The Last Man on Earth is Not Alone

The World, The Flesh, and the Devil
"The Most Unusual Story Ever Told!"-Promotional Tagline

The World, The Flesh, and the Devil is one of the earliest examples of what would eventually become the Post-Apocalyptic Action film. Like Arch Obeler's Five (1951), The World, The Flesh, and the Devil tells the story of a small group of survivors after nuclear holocaust. While the plot elements of these early films are not as fantastic as the later entries in the genre, the metaphorical values George Miller mentioned are still utilized. The filmmakers are able to tell a pro-civil rights story in the turbulent racial atmosphere of the late 1950s. While the anti-bomb sentiments exemplify the 1950s Communist paranoia of Middle America, its plea for racial harmony predates Martin Luther King's "dream" speech by five years.

Set in an abandoned New York City, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil tells the story of three survivors, Ralph Burton, Sarah Crandall, and Ben Thacker. Burton (Harry Belafonte), a mine worker, is protected from the atomic disaster while working underground. He spends the early part of the film believing he is the only person left, until he meets Sarah (Inger Stevens). She has been watching him secretly, afraid to confront him until she mistakes Burton's mannequin friend Snodgrass plummeting from a window for Burton himself attempting suicide. When Burton asks her how she survived, she says she went into a decompression chamber with two others at the first alarm. The other two ventured out too early and are assumed dead. Sarah and Burton's budding romance is continuously halted by Burton's awareness of the racial barriers that would have kept them apart prior to the disaster. Their strained relationship is further threatened by the arrival of sea captain Thacker (Mel Ferrer), who avoided the disaster while at sea, far from populated areas. Thacker falls for Sarah, although she is still in love with Burton. This love triangle leads to a violent confrontation between the two men over the last woman on earth.

The film's early version of the Urban Oasis is utterly empty; there is no structural damage to any of the buildings and the only signs of disarray are abandoned cars and paper trash in the streets. With the buildings still intact, rebuilding is unnecessary, and enough supplies remain that the small band of survivors can easily scavenge what they need without the need to reseed the land. Burton drives a car off of the showroom floor and then lugs pilfered supplies in a wagon when he must abandon the "borrowed" car. Thus the main conflict in the new civilization is repopulation, and Sarah Crandall becomes one of the first in a long line of last fertile women on earth. The racial issues that Burton places between Sarah and himself further complicate the issue.

Although The World, The Flesh, and the Devil is on a small scale, it nevertheless covers the same conflicts as other post-apocalyptic action films, with each of the characters filling the role of a group. Thacker is clearly a barbarian, a deviant uninterested in learning from the past or planning for the future. His sexual interest in Sarah is not reproductive but purely recreational, and her rejection of him does not lessen his interest. Instead of retreating, Thacker goes for a weapon with which to kill Burton so Sarah will have no other choices. Burton retains the last shreds of the old civilization and will provide the basis for the new one. As the one representing the Civilized, Burton makes the rules the survivors live by. His concerns are for conserving resources, knowledge, and propriety, even including racial separation because that played such a large role in the society he knew. He will not let Sarah move into the building he lives in and seems preoccupied with appearances, even though there is no one else around to see anything. When he throws Sarah a birthday party in a fancy restaurant he takes on the roles of entertainment and help, but refuses to join her at her table as an equal. Sarah is neither Civilized nor Barbarian; she is outside both realms, claimed by neither and drawn in some ways to both. She is simultaneously the hero who must strike a balance between the two, and also the promise of the future that will arise from that balance. Being the last fertile woman on earth compels her to make a personal choice between two men. Her love for Burton draws her to him, even as he pushes her away. Thacker is willing to give her the attention Burton is not, but his intentions are not as honorable and his concern for her is not as genuine. Thacker wants Sarah even though she is interested in Burton. He is even willing to kill Burton if it means that he can have Sarah. As the Hero, though, it is her choice between the Civilized and the Barbarian, not Burton or Thacker as individuals, that will determine the fate of the world. Ultimately she chooses Civilization and asks Burton to stay with her in the city, but refuses to turn her back on the Barbarian, therefore striking the balance for the future. But because the wandering or martyr Hero has not yet become an element of this budding genre, Sarah remains to mediate between the Civilized and the Barbarian in the film's promised "Beginning."

The World, The Flesh, and the Devil was made in 1958, only one year after the Russians successfully launched Sputnik into orbit. The United States was lagging behind in the Space Race and the threat of a technologically superior Soviet Union loomed heavily over the American psyche. Although the circumstances of the disaster and even the specifics of the disaster itself are never fully discovered by the characters or the audience, the film's original audience would probably have assumed Russian involvement.

The paranoid Cold War atmosphere lurks in the appearance of the Civil Defense Headquarters in the coal mining town and the "Aware Today - Alive Tomorrow" Civil Defense poster at the tunnel. The Department of Civil Defense was created to provide the illusion of preparedness in the event of a national disaster, most immediately a possible attack by sinister Russian forces. The fact that the Civil Defense Department was largely a security blanket for the American public does not go unnoticed by the filmmakers; the Civil Defense Headquarters is just as deserted as the streets outside and the Civil Defense poster mocks the empty cars that clog the tunnel out of New York. It is this paranoid hyper-vigilance and the concurrent escalation of the armament race that the filmmakers condemn by showing the ineffectiveness of the Civil Defense Department in the face of the mysterious disaster that depopulates the earth.

Burton's first stop after digging himself out of the mine is the Civil Defense Headquarters, which he finds empty. He does not truly give up hope, though, until in the heart of Manhattan he finds a large cathedral completely empty. As Burton enters the church, just before his moment of despair, the bells toll as shots of five different lion statues are montaged to give the illusion of a lion rising from sleep into a roar. This shot sequence directly echoes a similar sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Communist propaganda film Battleship Potemkin. The filmmakers may have intended the shots simply as a tribute to a master, or it may have been a conscious effort to remind a cinema-savvy audience of Potemkin's Communist message; either way, the choice of effect is a pointed reference to a specifically Russian filmmaker. Given the cultural climate and distaste for the Russians, it was daring to reference such a pro-Communist film.

As daring as the filmmakers were, they were still aware of America's inferior position in the ongoing Space Race. When Burton goes into the film vaults to find out about the events that led up to the disaster, he can find nothing of any importance, but the first news reel he shows Sarah and Thacker is of a failed U.S. rocket launch. The filmmakers, though peace-minded, still remained concerned about the United States' inability to surpass or even equal the Soviets' spacefaring efforts. The World, The Flesh, and the Devil's plea for a peaceful future is not immune to the paranoid stresses of 1958 American culture.

Another major stress on the American culture in 1958 was the strained state of interracial relations. In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled to desegregate public schools and put an end to the era of "separate but equal" racial division. One year later in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person. The civil rights movement began in earnest with a bus boycott and continued on through the 1960s with other protests, demonstrations, and rallies, all in the name of racial equality. The World, The Flesh, and the Devil was made in the midst of this turmoil and Burton's race is constantly an issue.

As soon as Burton starts to settle in the abandoned New York City, he adopts two friends, Betsy and Snodgrass. They are department store mannequins, cheerful, inanimate, and also white. His projected relationship with these two is a prelude to the situation he finds himself in later with Sarah and Thacker. Burton tells Betsy that although Snodgrass is a friend of his, she is too good for him. Burton's playful assumption that Betsy and Snodgrass are a couple reveals his feelings of inferiority as a black man. Certainly Burton knows that Betsy is not real, and even so he cannot so much as fantasize a relationship with her despite his abject loneliness. His jealousy manifests itself in a belief that Snodgrass' sculpted smile is mocking him, even though the smile is the reason Burton originally chose Snodgrass as a friend. Snodgrass becomes an outlet for Burton's frustrations, which leads to Burton's violent outburst ending in Snodgrass being thrown from the balcony.

The same feelings and frustrations return when Thacker arrives and begins spending time with Sarah. She becomes Burton's new unattainable Betsy, and Thacker becomes her mocking suitor. Burton makes this more apparent when he tells Thacker "You remind me of a guy named Snodgrass. I never knew what was in his mind either." With the white Snodgrass, Burton is able to voice his anger but even in the decimated culture that remains when the imagined scenario becomes real he is incapable of breaking the societal taboo against black men voicing anger at white men. While he may be unable to act directly against Thacker, Burton does make small passive attempts to ruin Sarah and Thacker's budding relationship. After Thacker and Burton have their first real dispute over Sarah, she and Thacker spend an evening together, during which the lights inexplicably flash on and off. Thacker knows that these are "parlor games" that Burton is using to trip up the couple, because Burton controls the power supply to the city. Finally, it is Thacker who forces a confrontation but it is Burton, as the Civilized, who rises above the barbarism and his own prejudices to accept the possibility of a relationship with Sarah.

Ralph Burton is played by Harry Belafonte, a star known more as a musician than an actor. By including several interludes during which Burton sings the filmmakers ensure that Belafonte's musical career is never far from the mind of the audience. While the racial politics of the film stem from the forward-thinking civil rights movement, the image of the singing black man has been a hurtful reminder of inequality in roles between whites and blacks. For many years in American cinema, blacks were limited to roles as entertainers or servants. All a black man could do on screen was sing or dance before vacating the screen for the white leads to fall in love. One of Burton's musical numbers is sung in the presence of Betsy and Snodgrass; at one point he even tweaks Snodgrass' head to make him a more attentive audience member. Playing for the "entertainment" of this white couple is what makes Burton angry with Snodgrass. Burton is aware of the subjugated existence of black entertainers of the time and even believing no one other than him is left, it still pains him. When Burton throws Sarah a birthday party, his deep-rooted belief in his own racial inferiority causes him to place himself into both the role of entertainer and of servant, while refusing to assume the role of a guest. He meets Sarah in front of the club, invites her in as a doorman, and then proceeds to enter through a different door himself. Once inside, he acts as maitre'd and waiter while, with the help of a recording, he emcees his own musical performance. Sarah invites him to join her during the meal; he turns her down because "the help" is not allowed to mingle with guests. Although Sarah is willing to accept Burton as her equal, Burton takes on the traditional black roles of servant and entertainer, regardless of how distasteful he finds them.

With The World, The Flesh, and the Devil the genre is still in its infancy, but many of the conventions are already in place. It features a Hero caught between the Civilized and the Barbarians in an Urban Oasis. While it tells a possible Armageddon story and works as a cold war era warning against atomic warfare, it is also a forward thinking civil rights picture making a plea for racial harmony in the pre-apocalypse world. As the genre matures the conventions become more prominent, but the issues of the day are always on the minds of the filmmakers and the audiences.