermonising than the era usually managed. The looseness is a feature. The unevenness is a fault. Both are true and the first one wins.

Watch it for the young cast, half of whom became somebody; for the desert, which Corman shoots like a man on holiday; and for the historical vertigo of seeing the exact point where the most important producer in American genre cinema decided he had had enough. It turns up in Corman retrospectives and on the streaming services that carry the AIP catalogue. The available versions descend from the release cut, so what you are watching is the object AIP made, which is its own kind of appropriate.

Spoilers below

The film ends at the commune in New Mexico, where the survivors have gathered and where the various tribes converge for a confrontation the picture defuses rather than stages. Corman’s instinct, faced with a climax, is to refuse it — the football army and the assorted petty tyrants arrive and the film declines to give them a battle. Instead the dead of history turn up: figures including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and other assassinated public faces appear in a final procession, a gesture towards the idea that the young world will have to reckon with the ghosts of the one that produced it.

It is a strange, tonally naked ending and it does not entirely work, which may be the most honest thing about it. The film cannot decide whether to bless its characters or bury them, so it walks them into a benediction it has not earned and hopes the music covers the gap. Country Joe obliges. The apocalypse ends with a shrug, a parade of martyrs and a suggestion that everyone might just get on with it — which, from the man who had made a career out of never losing money, plays like the closest thing to sincerity he ever put on film.