Charles, having just killed his landlady and her 7-year-old daughter, wanders through the city before arriving at the Golden Gate Bridge, where he jumps to his death.
Jordan Belson (who later became known for his own meditative works like 1961's Allures) served as the film's cameraman, shooting on inexpensive Kodachrome stock.
When the company closed in 1957, Maclaine's work didn't find a new distributor up until 1962, when Stan Brakhage and Willard Morrison of the Audio Film Center brought it back into circulation.
[6][7] Critic P. Adams Sitney described The End as a "a deliberately conclusive work" that "mixes the prophecy of immediate doom with nostalgia, as if the earth were already gone".
[9] In his review in The Moving Image, Richard Suchenski called it "Maclaine's best film,…one of the definitive cinematic expressions of the Beat sensibility.