The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) Reviews

• provided serious food for thought at a time the world wasn't hungry.

  bobkat11382001-07-23

  A very thought provoking movie that was not accepted at the time, but in retrospect, way way ahead of its time. In a racially charged world it put forth the premise that race, in the final analysis, is superficial and meaningless. Once you strip away the layers of conditioning and socialization, you find, at the core, good and evil and the age old struggle as to which will prevail. A simple story, told directly and honestly. On a scale of 1 to 10, its an 11.

• For Caring Hearts who Want to Think

  geoff332001-01-26

  This movie will grab your interest and exercise your moral fiber. The setting of the movie is New York City after a catastrophe that eliminates all the people on the planet, except a few. Race, prejudice and pride are but minor subplots in this excellent film. A fair minded and humanitarian black man discovers the true nature of life and friendship in a white woman. A sheltered white woman finds the friendship of a black man who is everything she loves and desires in a lover, but nothing at all like her upbringing would endorse. Suddenly, her psychological paradise is shattered when a third person comes along who threatens to bring back all the old ways of thinking that separated people and cultures throughout generations. Black and white has never been so colorful.

• Engrossing, well-guided end-of-the-world tale that sells its soul to the Devil in the last reel.

  gbrumburgh2001-02-24

  A well-mounted, ambitious end-of-the-world epic, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" thankfully has more going for it than most of the cheapjack sci-fi prevalent in the 50s, but, alas, it fails to live up to its early, exciting premise. Harry Belafonte portrays miner Ralph Burton who appears to be the only survivor of some above-ground nuclear gas explosion. The first part of the movie focuses entirely on Ralph scouring the desolate streets of a debris-filled, obliterated New York City in search for other human life. These early scenes are quite tense and fascinating as Ralph is forced to come to fateful grips with his total isolation and lifeless surroundings. There are lighter, even amusing moments interspersed with the potentially heavy-handed theme as Ralph quite bizarrely sets up a makeshift household for himself and plays "mind games" in an attempt to break the utter monotony of loneliness and preserve his sanity. In the meantime, to keep productive Ralph tinkers around his big city "shop" with newly-found gadgets and radio hardware in a dire effort to communicate with other possible survivors. A bit mystifying though is why we don't see any remnants of human existence anywhere and why everything else...stores, automobiles...are still standing, even in tact, for the most part. Did all signs of humanity just evaporate? Was this a selective nuclear explosion? Enter lovely, timorous Inger Stevens as Sarah Crandall (the Flesh in the title?), a second survivor, who has been secretly following Ralph but fearful, until now, to make contact. Intriguing conflicts set in immediately as Sarah is white and Ralph black. Knowing they have only each other in the world, they endeavor to break the delicate barriers of fear that distance them. So far so good. But then the plot takes a turn for the worst with the arrival of a third survivor (the Devil in the title?), villainous Benson Thacker, played here by Mel Ferrer, and the movie becomes a silly, ludicrous romantic triangle. Interest literally explodes and burns as fast as you can say "nuclear war." In a disappointing, poorly-scripted climax, the men get involved in a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Belafonte and Ferrer vying for the affections of Stevens, gunning for each other on isolated streets and lurking around buildings "High Noon" style. Here we have three mature people, supposedly the only humans left on earth, and they want to knock each other off in order to get the girl! And the final scene is unintentionally laughable. Why they chose such a cop-out ending will always be a mystery. Granted, this move was shot in 1959 and so the racial issues naturally had to be skimmed over. But since they introduced it in the first place by casting Belafonte and Stevens, why not deal with it? With a little more care and originality, they could have scaled new heights and made a daring, confrontive, ground-breaking classic. Nevertheless, the good points outweigh the bad. Belafonte is terrific especially in his early scenes and Miss Stevens registers quite strongly during their tense exchanges. Most of all, director Ranald MacDougall captures a barren, decimated-looking New York City to awesome, jaw-dropping effect. His huge, looming, shadowy panoramic shots of a deserted Manhattan is a marvel of creativity and cinematography...an incredible feat that is alone worth the price of admission.

• the first time i watched the world end

  raegan_butcher2005-12-17

  When I was in the 3rd grade I stayed home from school one day sick with the flu and watched this on a local TV station and some scenes from it have stuck with me ever since; I will never forget the sight of Harry Belafonte eating dinner with Inger Stevens and then cleaning up by casually throwing the entire contents of the dinner table out the high rise apartment window and calculating that it would be YEARS before the pile of smashed crockery reached his window; who can explain the eerie fascination of empty cities? This film is one of the first to successfully pull off the effect, setting the standard for what followed: The Omega Man, The Day of The Triffids, 28 Days later and especially The Quiet Earth.

• The black...the white...and the blond...

  macabro3572003-07-17

  Harry Belafonte emerges from a mine after an accident and discovers that the world is deserted, except for Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer. Some kind of nuclear war has taken place and there are few survivors. No dead bodies, no rotting corpses. No physical body traces of any kind. Some people have said that Ferrer played a bigot in this film, but I didn't see much of that at all since the main conflict between Belafonte and Ferrer is based more on lust than anything else. But since this is 1959, we can't show interracial love onscreen because many parts of the country would wind up banning the film, so MGM and Belafonte keep the lust toned down and mostly implied. The viewer should just look at it in the context of the times that it was made in, and not try to apply 2003 standards to something filmed over 40 years ago. The deserted lower Manhattan streets including Times Square look pretty cool. They must have filmed them on an early Sunday morning in order to keep any traffic disruption to a minimum. And the ending resorts to a preachy "The Beginning" stamped across the screen as the three of them walk down a deserted Manhattan street. I guess only goodwill comes next, huh? If you want to see a better "end of the world" flick from the same period, then check out the Arch Oboler's rarely-seen FIVE (1951) or Stanley Kramer's ON THE BEACH, made during the same year as this one. I thought they were done better. 5 out of 10 for clearing out New York in time.