We Cease to Grow! (1972)

D. Damien Nostro
B&W

Much like the Doctor Who serial ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and the forthcoming ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’, this obscure grainy 1970s film features a mad environmentalist who decides that the best way to solve the population problem is to wipe out most of mankind. Obviously Paul R. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ has, and continues to have, some effect – although possibly not the one the good doctor was expecting. Let’s look at this closely, what kind of absolute nutter thinks that the best way to save the human population is to wipe out 99.9% of it? Okay, let’s say that there are people like that out there, misanthrope extremis, how would they persuade anyone else to go along with their scheme? Surely anyone propositioned to help implement this plan of mass slaughter, would back slowly away with a distinctly scared and freaked out look in their eyes. In both ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’ it’s the elite who are saved (although in the 1970s that meant intellectuals; in 2014 it apparently means celebrities), while in ‘We Cease to Grow!’ it’s less clear – but even then, surely members of any elite know people who aren’t in the elite? Surely they’re not so blasé in their lifestyle they’re happy to watch everyone else die just so they can hang out and procreate with people like themselves. Perhaps I’m being horribly naive, but I’d like to think that when some billionaire megalomaniac does come along and suggests this scheme, that most people (although certainly not all, I admit that) will say that they don’t want to be a party to the genocide of most of humanity, thank you very much.


Orson Welles plays the lead role – although even then he probably knocked out his part in about four days – as a wheelchair bound mad genius who has unleashed a terrible chemical bug into the world. Now locked down in his bunker, and resembling a bigger and scarier Raymond Burr, he ruminates on his reasons and rationale whilst chaos takes hold outside. Welles’s voice as he intones is like the rumble of the apocalypse, so it’s appropriate he’s there literally narrating the end of the world. Statistics purr out of this wounded lion, as he tells of how much food the world has left, the spread of diseases and the rise of the oceans. Outside we see the chaos starting, rioting on the streets; as well as more individual vignettes, where sad and desperate people come to the end of their sad and desperate lives. It’s not a film to make you feel good about yourself; in fact it’s difficult to work out what kind of mood the film makers want you to leave the cinema in, because as far as I can see Welles is supposed to be right here. Yes he has carried out this drastic act, but he is a sage, a seer, he is salvation. So who knows what the audience was supposed to do with it? Maybe the film makers just wanted enough people to see it so that if some megalomaniac did suggest killing most of humanity, somebody would actually say yes.