L'histoire de l'humanité

Unlike most people, I really enjoyed this film. Not only was it unintentionally funny, but it had all the elements that would later be associated with many of Irwin Allen's latter works (stock footage and an all-star cast). Vincent Price is at his sinister best playing Mr. Scratch, the devil, and Ronald Colman is wonderful as the spirit of mankind. Too bad this film isn't on video or DVD because it truly is a cult classic that is an acquired taste.

The Story of Mankind when I saw it was a movie I initially found difficult to rate. Mainly because it is a big mess. Having said that somewhat, it is a mess that is worth seeing.

The production values are hardly high art, but they are decent. The sets are okay, the costumes are interesting and the cinematography is not exceptional but not exactly cheap either. I liked the premise as well, and it started off decently with Sir Cedric Hardwicke presiding over things nicely. There is also some good performances. Ronald Colman gives far from his best performance, but he is very suave and convincing, Marie Antoinette is nicely coquettish and Agnes Moorhead chews the scenery with glee. It was also nice to see the Marx Brothers, Harpo and Chico aren't really that funny but Groucho is though there was the odd moment not to do with Groucho more to do with the writing and the way the characters were written that came across as more offensive than amusing. Best is Vincent Price, with his powerful voice and magnetic presence, he is gleefully wicked.

However, the direction falls flat as if it is unsure of which direction to go whether it wanted to be a history lesson or an exercise in camp. The dialogue is mostly absolutely abysmal, but it is so hard not to laugh at how bad it is. The film goes at an uneven pace with some segments faster than others or better acted and written. The characters are little more than stereotypes and caricatures and badly explored ones at that, and there are some unintentionally hilarious ideas incorporated into the story especially with Joan of Arc. I liked the leads and Moorhead and Groucho, but the rest of the cast are just bizarre. Peter Lorre though isn't too bad, perhaps too young and somewhat too effeminate too but there are some moments of unexpected poignancy, but Hedy Lamarr is woefully miscast as Joan of Arc and a very over-the-top Dennis Hopper does nothing with the role of Napolean.

Overall, The Story of Mankind is a mess, but it was worth watching and I personally wouldn't put it on my worst movies ever list. 4/10 Bethany Cox

Mankind is on the verge of discovering the secret of the Super H-bomb so a special tribunal meets in outer space to discuss what to do. Arguing on behalf of mankind is the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman). Arguing that humanity must be destroyed is Mr. Scratch (Vincent Price). They both use examples from history to make their cases.

Here are some of the historical reenactments. Cavemen discover fire in the middle of an attempted murder and rape. Cleopatra (Virginia Mayo) kills her brother and seduces Caesar and Marc Anthony (Helmut Dantine). Peter Lorre plays a drunken Nero laughing while Rome burns. The most embarrassing episode belongs to Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc. Her Joan wears bright red lipstick and a terrible wig. Her trial is presided over by Henry Daniell dressed as Santa Claus. Agnes Moorehead hams it up as Queen Elizabeth I, who receives military counsel from William Shakespeare! Groucho Marx plays Peter Minuit in a painfully unfunny comedy segment where he rips off Indians for Manhattan island. Marie Wilson is a bimbofied Marie Antoinette. 21 year-old Dennis Hopper is a soft-spoken Napoleon with 37 year-old Marie Windsor as his Josephine. Among the other stars we see in this are Cedric Hardwicke as the celestial tribunal's judge, John Carradine as Pharaoh Khufu, Charles Coburn as Hippocrates, Chico Marx as a monk offering advice to Columbus, Edward Everett Horton as Sir Walter Raleigh, Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton, and Don Ameche's younger brother Jim as Alexander Graham Bell.

Today Irwin Allen is best remembered for his contributions to television like Lost in Space or his '70s disaster flicks like The Poseidon Adventure. The Story of Mankind wasn't Allen's first film but it was his first notable one. This movie came about during the heyday of Atomic Scare movies. The decade was full of them, usually in a sci-fi setting. There were some great classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still made during this era rife with paranoia. This film has the reputation of being one of classic Hollywood's biggest stinkers. Personally, I like it! But part of why I like it is because it's so flawed. It's got an all-star cast, most of whom are laughably misused. The script is terrible with some of the corniest dialogue you'll ever hear and some truly cringeworthy speeches. The history is inaccurate and blends myth with fact. It's all filmed in lush Technicolor but on cheap sets with tons of stock footage. Still, I can't help but enjoy it. It's a movie that falls squarely into the "so bad it's good" camp for me. Taken seriously, it's ridiculous and offensive to your intelligence. Taken lightly it's quite a bit of cheesy fun.

It has the distinction of being both Ronald Colman's final film and the final film to feature the main three Marx Bros. together (although they bafflingly share no scenes). By the way, listening to the Devil's point of view, it struck me how that is the more likely view we'd see advocated today, not only in films but in real-life discourse as well. Kind of depressing. Worth seeing for a variety of film fans but especially for fans of Price and Colman, who have two of the most pleasant voices the movies ever knew.

THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957) is a very elusive all-star misfire about a heavenly debate over should earth survive or be wiped out. For the defense, you have the Spirit of Man (Ronald Colman), for the prosecution, you have Satan (Vincent Price having a ball!) They each call examples of humanity by showing famous good and evil people. We see little skits involving Nero (Peter Lorre making googly-eyes at members of an orgy!) Napoleon (22 year old Dennis Hopper playing the part like a naughty frat boy!) Christopher Columbus (miscast Chico Marx), Issac Newton (even more miscast Harpo Marx!) The cast gets stranger and stranger. Aging Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc? Where was everybodies agent? The end result looks like the biggest celebrities in Hollywood are doing a 5th graders' play! An amazing film, a tape I treasure!

THE STORY OF MANKIND (1957) is not a good movie, but it's a fascinating one on several levels. I'm most intrigued by the central event of the film, a debate over the fate of mankind undertaken, in a heavenly tribunal, between the "Spirit of Man," played by stately English actor Ronald Colman (in his final film), and a rather more sinuous type, Mr. Scratch (aka the Devil), played by Vincent Price on the cusp of his emergence as a major horror star. Colman speaks in defense of mankind, while Price argues for allowing the species' impending self-engineered demise. (This was the Atomic Age, after all.) Price offers concrete examples of man's inhumanity to man (and nature) and the various atrocities the race has committed, establishing a whole pattern of misconduct—theft, exploitation, slavery, mass murder, rape, pillage, plunder, perversion--that extends from Ancient Egypt right up to the present day. Colman glosses over these things, preferring to expound rather vaguely on man's lofty ideals and dreams of progress, exploration, and artistic achievement. When Colman brings up Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, Price points to da Vinci's detailed plans for highly destructive weapons of war. Price seems much more outraged by the crimes of mankind than Colman is, which marks his character as the true moralist in the film.

(In real life, Colman and Price were good friends and one exchange of dialogue in the da Vinci scene, where Colman insists that Price "knows nothing about painting," while Price responds that he "never pretended to be an art expert," is an in-joke reference to Price's already considerable reputation by that point as a connoisseur, collector and historian of art.)

On a more mundane note of cinephilic appreciation, I tried tallying up all the footage taken from earlier movies with historical themes. (Any time you see a shot with multiple extras and lavish sets, you know it's from a different movie.) Early on, for instance, we see John Carradine as the pharaoh, Khufu, sharing a scene with Price and Cedric Hardwicke (as the celestial judge). All three were in Cecil B. DeMille's spectacle from the previous year, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956), which took place in Ancient Egypt. Yet when this scene transitions to shots of pyramid building, they don't use clips from DeMille's film, but instead rely on clips from another film set in that period—LAND OF THE PHARAOHS (1955). Why? Because THE STORY OF MANKIND is a Warner Bros. production and the only color film clips they could use without having to pay exorbitant fees would have to come from Warner Bros. films. So when they go to the Trojan War, we see clips from HELEN OF TROY (1955). And when they go to the Crusades and other scenes from the Middle Ages, we see clips from KING RICHARD AND THE CRUSADERS (1954). Piracy and ship battles between England and Spain for supremacy of the seas? CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER (1951). Elizabethan England? THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (1939). Western scenes? DODGE CITY (1939). There were some clips I didn't recognize, though, such as the shot of Rome burning. (QUO VADIS?, 1951, was an MGM production.) Producer-director Irwin Allen would expand on this practice of mixing cheaply shot studio scenes with more lavishly filmed clips in his TV series, "Time Tunnel," some nine years later. (By then, of course, Allen would be at a different studio and have to rely on clips solely from 20th Century Fox.)

The recent cablecast of this film on Turner Classic Movies (on March 14, 2011) was beset by technical problems. The film often froze up and went black. This happened most egregiously during two sequences, one with Cleopatra (Virginia Mayo) and one with Peter Minuit (Groucho Marx), so I missed several seconds from each. I must say I didn't recognize Ms. Mayo in the dark wig. In another sequence, 45-year-old Hedy Lamarr turns up as the teenaged Joan of Arc(!). Marie Windsor plays a much taller and older Josephine to Dennis Hopper's Napoleon. (Josephine actually WAS taller and older than Napoleon, but not by that much.) Shakespeare is described by Queen Elizabeth (Agnes Moorehead) as a "young actor-poet," but is played by veteran character actor Reginald Gardiner, who'd been in films for 25 years at this point. Why couldn't they recruit bigger names to play Shakespeare and such other key historical figures as Columbus (Anthony Dexter) and Lincoln (Austin Green)?

Silent star Francis X. Bushman (Messala in the silent BEN-HUR) plays da Vinci—and has no dialogue. Cathy O'Donnell plays an early Christian in Rome some two years before appearing in a vaguely similar role in the BEN-HUR remake. In one piece of gimmick casting, Jim Ameche appears as Alexander Graham Bell, a role closely identified with his more famous brother, Don Ameche. (I'm guessing they tried to get Don to recreate it, but were turned down.) Seven actors in this cast went on to guest star on TV's "Batman": Vincent Price, Cesar Romero, Reginald Gardiner, Edward Everett Horton, Francis X. Bushman, Marie Windsor and Ziva Rodann.

For years I only knew this film as the last to feature all three Marx Brothers. On that basis, I'd always thought it was a comedy. It isn't. Still, it struck me as pretty funny to see an opening credits sequence where Francis X. Bushman, Franklin Pangborn and Dennis Hopper are among the many listed together ABOVE the title.