The film stars William Phipps, Susan Douglas Rubeš, James Anderson, Charles Lampkin, and Earl Lee.

The film's storyline involves one woman and four men, the apparent sole survivors of a war using a new type of atomic bomb.

A newspaper headline reports a scientist's warning that detonating a new type of atomic bomb could cause the extinction of humanity.

Roseanne was in a hospital's lead-lined X-ray room, while Michael was in an elevator in New York City's Empire State Building.

According to Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, the film is the first to depict the aftermath of an Earthly atomic bomb catastrophe.

The unusual house that is the setting for most of the film was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was the separate guesthouse of the ranch of producer/director/writer Arch Oboler,[5] located at 32436 Mulholland Highway in Malibu, California.

Actor Charles Lampkin came to Oboler's notice when reading the prose poem "The Creation" by James Weldon Johnson on a Los Angeles TV program.

It would become Lampkin's soliloquy for his character Charles; this may be the first time that audiences in the USA, Latin America, and Europe were exposed to African-American poetry, albeit not identified as such in the film.

[8][6] Oboler shot this very low budget feature for $75,000, using as his crew a small group of recent graduates from the University of Southern California film school and starring five (then) unknown actors.

[5] Film reviewer Bosley Crowther in his review for The New York Times, noted the characters handicapped the film as much as the tepid plot line created by Arch Oboler, "the five people whom he has selected to forward the race of man are so cheerless, banal and generally static that they stir little interest in their fate.

[10] During the film Great Balls of Fire!, the characters Jerry Lee Lewis and his future wife Myra Gale Brown can be seen watching Five in a scene.