Die Welt, das Fleisch und der Teufel

Harry Belafonte is a coal miner trapped in a cave-in. He hears the drilling of the rescue crew which abruptly stops. Belafonte claws his own way to the surface and finds everything abandoned. I mean really abandoned. An Armageddon has occurred when some nation decided to forego the bomb and all that destruction and just use the radioactive byproducts. It gets out of control and wipes out everybody.

Well, almost everybody. Harry hot wires a car and travels to New York City in search of life in the largest population center. After a while he finds it in Inger Stevens. It looks like another Adam and Eve ready to begin again when Mel Ferrer also shows up. By that time Belafonte has established some kind of contact with some unknown foreign survivors somewhere in the post apocalypse world?

Of course with two men, two races, and only one woman, things start to look like business as usual for mankind. I was reminded of Neil Patrick Harris's line from Starship Troopers about how we're in it for the species. Will all three of them and anyone else they contact decide we're in it for the species in The World, the Flesh and the Devil?

Director Ranald McDougall got three good performances out of his small cast. The World, The Flesh And The Devil does ask some thought provoking questions as to whether man is capable of screwing up once again. What kind of culture will they establish and will a Supreme Creator/Deity need to intervene?

Like a trashy coffee table book you just can't put down. Hard to say why, but I keep going back and watching this film again and again. The irresistible notion of a single man roaming the empty streets of the big city, holds my attention every time. However, the execution of such a powerful idea gets muddled in this particular telling. For example, the city is clean -- there are no dead bodies, and any force powerful enough to disintegrate the bodies would have left traces, of which there are none. Despite the significant problems I had with this picture, I rushed out to buy the DVD first chance I got. And I bought Miklos Rozsa's score, too.

I've seen many actors play the "last man on earth," and NO ONE ever played the part as believably as Harry Belafonte. There's his reaction when he's listening to those radio messages ; his shouting at the whole world to come back (I'm paraphrasing this) : "Where did you all go? What did I do?" ; his trying to live alone with the mannequins ; singing to himself ; his reaction when he finds out there's someone else ; his line when Mel Ferrer threatens him : "Is this World War IV ?" And Inger Stevens was extremely good in it, including her big argument with him, telling him she can live alone, with its almost funny little faux pas : "I'm free, white and 21." And Mel Ferrer, whose character (if I'm correct) was more arrogant in a GENERAL way than he was a bigot, seemed very right for that part. People have complained about the faulty science and similar things, but to me, those things pale alongside the actors and characters. One science fiction guidebook had a great line about this "last three people on earth" movie : "Well, at least one of them can sing."

In the '50s the nuclear holocaust was never far from the popular imagination. This picture is one of many fictional efforts to show what might have happened.

By being trapped in a Pennsylvania mine, Belafonte is one of the very few people on earth (as far as we know from the film, only three) to escape annihilation. He manages to get out of the mine on his own (the first of many plot contrivances), goes to New York City and finds it depopulated, except for Inger Stevens, who eventually comes out of hiding. It's mostly a picture about loneliness. As much as we may resent the jostling masses in our midst, what if they were gone?

Actually, it spurs a fantasy, too. Imagine that you had the pickings of all of New York to yourself, and imagine that you were a handyman who could rig up generators and the like, and imagine that you found a comely woman to keep you company. Could be worse.

But we are asked to ignore too much in the picture, the fact that only one person in all of the city survived, the fact that not a single rotting body is shown on the streets, the fact that the shortwave transmissions Belafonte regularly monitors show that the rest of the world is empty, too (except, eventually, for Mel Ferrer, who was sailing during the nuclear blasts)-- all a bit too much. The film tries too hard to be an allegory when it should have been good, logical science fantasy.

Nevertheless, TWTF&TD is well worth a watch.

Behind its rather emphatic title is a suitably sober entry in the 'Last Man On Earth' sub-genre. Harry Belafonte plays Ralph, a miner who was underground when an apocalypse occurs. As in many of these tales, for a while he truly believes he is the only human survivor and sets up his own little world in NYC; And, of course, he's usually wrong.

Sarah (Inger Stevens) arrives on the scene. Less understanding and tactful is Mel Ferrer as Benson. It's a racially charged triangle, but, it's handled fairly maturely by writer-director Ranald MacDougall (based on stories by M. P. Shiel and Ferdinand Reyher), even if too demurely. The actors apparently pushed MacDougall to be more open with the relationships, but the Director balked. Even with that cautious approach, the film didn't do well at the box office and it is said that some Southern theaters didn't even book it. The acting by all three helps with Belafonte showing off his considerable screen charm. Why is it, that when there is a "last trio" on earth it always seems to be two men and a woman?

The stark empty streets of New York are shot in Cinemascope by Harold Marzorati and the great Miklos Rosza provides the rousing score. THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL isn't the definitive word on the last person trope, but, it's a solid late 50s example.