Peter Graves' Post-Mission Career: Where Have All The People Gone? (1974)

Following the conclusion of Mission: Impossible, Peter Graves starred in a string of TV movies with titles like SST: Death Flight, The President's Plane Is Missing and Where Have All the People Gone? Despite a title that sounds like it belongs in Troy McClure’s filmography on The Simpsons, the latter is a fairly effective low budget post-apocalyptic thriller. Graves, playing his actual age now instead of insisting on the ridiculous late-season Mission: Impossible assertions that he’s a “young man” and that his hair is blond and not white, is the patriarch of a California family on a camping trip in the mountains. His wife leaves in their car to head back to their home in Malibu for work, leaving Graves and his son and daughter (a young Kathleen Quinlan) with family friend Tom Clancy (not the writer). While Clancy cooks dinner, the family does a little spelunking. Clancy witnesses a strange flare in the sky. Is it a distant atom bomb? Or is it the sun itself flaring up in an unpredictable fashion? Whatever it is, it’s followed immediately by an earthquake. Graves and his children come clamoring out of the cave, safe. But Clancy, having witnessed whatever it was he witnessed, doesn’t feel so well. Within a few days he’s dead, and his body, strangely, disintegrates, leaving only his empty clothes and a little sand. This–combined with the fact that the radio hasn’t worked since the earthquake–convinces Graves and his kids that it might be a good idea to hightail it home. (They’ve already had the foresight not to eat any food except what was down in the cave with them at the time of the event, lest the rest be radioactive.)

The trio eventually ambles into suburbia, and finds it completely deserted. No people anywhere! Hence the title. (Strangely, there also aren’t little piles of clothes all over the street as you’d think there would be if they all disintegrated like Clancy, but we won’t worry about that. It is a missed opportunity for some extra creepiness, though.) The spooky, people-free atmosphere leads to a nice shock moment when they discover a living person staring out a window at them. Eventually they encounter some other survivors, but no one has much idea what has happened or why whatever it was didn’t happen to them. We do get an explanation in the end (having to do with solar flares), but it’s so implausible that the filmmakers would have been much better off leaving the entire phenomenon unexplained. Heading for Malibu, where they hope to find their wife/mother, our trio pick up a few traveling companions along the way including a young boy and a woman named Jenny who won’t speak a word. Other survivors aren’t so amicable, having quickly resorted to violence. (The group has their car stolen at gunpoint, and the boy’s parents were killed for their vehicle.) Whatever event transpired, it also made the animals go crazy. Peter Graves fans will get a kick out of seeing him bravely fight a “savage” house cat and a collie not unlike Lassie!

Director John Llewellyn Moxey (a veteran of The Avengers and other ITC spy shows as well as Mission: Impossible) generates a generally creepy atmosphere, but I kept hoping for a different ending. I kept hoping that Anthony Zerbe or someone would pop out and reveal that he was behind some massive con job, making Graves believe that the world had ended and he was the last man on earth as revenge for all the times Graves and his crew played that exact trick on traitors and foreign agents and Syndicate men on Mission: Impossible! Alas, it’s not to be.

Where Have All the People Gone? isn't on DVD, but it does play from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel.