“This is a test. This is only a test.” For anyone who grew up with the Emergency Broadcast System, that phrase meant nothing was wrong — a monthly tone, a few seconds of static, then back to the regular program. This Is Not a Test takes that exact reassurance and inverts it. The title is the broadcast you’d hear on the one day the test wasn’t a test. A GPA Productions release from 1962, shot in black and white for almost nothing on a stretch of California highway, the film spends 73 minutes with a handful of strangers locked behind a police roadblock while the Emergency Broadcast System tells them, repeatedly, that this time it’s real.
The lead actor, Seamon Glass , was a former Marine Corps heavyweight boxer who’d been working as a boxing instructor for Hollywood actors when one of his clients — director Fredric Gadette — offered him the part, kinda out of nowhere. Two years before that, Glass had an uncredited bit as a pirate in Spartacus (1960) ,and then nothing much for a while. Ten years later, he’d play one of the Griner brothers in Deliverance (1972), which is one of the most quietly menacing performances you’ll ever see in a movie built almost entirely out of menace. In between all that, he took the role of a deputy sheriff, slowly losing the thread on a roadblock situation full of people who honestly think they’re about to die.
One of the people in his roadblock is played by Ron Starr — who, the same year, appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) alongside Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in what many critics consider one of the great American Westerns. 1962 was the only year either Glass or Starr did work of any real consequence in front of a camera, and one of those two pieces of work was this film: a roadblock, a countdown, and a supply truck that a handful of strangers are trying to turn into a bomb shelter before the missiles land.
This Is Not a Test 1962 — Movie Overview Table
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | This Is Not a Test |
| Release Date | 1962 |
| Country | United States |
| Runtime | 72–73 minutes |
| Genre | Drama, Science Fiction, Cold War / Nuclear Holocaust Fiction |
| Language | English |
| Format | Black & White, Sound |
| Director | Fredric Gadette |
| Producers | Fredric Gadette; Murray De Atley |
| Executive Producers | James Grandin; Arthur Schmoyer |
| Production Manager | Gordon Gadette |
| Screenplay | Peter Abenheim, Betty Lasky, Fredric Gadette |
| Cinematography | Brick Marquard |
| Editor | Hal Dennis |
| Music | Greig McRitchie |
| Production Company | GPA Productions |
| Distributor | Allied Artists |
| Filming Location | Rural highway, central California |
| Notable | Seamon Glass’s first lead role (later Deliverance, 1972); Ron Starr appeared the same year in Ride the High Country (1962) |
| IMDb Rating | 5.3/10 |
| Public Domain | Yes — freely available to stream and download |
Full Cast — This Is Not a Test (1962)
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Seamon Glass | Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter |
| Thayer Roberts | Jacob Elliot Saunders |
| Aubrey Martin | Juney |
| Mary Morlas | Cheryl Hudson |
| Mike Greene | Joe Baragi |
| Alan Austin | Al Weston |
| Carol Kent | Karen Barnes |
| Norman Winston | Sam Barnes |
| Ron Starr | Clint Delany (hitchhiker) |
| Don Spruance | Peter |
The Phrase That Was Supposed to Mean Nothing Was Wrong
By 1962, “this is a test, this is only a test” was a familiar piece of American background noise — the Emergency Broadcast System’s monthly check-in, a brief interruption that existed specifically so people would learn to ignore it until the day it mattered. The film’s title takes that exact sentence and removes the word that made it safe. This Is Not a Test is the broadcast nobody wanted to hear, arriving in the format everybody had been trained to dismiss.
The film belongs to a specific cluster of early-1960s low-budget productions built around the same premise: ordinary Americans, told with absolute certainty that a nuclear attack is minutes away, and the film’s real interest in how they behave once the certainty sets in. Science fiction historian Gary Westfahl’s assessment of the film — that it demonstrates the ineptness ordinary people would likely show in the face of an actual nuclear attack — gets at what separates this from the genre’s more spectacle-driven entries. There’s no mushroom cloud here, no special effects budget for the bomb itself. The entire film takes place on one stretch of road, with a handful of people who have nowhere to go and nothing to do except wait and reveal who they actually are under pressure.
GPA Productions and the Four-Day Shoot
GPA Productions was Fredric Gadette’s outfit — a small independent operation with executive producers James Grandin and Arthur Schmoyer providing the financing, and Gadette’s own family involved in the production: his production manager, Gordon Gadette, shares the surname. One IMDb reviewer who saw the film as a child on late-night television and spent years trying to track down the title estimated the shoot at four or five days. Nothing about the production’s scale contradicts that estimate. A single highway location, a handful of vehicles, ten credited actors, and a 73-minute runtime describes exactly the kind of production a determined independent crew could complete in under a week in 1962.
What that constraint produces, though, isn’t necessarily a weakness. The same reviewer — who specifically remembered the film’s “smothering mood of impending doom” — made the case that the low budget and the confined setting work in the film’s favour. There’s nowhere for the camera to go except into the faces of the people at the roadblock, and nothing for the actors to do except react to each other. A bigger budget would have given the production somewhere else to point the camera. This one didn’t have that option, and the film is better for it.
Full Plot Summary — This Is Not a Test (1962)
Late at night on a rural road somewhere in central California, Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter (Seamon Glass) sets up a roadblock on orders from dispatch. The initial reason given is mundane enough — blocking access to a city ahead — and Colter, alone, begins stopping every vehicle that approaches. Within a short time he’s accumulated a small, mismatched group: an elderly man, Jacob Elliot Saunders (Thayer Roberts), travelling with his granddaughter Juney (Aubrey Martin); a recently wealthy man, Al Weston (Alan Austin), and his alcoholic wife Cheryl Hudson (Mary Morlas); a married couple, Sam and Karen Barnes (Norman Winston and Carol Kent); a truck driver, Joe Baragi (Mike Greene); his passenger Peter (Don Spruance); and a hitchhiker, Clint Delany (Ron Starr).
The Broadcast Changes Everything
Over the police radio, attack warnings begin. What started as a routine roadblock becomes something else entirely: confirmation, repeated and escalating, that a nuclear strike is imminent and that the group at this roadblock has no way to reach safety in time. The film’s structure shifts immediately — from “why are we being stopped” to “what do we do with the time we have left,” and the answer the group settles on is the truck. Joe Baragi’s supply truck, parked at the roadblock by chance, becomes the closest thing to a bomb shelter available to anyone present. The group begins converting it.
Clint Delany Is Not Just a Hitchhiker
Partway through, the film introduces its second source of tension: Clint Delany, the hitchhiker, is revealed to be wanted for murder — a psychotic on the run, picked up by chance just before the roadblock went up. This complicates everything. The group now has to manage both the external threat, counting down on the radio, and an internal one, sitting among them and increasingly unstable as the pressure mounts. Ron Starr plays Delany with a quality that, watching the film with the knowledge of what he’d be doing in Ride the High Country the same year, reads as more controlled than his detractors in that other film’s discussion threads would suggest he was capable of.
The Countdown, the Truck, and Colter’s Unravelling
As the countdown to the strike continues, the group works to seal themselves inside the truck — their best and only option. Colter’s behaviour, meanwhile, becomes increasingly erratic. The deputy who began the film calmly directing traffic ends it trying to force his way into the truck the others have sealed, just as the strike arrives. The film doesn’t resolve the question of whether the truck would have offered any real protection at all. It ends on the strike itself, with Colter outside, and the ambiguity of what — if anything — happens to anyone inside.
The IMDb reviewer who called it “a perfect late-night tale of confusion and fear with a perfect ending” and asked “who was right in the end?” identified exactly what the film is doing with its conclusion. There’s no triumphant survival, no clean moral lesson about preparedness. There’s a truck, sealed from the inside, and a man left outside it when the world ends — or doesn’t, because the film doesn’t show you that either.
Seamon Glass — From the Boxing Ring to a Roadblock to Deliverance
Seamon Glass was born in Brooklyn in 1925, served in the United States Marine Corps, and competed in roughly fifty amateur and professional heavyweight boxing matches before turning to acting. His path into film was entirely practical: as a boxing instructor and sparring partner, he worked with actors and Hollywood figures who wanted to learn to box without getting hurt or having their faces damaged. One of those clients was Fredric Gadette — who, when he needed a lead for This Is Not a Test, had a 6’3″ former Marine heavyweight with an authentically rough, unactorly presence sitting right there.
Glass had already done uncredited stunt work as a pirate in Spartacus (1960), filmed in a boat scene not far from his home in Santa Monica. This Is Not a Test was his first real lead. The IMDb reviewer’s observation that Glass “doesn’t seem to be acting at all” wasn’t a criticism — it was precisely the quality that made the casting work. A deputy sheriff slowly losing composure under impossible pressure needed someone who looked like pressure was a real, physical thing to him, not a performance choice.
Glass never fully committed to acting as a career — by his own account, he preferred the financial reliability of teaching and merchant seaman work to the unpredictability of film. He turned down extra work on Kid Galahad (1962) and Captain Newman, M.D., and a merchant voyage cost him a role John Wayne had specifically requested him for, reportedly The Sons of Katie Elder. His agent dropped him over it. He kept teaching — drama at Pacoima Junior High, then for decades as a substitute teacher and guidance counselor at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles, where his students at various points included a young Demi Moore and Tim Hutton.
And yet the film career kept finding him anyway. He show up in Star Trek’s “Mudd’s Women” (1966), kind of guested around for six episodes of Perry Mason ,and then in 1972 he played First Griner in John Boorman’s Deliverance— you know, one of those menacing mountain men the canoeing group runs into, in a picture that is built almost entirely on the danger that encounter stands for. After that he kept turning up in Sleeper (as a guard who tangles with Woody Allen), Blazing Saddles, The Rose, and Damnation Alley, working pretty steady into the early 1990s, while he was teaching full time. He passed away in Los Angeles in July 2016, at 90.
Ron Starr — The Same Year as Ride the High Country
Ron Starr’s filmography is short, and almost all of it happened in a brief window around 1960 to 1962. He’d had a small role in G.I. Blues (1960) with Elvis Presley, and then — the same year as This Is Not a Test — appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, playing Heck Longtree opposite Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea in roles widely regarded as among the finest of either veteran star’s career, and one of the films that announced Peckinpah as a major directorial talent.
The MovieChat discussion thread about “whatever happened to Ron Starr” surfaces a story that’s become part of the film’s lore: that someone on the production — not Scott, not McCrea — suggested early in shooting that Starr be replaced, and that it was Scott and McCrea themselves who intervened to keep him in the role, on the grounds that his part wasn’t central enough to threaten the film either way. Whether or not every detail of that account is accurate, what’s not in dispute is that Starr made almost nothing else of consequence afterward.
Which makes This Is Not a Test a strange companion piece to sit alongside Ride the High Country in Starr’s filmography. One film paired him with two of the genre’s most respected veterans in a production now regarded as a classic. The other put him in a $5,000 nuclear-anxiety picture with a former boxer and a cast of mostly first-time and one-time actors. Both were made in 1962. Neither led anywhere else. The hitchhiker who might be a murderer in This Is Not a Test is, in the most literal sense, the same actor who spent that year being protected by Randolph Scott on a much bigger set a few miles away.
Where to Watch This Is Not a Test (1962) Free Online
This Is Not a Test is in the public domain and legally available across multiple platforms at no cost. Print quality varies across uploads.
| Platform | Format | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Internet Archive | Stream + Download (multiple formats) | Free |
| YouTube | Stream (multiple uploads; quality varies) | Free |
| Tubi | Stream (with ads) | Free |
| Public Domain Movies | Stream | Free |
This Is Not a Test (1962) on Internet Archive:
Is This Is Not a Test (1962) in the Public Domain?
Yes, This Is Not a Test is in the public domain in the United States. I mean, the copyright didn’t get renewed, so the film is freely out there you can stream, download, share, and even screen it, no real restriction or payment needed. It has been released across numerous DVD formats over the years, both as a standalone title and packaged in collections of similar Cold War-era films — but the underlying film itself carries no restrictions. The Internet Archive carries a complete version for downloading and reuse.
Critical Reception — Then and Now
The film holds a 5.3 out of 10 on IMDb — solid by the standards of public domain Cold War cinema, and reflective of a film that several reviewers describe finding more effective than its budget would suggest. The VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever assessment was two stars, with the specific complaint that the film’s social commentary is “hindered by its small budget” — a fair point about scale, though one that several individual viewers have pushed back against directly.
The most detailed account of the film’s impact comes from a viewer who saw it as a child on late-night television, spent years trying to identify it without remembering the title, and described it on rediscovery as carrying a genuinely “smothering mood of impending doom.” That kind of response — a film that lodges itself in memory specifically because of its atmosphere rather than its production values — is the strongest case for This Is Not a Test‘s ongoing relevance. It isn’t trying to show you the bomb. It’s trying to show you what people do with the last hour before the bomb, and on that narrow goal, made in four or five days on one stretch of California road, it largely succeeds.
This is a film about characters confronting the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, and the dread it portrays reflects genuine anxieties of its era. If the themes of catastrophic loss or existential fear raised here feel heavy, that’s worth sitting with rather than dismissing — and if you ever want to talk through how news of large-scale threats affects your own outlook, that’s a completely normal thing to want support with.
Frequently Asked Questions — This Is Not a Test (1962)
Q: What is This Is Not a Test (1962) about?
A deputy sheriff sets up a roadblock on a rural California highway, intending to stop ordinary traffic. The group of motorists he detains — including an elderly man and his granddaughter, a wealthy couple, a truck driver, and a hitchhiker — soon learn from emergency radio broadcasts that a nuclear attack is imminent. The film follows their attempts to convert a supply truck into a bomb shelter, complicated by the revelation that the hitchhiker is a wanted murderer, and the deputy’s own increasingly erratic behavior as the countdown continues.
Q: Is This Is Not a Test in the public domain?
Yes. This Is Not a Test is in the public domain in the United States. The copyright was not renewed, making the film freely available to stream, download, and share. The Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Public Domain Movies all carry it at no cost.
Q: Who directed This Is Not a Test?
Fredric Gadette directed the film for his own company, GPA Productions, and co-wrote the screenplay with Peter Abenheim and Betty Lasky. Gadette also co-produced alongside Murray De Atley, with James Grandin and Arthur Schmoyer serving as executive producers. The film was distributed by Allied Artists.
Q: Where was This Is Not a Test filmed?
The film was shot on a rural highway location in central California, though the exact city the roadblock is meant to protect is never identified on screen. The entire production took place at this single location, with an estimated shooting schedule of four to five days.
Q: Who is Seamon Glass and what else did he appear in?
Seamon Glass plays Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter, his first lead film role. A former Marine Corps heavyweight boxer who worked as a boxing instructor to Hollywood actors, Glass had previously done uncredited stunt work in Spartacus (1960). He went on to play First Griner in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), appeared in Star Trek’s ‘Mudd’s Women’ (1966), and worked steadily in film and television into the early 1990s while also teaching at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. He died in 2016 at age 90.
Q: Who plays the hitchhiker, and what else did that actor appear in?
Ron Starr plays Clint Delany, a hitchhiker revealed to be wanted for murder. The same year, Starr appeared in Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) opposite Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, in a film now considered one of the great American Westerns. Starr’s film career was brief, with This Is Not a Test and Ride the High Country representing the bulk of his notable screen work.
Q: What does the title This Is Not a Test refer to?
The title inverts the standard Emergency Broadcast System announcement, ‘This is a test. This is only a test,’ which Americans in the early 1960s were accustomed to hearing as a routine, harmless interruption. The film’s title represents the broadcast that would air if an actual nuclear attack were underway — the moment the familiar reassurance is withdrawn.
Q: How does the film end?
As the nuclear strike countdown reaches zero, the group at the roadblock has sealed themselves inside a supply truck in an improvised attempt at shelter. Deputy Colter, whose behavior has become increasingly irrational, attempts to force his way into the sealed truck just as the attack occurs. The film does not show the outcome for those inside, ending on the strike itself.
Q: What genre does This Is Not a Test belong to?
This Is Not a Test belongs to the cycle of late-1950s and early-1960s American films built around the premise of imminent nuclear war — a category sometimes referred to as nuclear holocaust fiction or Cold War cinema. Unlike higher-budget entries in the genre, the film has no special effects depicting the attack itself, focusing instead entirely on the psychological reactions of a small group of ordinary people in the time leading up to it.
Q: Where can I watch This Is Not a Test (1962) for free?
This Is Not a Test is freely available on the Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Public Domain Movies. All versions are legal to stream and download under the film’s public domain status in the United States.
Related Free Classic Drama and Sci-Fi Films
If This Is Not a Test (1962) sent you further into public domain Cold War cinema and low-budget science fiction drama, these are the natural places to keep going:
- Public Domain Cartoons
- Public Domain Horror Movies – Free Classic Scary Films Online
- Earthworm Tractors (1936) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Joe E. Brown Comedy
- Public Domain Movies List – All Free Classic Films (Complete Guide)
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