The World, the Flesh and the Devil -- all three of them -- is now out on DVD from the Warner Archives Collection. SRP $19.95, though Warners has occasional sales (including on the date of this post). The film has been remastered and is in its original widescreen format. Order direct from WBshop.com for the lowest price.
shareMovies Unlimited in Philadelphia are doing it at that price too but amazon over $24. Just discovered this today! How exciting, a rush order!
shareI use MU too but as far as Warner Archive titles go it's still much cheaper and faster to order direct from Warner. This from experience. But enjoy the film!
shareI've been waiting forever to see this again...thanks for the heads up, hobnob, I just ordered it.
shareYou're welcome!
shareIt arrived today...fairly quick service. Will have to pop it in and see if it's as good as I remember. Thanks again for the heads up.
shareLet me know how it holds up for you...I have my own views on that. But still a worthwhile movie.
shareWatched it last night.
By modern standards the pacing seems a bit slow.
I kept wondering where all the bodies were. OK right, they had to evacuate but consider Katrina: how many simply couldn't get out (or chose not to)? It simply happened too fast, if the material was lethal for only two days. All the cars stuck on the bridges---those people abandoned them and walked out of the city? They should have found bodies somewhere.
I think they could have handled that without making a big deal of it. They could show him finding one or two. Then maybe he'd head to ground zero, where absolutely everybody had evacuated. In the long term though, decaying bodies in the city would be a problem. Hmm.
Belafonte was good but not great. Stevens and Ferrer were both pretty good. It's pretty impressive that they got the empty shots of New York...not sure how they managed it.
What was the operation on Ferrer? I didn't get that. It seemed largely unnecessary. He could have been sick but they nursed him back to health without an operation.
I'm not sure about the ending. On the one hand, you don't want Ferrer ousted because he could hang around and play guerilla, shooting from rooftops. On the other hand, keeping him close isn't the problem just going to reinvent itself periodically? If he were willing to resort to a shootout, what will change? I guess the bottom line is that with so few alive, they don't have a choice. Killing one of the few survivors, bad idea. With time, there may be others.
Of course the main disconnect is that any straight man with a pulse could leave Inger alone for *any* length of time. Yikes! She had it going on!
Overall a pretty good film. I was a kid when I saw it the first time, 40 (?) years ago, on TV. Viewing it now, 50 years after it was made, it's still pretty good. We've become so accustomed to CGI and big budgets of course. It's good in portraying the racial delineation of the time.
Thanks for your insights!
The main raps on this film have always been (and I think legitimate ones), first, that they movie really dodges the race issue, at least when it comes to s-e-x; and second, that the plot and pacing fall apart after Ferrer arrives on the scene, up to and including a cop-out ending. The movie steps up to confront the issues of what used to be called miscegenation ("mixed-race" sexual intercourse or marriage), and racism in general, then runs away from them.
I think the filmmakers decided they had to do the "liberal" thing by depicting a black man in a too-good-to-be-true light: a selfless "Negro", clever but modest, talented in myriad ways, but chaste -- someone who knows his place, not only a gentleman but one who would never, ever think of having sex with a woman outside his own race. He resents her stupid "I'm free, white and 21" remark, but remains a black man who feels most at home staying in his place beside (or below) the white community, and definitely not having lustful thoughts toward a white woman...even if she is the only woman left in the world. I think those concerned feared that if they showed Belafonte and Stevens develop a normal sexual or romantic relationship, it would inflame millions of white Americans (and not just in the South), conjure up the phony racist image of black men ever lusting after white women, and in general cause trouble for the movie. Given the film's gooey and contrived ending, one is led to the conclusion that either all three will remain celibate for the rest of their lives (and thereby finish off the human race, perhaps), or that the men will share Inger. I guess Hollywood preferred an "immoral" sexual threesome to a straight black man/white girl love story. Even in 1959, this aspect could have been handled much more realistically and satisfactorally. (The irony is that in private life Inger Stevens was secretly wed to the black singer Isaac Jones from 1961 until her suicide in 1970, a fact not revealed until after her death and known by virtually none of their friends.)
To answer a couple of points you posed, I believe the isotope in the bombs used caused all the bodies to disintegrate, hence no dead people (or animals) around. It's a convenient if far-fetched plot aspect designed to explain away the "no-bodies" problem you aptly cite as a major issue.
They got the shots of a deserted NYC either by filming in locations (such as Wall Street and lower Manhattan) on a Sunday, when nobody/no body was around, or by shooting in the early morning in restricted sites. Shots such as the car-crammed George Washington Bridge, and Belafonte pulling his wagon along Times Square, were composites. The majority of the scenes were filmed on the MGM back lot.
I don't know if you know New York, but for those of us who grew up there the geography in the final sequences, with Ferrer chasing Belafontes around the city, is laughable. They're shown running down one street one moment, then turning up at a location miles away the next, and back and forth. It's realy pretty ludicrous.
I thought all three actors were good but not much more than two-dimensional; Inger was best. And yes, I too can't see how any straight man with a pulse, or for that matter who could manage nothing more than barely fogging up a mirror held under his nose, could resist keeping his hands off Ms. S....who in any case was practically throwing herself at Harry B. -- and wasn't all that choosy about switching to racist Mel after Harry selflessly turned away her lust-crazed, but racially impure, advances!
I think it would have been better handled by an Indy company back then...not sure if there were any around though. So, getting a major studio to put it out meant some compromises. MLK's March on Washington was still 3-4 years in the future when this was made, after all.
I didn't live through the times...I came of age in the 70s. I figured the studio pushed this as far as they could, and that probably applied to the cast as well. If Inger kept her marriage a secret, then what about Harry? When the film ends, there was still a singing career to consider.
I don't know about the conclusion that they had to remain celibate or have a three-way relationship. Other survivors are out there and may turn up...they could bide their time awhile. I also thought it was interesting that when Sarah loses it, she tells Benson to "make love" to her. That's the "old" version---not sex, but more like "Kiss me, hold me." Married couples on TV were still sleeping mostly in separate beds, even.
It's interesting too that at one point he tells her he loves her. I would have liked to see more emerging fondness before the declaration, but that's how movies often seemed to handle it. I don't recall her saying it to him, strangely enough.
Overall though, I assumed that lots of things are true off-screen that movies don't portray. Like the silly convention of not showing married couples in bed together...you know that isn't the way it was in most households. If nobody ever tried to cross racial lines, miscegenation laws wouldn't have been necessary.
There was a moment in this where it seems like Belafonte's seriously considering it. If everyone else is gone, what's the problem? Then he hears a voice on the radio and figures others will be coming, so he cans the idea. I think that was their opportunity to say, "We can rewrite the rules. Even if there are a few dozen survivors, our vote matters. The fewer of them there are, the less we should care."
Speaking of Yikes!
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q9g7ZC2KSLw/S9nU1RREQxI/AAAAAAAAH4k/G1wMhsO0OVg/s1600/Annex+-+Stevens,+Inger+(A+Guide+for+the+Married+Man)_01.jpg
I was a kid when this movie came out (and vaguely remember hearing about it then), but you're correct, the film went about as far as its makers felt comfortable doing. An indy company might have made something a bit more controversial but even they would have pulled their punches, and in any case the lower budget would have dampened the film's strong visual images.
But the negative feeling most people had against interracial romantic relationships was pretty widespread in this country well into the 60s, and beyond. Miscengenation laws remained on the books in many states until repealed or struck down by the courts in the late 60s, but people's disapproving attitudes lingered longer.
Basically, I think this movie arrived about 8-10 years too early. Had it come out around 1967 or so it could have hit the racial issue more forthrightly (certainly by 1970). But for the reasons I mentioned before, the producers figured they had to play it safe, so after approaching the realm of serious controversy, they turned tail and ran for cover -- hence, the conventionalization of the film by bringing in the standard white racist, which allowed them to draw the film's focus away from the interracial romance aspect to a more obvious, but dull, straight-out racism tale. That, plus its sappy resolution -- we all learn to live together, la-dee-dah -- really flattened this film after its promising start.
I don't know that tackling the interracial love story more forthrightly would have seriously damaged either Stevens's or Belafonte's careers. But it would have been extremely controversial, that's for certain (and probably helped the box office due to such notoriety). Belafonte quit films after 1959 anyway, and didn't appear in another until 1970. Stevens had her greatest success on TV in the 60s, and I doubt any treatment of this film would have changed that. Ferrer, who never quite made it as a top star anyway, usually played cads, so his role here made no difference to his career.
Incidentally, it should be noted that the year before this film (1958), MGM released a movie called The Decks Ran Red, a tale about murder and mutiny aboard a freighter in the Pacific, which starred James Mason. In that movie, the gorgeous black actress Dorothy Dandridge engaged in mainstream American cinema's first true interracial kiss (several of them) with Stuart Whitman, who played one of the mutineers. However, in the movie Dandridge's character was supposed to be a Maori, the wife of the ship's cook, from New Zealand. It's still an interracial sexual relationship, but not quite as unacceptable (to racist whites) as a flat-out white/black relationship. (Making her a Maori also added a tinge of the exotic, thereby softening the racial blow.) And of course in that case, it was a white man lusting after a woman of color. Lots of white men secretly had such feelings (and many had such encounters for real), but society considered this a "permissible" deviant thought, vs. having a black man interested in a white girl. Point is, it shows that depicting an interracial romance at least a bit more explicitly could be done, even in 1959.
(Incidentally, it's often erroneously stated that the 1957 film Island in the Sun, which co-starred Belafonte and Dandridge, contained the screen's first interracial kiss, but this is not so. Both those performers' characters had interracial romantic relationships -- with Joan Fontaine and John Justin, respectively -- but in neither case did they actually kiss. Dandridge and Justin embraced cheek to cheek but never kissed in any manner. But just a year later Dorothy did indeed deliver the screen's first such "forbidden" kiss.)
TCM showed the film with closed-captions. All DVDs from Warner Archive do not come with closed captions or subtitles. Maybe not important to some folks, but it's a deal breaker for me.
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