My Duck Is Dead

Teenagers Glen and Randa are members of a tribe that lives in a rural area, several decades after nuclear war has devastated the planet. They know nothing of the outside world, except that Glen has read about and seen pictures of a great city in some old comic books. He and Randa set out to find this city.

Director Jim McBride (who later helmed such better known big budget films as "The Big Easy" and "Great BAlls of Fire") skillfully uses an extremely plain, basic and unpolished no-frills cinematic style to plausibly create a vivid depiction of the banality and hopelessness of day-to-day post-holocaust existence, thus giving this bleak, albeit strangely haunting and affecting apocalyptic vision an unshakable sense of gritty, lived-in conviction. 

The bare-bones, but eloquent and sometimes wittily droll script by McBride, Lorenzo Manns, and Rudolph Wurlitzer (who went on to write "Two-Lane Blacktop" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") relates with deceptive simplicity and straightforwardness a lyrically powerful parable with provocative religious allusions (Glen and Randa's odyssey could be interpreted as Adam and Eve's fall from grace after leaving the garden of Eden) about lost innocence and a futile search for an irrevocably vanished past paradise. Kudos as well to Alan Raymond's flat, spare, minimalist cinematography, which uses long, lingering, unedited takes, stately tracking shots, and elegant fade-outs to convey a wealth of striking visuals: the rusty hulk of a car with tree branches growing out of it, a horde of grimy survivors glumly rummaging through the rubble for cans of food, Randa ravenously devouring grass and worms, Glen savagely beating several fish with a stick, and the oddly poignant final shot of Glen and the old man drifting out to sea on a rickety boat are all indelible moments that stick in your memory after seeing the movie. A pleasingly quirky and truly novel one-of-a-kind experimental oddity.