by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched one of the
downright weirdest movies ever made, The
Story of Mankind (“Are you sure we have
time for it all?” Charles joked when I announced the title), a 1957 Warner
Bros. production by producer-director-co-writer Irwin Allen, who previously had
made only documentaries but who would become a major force in the movie
business in the mid-1970’s when he specialized in disaster movies with all-star
casts and turned out two back-to-back blockbuster hits, The Poseidon
Adventure and The Towering Inferno. (Though disaster movies have been made before, it was
these two films that established “disaster” as a movie genre.) The Story of Mankind — this project, anyway — began life as a pop world-history
book by Dutch author Henrik Willem Van Loon, first published in 1922 and which
I remember reading in junior high school (before junior high school got renamed
with that awful appellation “middle school”), which became famous not only
because Van Loon was able to tell a reasonable approximation of the story of
mankind in one slim volume but also because of the clever little drawings with
which he illustrated it. (I remember one called “Propaganda” which showed a
line of people marching off a cliff, obviously induced to do so by some
dictator’s propaganda.)
For some reason Irwin Allen decided there was a movie
in Van Loon’s book, and what he and screenwriter Charles Bennett (best known
for the six Alfred Hitchcock films he worked on between 1934 and 1940 — indeed
I’ve argued in these pages that Bennett was to Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was
to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford) came up with was a framing
story in which humankind has invented the “super H-bomb” (I think it was pretty
much the same as the “solarbonite bomb” that figured prominently in Ed Wood’s
messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space),
not knowing that its use will mean the immediate destruction of Earth as a
viable human habitat. So a “Celestial Tribunal” headed by “High Judge” (i.e.,
God) Cedric Hardwicke has been called to determine whether humanity should be
allowed to destroy itself with the super H-bomb or whether the celestial
tribunal should intervene and destroy the bomb before it can be used, thereby
sparing humanity indefinitely. The two representatives who appear as attorneys
for both sides — “The Spirit of Man” (Ronald Colman, surprisingly dignified and
impressive in what turned out to be his final film), arguing on the side of
humanity’s existence; and “Mr. Scratch’ (Vincent Price), a.k.a. the Devil (the
same pseudonym used for the Devil in William Dieterle’s 1941 film All That
Money Can Buy, a.k.a. The Devil and
Daniel Webster, in which Walter Huston
played him), arguing for our destruction — are allowed to cite various
incidents from human history to argue that humans are either good or evil. The
trial kicks off with Pharoah Khufu of Egypt (John Carradine) — who has a bone
to pick with Mr. Scratch because the latter promised him immortality (I
couldn’t help but joke, “And all I got to do was be in terrible horror movies,
just like you!”) — who according to the script consigned a million human souls
to the Devil by forcing them to build the Great Pyramid. The Spirit of Man cites
Moses (Francis X. Bushman) as a counter-example of someone good who came out of
ancient Egypt. It goes on pretty much like that from there, with Price
denouncing the ancient Greeks and Romans as warmongers and Colman citing the
beauty of the art and culture they created as well as the ways they extended
scientific knowledge.
Some of the sketches provided to illustrate various parts
of human history are pretty risible — Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx all appear
but not in the same scene; instead
Chico plays a monk who tries to talk Christopher Columbus (Anthony Dexter) out
of his mad plan to try to reach the Indies by sailing west instead of East;
Groucho is Peter Minuit, skillfully swindling an Indian out of Manhattan Island
for $24 (he’s one of the few stars in this film who actually got to play pretty
close to his normal typecasting); and Harpo is Sir Isaac Newton, playing his
harp in an apple orchard (his song is Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,”
actually written over a century after
Newton’s time, and I couldn’t help but wish that a giant ape had come on and
picked him and his instrument up as he played) when an apple falls on his head
and gives him the idea for the theory of gravity. (This is Harpo’s only color
film, so we finally get to see his
famous wig the red color it was on stage rather than the “blonde” it looked
like in the Marx Brothers’ joint movies.) Peter Lorre makes a quite good
Emperor Nero (and Allen and Bennett blessedly avoid letting us hear him attempt
to sing) even though he seems to have been patterning his performance on Emil
Jannings’ in the 1924 German-Italian co-production of Quo Vadis? (I’ve never seen that movie, but I have seen how Jannings posed as Nero in the stills), but
Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra (I’m not making this up, you know!) and Helmut
Dantine as Mark Antony seem to be the warmup act for the Liz Taylor-Richard
Burton misfire on the same story. The film earned the usual critical brickbats
for casting 42-year-old Hedy Lamarr as 19-year-old Joan of Arc (and they had her
wear her hair close-cropped as usual in Joan of Arc movies even though
contemporary art depicts the real one as having long brown hair), but she’s
actually one of the better cast members even though the brevity of the “turns”
means it’s unfair to compare the performances here to actors playing the same
roles in full-length features about their historical characters.
Agnes
Moorehead is surprisingly good as Queen Elizabeth I, though the script for her
sequence — William Shakespeare (Reginald Gardiner) reads her a bit of his
patriotic poetry and this inspires her to resist and ultimately defeat the
Spanish Armada instead of surrendering to it — is preposterous. The French
Revolution sequence suffers from the dippy casting of dumb-blonde Marie Wilson
as Marie Antoinette, though Franklin Pangborn is marvelous as the Marquis de
Varennes — and of course Allen and Bennett couldn’t resist having her say, “Let
’em eat cake,” though that’s been pretty well debunked now (it was a
long-standing urban legend about clueless royals and had first appeared in
print a century before Marie Antoinette’s time). There’s also the unlikely
casting of Dennis Hopper as Napoleon (with Marie Windsor as an appropriately
slatternly Josephine), and a final montage sequence of Adolf Hitler, alternately
represented by sound recordings of the real one and film clips with Bobby
Watson (repeating the role he’d played in To Be or Not to Be and quite a few other World War II-era movies, when he’d
been Hollywood’s go-to guy for Der Führer)
shown over a backdrop of shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s dark masterpiece Triumph
of the Will. That’s hardly the only use of
stock footage in this film; we also get clips from Land of the Pharoahs,
Helen of Troy, King Richard and the Crusaders, Captain Horatio Hornblower and, I suspect, John Ford’s The Searchers to represent the cruelty with which the Anglo-American
settlers repressed and wiped out the Native Americans. (Oddly, this movie is
one of the most blatantly pro-Native films turned out by Hollywood before the
early 1970’s, when movies like Little Big Man and, later, Dances with Wolves made pro-Native Westerns fashionable; when Vincent Price
made the point that the white Europeans in America wiped out the Indians and
enslaved the Blacks for a workforce, I joked, “He sounds like Howard Zinn.”)
The
Story of Mankind is one of those film
projects that seems to have been misbegotten from the get-go — according to an
imdb.com “Trivia” poster, when Ronald Colman was asked if the project were
based on a book, he said, “Yes, but they are using only the notes on the
dust jacket” — one wonders who Irwin Allen and the “suits” at Warners who
green-lighted it thought the audience was going to be. And yet it’s good enough
it didn’t really deserve the designation it got from the Medved brothers as one
of The 50 Worst Films of All Time in
their book of that title. Most of whatever quality it has comes from the lead
actors, Ronald Colman and Vincent Price; Colman tackles his nearly impossible
assignment with grace, dignity and a quite sense of commitment (I can think of
quite a few major stars whose last films were considerably worse than this
one!), and Price goes into the “camp” mode that was his default setting
whenever he had to cope with an especially ridiculous and clichéd script —
though there are moments here that evoke memories of the finest performance he
ever gave, as Oscar Wilde in his 1977 one-man stage show Diversions
and Delights. (I hate to keep mentioning
this play, which doesn’t seem ever to have been recorded or filmed and is
therefore lost, but I was lucky enough to get to see it and it was magnificent,
a daunting challenge to which Price fully and vividly rose. Though he spent
decades making increasingly wretched horror films that wasted his talents,
Vincent Price could act.)
Hardwicke’s presence as the divine judge of the celestial court is also welcome
— it’s interesting that at least three of the actors here played major roles in
Universal horror films in the early 1940’s (Price in The Invisible
Man Returns, Hardwicke in The
Ghost of Frankenstein and Carradine in The
Mummy’s Ghost) — and overall The
Story of Mankind is a compelling movie in
its sheer weirdness, even if it’s not “good” in any lasting artistic sense and
one can see why one contemporary critic said that if Price’s character had
waited a bit longer, he could have cited the movie The Story of
Mankind as one more piece of evidence
arguing for our destruction.
