I have yet to watch the film I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, aka The Fresh Prince. Richard Matheson's source novel, though, is a great book.
There were two prior adaptations of the novel. In the 1970s, Charlton Heston essayed the role as The Omega Man, and though I loved ol' Chuckles, it was not nearly as good a film as Soylent Green, nor the first filmic adaptation, the 1960s version, called The Last Man On Earth, starring another of my all time faves, Vincent Price. Who could not love Vinny?
The shots in this black and white film are excellent, and that's likely because it was made at the height of Fellini and Antonioni-mania, in Italy. Price made every role he played better than it had any right to be. He brought intelligence and pathos to some of the silliest characters ever invented. That's a great actor. Watch the scene where he has to stake his infected dog, and then you see a blanket with a stake in it. But he was doomed, by his non-leading man looks, to B films. Watch the film, and the case against voiceovers is rent. This film makes excellent use of such.
Here's the trailer:
Here's the film for free:
Now, of only The Unearthly Stranger or Planeta Burg were in public domain.
BONUS POEM:
VINCENT PRICE IN THE DRAPERY FOLDS
An indignant resign resides in the box
that shapes his eyes within the frame of the world
windowed and decorated and fluttering
in the motions of motion you largely see
but choose to ignore: his earlier career
was a banal extravagance into here
where the flesh remembers no time he was not
creepy and old and decaying with silent
eyes that entwined you like the billowing cloth
which frames your gaze away from television
and into the real world or out into it
because all is tragic when one is without
as he in between the cloth and the glass or
the divine chaotics of wish and snowflake.
