Friday night apocalypse: Panic in Year Zero (1962), about a family lucky enough to survive nuclear Armageddon. The story—though in some ways dated and at times very silly, especially when it comes to its uncritical reliance on rah-rah American ideology—is remarkable nonetheless for its heroizing portrayal of a father who abandons all sense of decency or moral duty mere seconds after he's realized the bombs have fallen, as well as for its brief but dark suggestion of rape and sexual slavery in the world after the apocalypse. Of course, like so many films of its era, it depicts a nuclear war as being not only survivable but actually winnable—but I suppose that's to be expected.

This lengthy review at CONELRAD Atomic Films has just about all the additional details you will ever need, if you're interested.

If you use Netflix customer, it's available to watch now—and if you're not, you can still catch the whole movie on YouTube, albeit in ten parts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

The novella on which it was loosely based (without credit), Lot by Ward Moore, is, beyond belief, even darker:

Ward Moore's "Lot" (1953) also creates a sympathetic setting for incest, as the father of the family in flight from an atomic attack on Santa Barbara abandons his blithering idiot of a wife and his whining sons at a gas station restroom, to drive off into a presumably happy future with his sexy fourteen-year-old daughter, Erika. In the sequel, "Lot's Daughter" (1954), the protagonist is made to pay for his callousness when Erika abandons him in his turn, leaving him with their child. Whereas the first story insists so strongly on the loathesomeness of the rest of the family that father-daughter incest is made to look like a logical alternative, the second seems to reject that view. A similar case for end-of-the-world incest (the holocaust in question is caused by nerve gas), also modeled on the story of Lot and his daughters, had already been published: Sherwood Springer's "No Land of Nod" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1952), in which a wife solemnly makes her husband promise to mate with their three daughters and continue the race. (See also Robert A. Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold [1964], and Bertrand Russell, "The Boston Lady" [1972].)

I've just bought the Moore story off Amazon as part of a anthology, Beyond Armageddon. I'll let you know how it turns out.