User Reviews

How do you rate this movie correctly? I don't know if its possible since this is not really a real movie so much as anti-communist anti-atheist propaganda of a most extreme nature.

Basil Rathbone is one of two "few" survivors. He is lecturing to Mary Murphy about the history and evils of communism. Set in an nether world where Rathbone stands at a lectern upon which a large book rests he talks and shows (in some really grizzly documentary footage) all of the terrible things that the commies have done. He says he is preparing her for what is to come, so that she can keep her eyes open and not break down. They discuss the godless communist threat and speak of her role as mother and Saviour.

Allegory? Science fiction? Psycho drama (in both senses of the term)? Your guess is as good as mine. Clearly this film's time has come and gone since the communist "threat" as been replaced by other "threats" in our world. This film is also extremely sexist with the role of the woman reduced to that of breeder and mother. The film makes clear that the role of the woman is to raise kids and suffer as a result (amazingly the film also acknowledges that she can do more but that society and "god" demands that she do only that) Watching it now is a rather quaint experience. We really thought like this back in the 1960's, and for good reason, we really were on the brink of nuclear war thanks to things like the Cuban Missile Crisis. The urgency bleeds off the screen.

Its not really possible to watch this movie as anything other than a historical document. Its not a narrative movie its a documentary with some very pointed commentary and political orientation. You can't watch this for entertainment like you would a comedy or drama, you have to look at it in terms of history and nostalgia.

The performances of both Rathbone and Murphy are suitably intense for this sort of film. Rathbone is a scary authority figure while Murphy is a warm and loving woman, perfectly modulated for getting the point across.

I liked it for what it is, anti-communist anti-atheist propaganda from a time now gone. If you watch it with that in mind you'll probably enjoy the experience. However if you watch it expecting a real movie with a plot instead of a political and social argument then you'll be bored silly.

7 out of 10 for the nostalgia factor.

"Two Before Zero" is more of a polemical statement rather than a drama, although it is not that far away from an episode of "The Twilight Zone" or an odd NET (the old PBS) drama from the 1960's ('ala "NET Playhouse). It is a dialogue between two characters illustrated by newsreel footage. Basil Rathbone plays what has been called an "inquisitor-like" charcter, and Mary Murphy is his audience. It is a warning against what happens when an ideology, in this case Marxism, is forced on individuals and the death and destruction that can occur. Hopefully, those who take the anti-Red Scare position can see that what went on in the Soviet Union and other places was not totally benevolent and lied about by its enemies in the west. (The film contains graphic footage of people who were killed by fanatical Marxists.) Although the film is dated (it came out in 1962) , I think we can still learn some of its lessons even today. Basil Rathbone, incidentally, gave a good performance in one of his last roles. This film doesn't deserve to be as obscure as it is.

It says here this is a documentary. Well, sort of. It features Basil Rathbone, who stands around in what looks to be priestly garbs before a lectern, on which sits a big book, hectoring his audience of one on the evils of communism. He is clearly not playing Basil Rathbone but it is not clear what he is. God? The devil? A down-on-his-luck actor waiting for his role in HILLBILLIES IN A HAUNTED HOUSE?

His audience of one is Mary Murphy who clearly represents.... single women looking for a guy to marry them so they can raise lots of babies, perhaps. The whole thing looks and sounds like it was done by a bunch of people who snuck into Cardinal Sheen's studio at three in the morning because he was soft on communism.

Very sad and painful. You should see some of it if you like really really really REALLY bad movies, but you can turn it off after ten minutes.

This is in the form of a semi-acted propaganda documentary, but one that would have seemed more appropriate to the hysteria of 1952 rather than to the more mellow attitudes of 1962 - although one must recall that both Castro's Cuba and the Berlin Wall were recent occurrences at the time it was made, and that the Cuban Missile Crisis was just about to arrive. If viewed from the proper perspective - putting yourself back in time to when it was made - it could be considered a fascinating mirror of that time's political, moral and end-of-the-world concerns, which is why I've rated it a quite high 8. Certainly, as a movie, it hardly exists: There is but one semi-set, consisting of little more than a couple of platforms on which the two actors can stand, and a six-step stairway leading from the floor to Mr. Rathbone's lectern, where he makes some pretty cosmic statements about the history and nature of evil in the world, and especially about Karl Marx's and Soviet Russia's more recent contributions to our continuing bedevilment. If you happen to be a Mary Murphy fan (Mary having been Marlon Brando's leading lady in THE WILD ONE), she has never had more dialogue, more close-ups, or been more simply but fetchingly photographed than she is here, and her voice projects an extremely intelligent femininity. However, I imagine most people who pick this up will do so because of Basil Rathbone and, given the qualifications already mentioned, they will surely not be disappointed, for Mr. Rathbone has never before or since enjoyed so huge an amount of dialogue to deliver in his sepulchrally mellifluous and nasty tones as he gets to conjure with here. For a guy who was considered one of the most truly nice and friendly gentlemen in the acting profession over a long career, it's always amazed me how wonderfully he could project villainy and coldness in both his voice and aspect, even when playing non-villainous characters (need I mention which one in particular?), and how incapable he seemed to be of projecting any semblance of warmth in even his most sympathetic portrayals, despite a fabled excess of such warmth in his real life. Anyway, he's not called upon to do so here, yet almost manages it at the very end of his hour-long diatribe (which is interrupted frequently by Ms. Morris, as a kind of Everywoman on a Pedestal, to make a few comments and then ask another question which will send Mr. Rathbone off into further paroxysms of beautifully delivered, if quite purple, prose). Additionally, much of his commentary is broadcast - an appropriate description, I think, for even Mr. Rathbone's whispers could probably be heard in the highest and farthest reaches of the Metropolitan Opera House - over some of the most graphic, startling and downright horrendous newsreel footage of rotted corpses, shootings, hangings, beatings, etc. I have ever seen (and now, 52 years after this film's release - assuming it was released - it is still my first exposure to most of that footage). Anyway, the whole point of the film is to be on guard against the ever-encroaching evils of communism, and that it is mainly Woman's role to be in the vanguard of this refusal to submit to The Ultimate Evil. People without a true sense of History may find much of this somewhat laughable and overwrought, but as someone who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, I can assure them that what it covers was taken very seriously at the time. (I can still recall pulling my shirt up over my head and crawling down under my school desk in rehearsal for protecting myself as best I could against the possible nuclear explosion that might someday decimate New York City. Such thinking really went on back then, and not much of it from extremists!) So, if you can watch this film with the right mindset, not retch at some of the newsreel footage, and truly enjoy the stentorian Armageddon-inducing tones of the great Basil Rathbone, allied to the visual and vocal loveliness of Ms. Murphy, you should find this a fascinating and unique viewing experience. If not, you can just admire Ms. Murphy, dressed in a gown that seems to have been torn directly off the back of Valerie Gaunt's supplicating vampiress in THE HORROR OF Dracula (we must take our pleasures where we can find them). But I can promise you this: You won't see another film remotely like this one if you live to be 100! You may want to thank God for that small mercy, but maybe not.