BONUS BLOG -- 1959: THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

What’s it about?

Coal miner Harry Belafonte is trapped when the shaft he’s inspecting caves in, and five days later help still hasn’t arrived. He manages to dig himself out, but upon emerging on the surface he finds an apparently empty world. Driving to New York City, he sees the same emptiness everywhere -- abandoned cars jam the Brooklyn Bridge and the Lincoln Tunnel, but otherwise there is no sign of any people or what happened to them. Eventually he learns that a poisonous radioactive dust was released into the Earth’s atmosphere during a quick-brewing nuclear war. It engulfed the planet and killed everything within days (including most animals and plants) but then decayed into harmlessness in the five days before he surfaced.

The lone survivor sets up base in an apartment building in New York -- hooking up a generator, collecting food, searching for other survivors via shortwave radio, and rescuing books and pieces of art from the crumbling city. Unlike most last men on Earth, this one doesn’t have any zombies or mutants or even feral animals to deal with. He is literally alone (except for a couple of mannequins) until two other survivors also arrive. First a woman and then another man show up in New York, and they form an uneasy community where racial and sexual conflicts whirl just below the surface until they erupt into a final confrontation.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

Unfortunately, I watched this in probably the worst possible venue to see any movie. It was playing near the end of a 24-hour science fiction marathon, and even though I showed on purpose to see this particular movie, most of the rest of the audience were exhausted after an all night/all day vigil and could have cared less about some forgotten movie from the fifties about the end of the world. It’s a bit difficult to assess the quality of a movie that was continuously interrupted by snide comments and snores, but overall I thought it was pretty well done. It’s much more of a B-picture than ON THE BEACH, but this one is also more interested in the speculative aspects of the end of the world.

Regarding the apocalypse itself, a lot of seemingly important details are glossed over or ignored entirely. For instance, Harry Belafonte never encounters a single corpse and it’s never explained where they are all supposed to have gone. (Presumably the MPAA censors picked them all up -- yet 1960's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is another end-of-the-world picture from just one year later that is rife with dead bodies.) It’s also not clear exactly how much of the Earth’s wildlife has been killed. Characters are ecstatic that a couple of tree branches still have enough life to blossom, but a very obvious flock of birds passes without any comment in another scene. But if you’re able to ignore all the hanging whys and hows concerning the nuclear attack itself, the movie does become a pretty gripping tale of lone survivors in a dead world. Harry Belafonte spends a lot of time by himself in the Big Apple, dealing with loneliness. (There are some neat shots of an abandoned Times Square here, just barely preempting I AM LEGEND by a mere fifty years.) Likewise, the relationship between the man and the woman is developed slowly -- and they just seem to be getting comfortable with each other when the third survivor shows up and introduces an entirely new dynamic.

Much of the first two-thirds of the movie does feel a bit familiar since it’s territory that’s been gone over so many times since 1959 -- but that’s no fault of THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL. But one interesting wrinkle (and part of the point of the movie) is the racial element. Harry Belafonte is black and the other two survivors are both white. Even when Harry Belafonte and the woman are seemingly completely alone in the world, they still share an uneasy understanding that they won’t be repopulating the world together any time soon, even though they are attracted to each other. This is frustrating to a modern viewer, but the characters seem unsure what the rules of the new world will be when other survivors eventually show up. And frustrating or not, it does point out how deeply some conventions can be ingrained in people. It is in fact the arrival of the white man that forces them to honestly face their feelings. The rapid descent of the two men into competitiveness and then violence is fairly predictable, but it’s never totally clear how things will resolve themselves until the final shot of the movie.