A Lutheran church funded short film which ruminates on mankind's propensity for cruelty and self-destruction, ostensibly by dint of the rejection of God.
Veteran actor LEW AYRES, himself a notedly resolute pacifist, narrates this chronicle of our steady march toward armageddon since the time of Christ, and offers us a glimpse of the horrors humanity may face in the near-future. The film's puppet and miniature animation technique is roundly just a consecution of dioramas. Here and there, a character will raise an arm or turn their head, but it's primarily the camera which is in motion, scanning the dramatically lit, but mostly static shadowbox displays. The culminating doomsday sequences are a bit more kinetic, envisioning the Earth's destruction in a choppy swirl of collapsing miniature structures, combined with practical pyrotechnic effects. Iconographically, it's rather primitive by modern standards, but it was likely quite impressive to audiences of the post-WWll 1940s.
Long unattainable before its beautiful restoration at UCLA, THE WAY OF PEACE is, somewhat expectedly, a bit on the preachy side, but it imparts a calling for peace on Earth which transcends compartmented belief systems. Too, it may well feature cinema's earliest depiction of nuclear Doomsday. While it lacks the terrifying thrust of more recent films such as THREADS and THE DAY AFTER, it's not entirely impotent, and it may interest genrephiles for its contributions by pre-famed visual effects artist WAH CHANG.
5.5/10...quaintly dated, but well worthy of preservation.
