The World, the Flesh and the Devil (Sol C. Siegel Productions, HarBel Productions, MGM, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 19) my husband Charles and I watched two more movies on TCM, including the second half of a two-film tribute to Harry Belafonte: The World, the Flesh and the Devil. It was made in 1959 at a time when post-nuclear apocalyptic stories were all the rage; the most famous World War III movie was Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, adapted from a novel by Australian writer Nevil Shute. The World, the Flesh and the Devil was the brainchild of director and co-writer Ranald MacDougall, though its basic story was an oldie from 1901 (before the existence of nuclear weapons!) called The Purple Cloud by British author Matthew Phipps Shiel. (His last name was originally spelled “Shiell,” with two “l”’s, but he dropped one “l” from his last name and used only initials for his first two as a pen name.) As the Wikipedia page on The Purple Cloud explains, “The story is about Adam Jeffson, a man on a polar expedition who discovers a mysterious and deathly Purple Cloud. In the wake of the massive global deaths wrought by the Purple Cloud, Jeffson becomes ruler of the world and builds a huge palace to his glory. He meets a young woman and the two become the heirs to the future of humanity.” A writer named Ferdinand Reyher worked up Shiel’s story – first published as a serial and then as a novel – into a screen treatment called End of the World, and MacDougall further developed it as a script and directed it as this film. The movie was co-produced by MGM with Sol C. Siegel Productions and HarBel Productions, the latter owned by the film’s star, Harry Belafonte. Belafonte had begun training as an actor in New York in the early 1950’s, but in order to raise money to go to acting school he also began singing in nightclubs. By 1955 he was a major recording artist with RCA Victor (apparently he was their second best-selling artist, next to Elvis), especially after he abandoned jazz and pop singing in favor of folk music.

In 1959 Belafonte was at the peak of his vocal career – he’d just recorded a two-LP set called Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall that was a huge seller – and he also starred in his own TV special for CBS (though this was two years after Nat “King” Cole had broken the color barrier with a regular series on NBC, which got good ratings but didn’t last because NBC couldn’t find a sponsor for it). His movie production company focused on stories that would incorporate anti-racist themes; his first film as producer as well as star was Odds Against Tomorrow (also 1959), in which he played a Black petty crook who teams up with a white racist (Robert Ryan) to plan an elaborate bank robbery. The World, the Flesh and the Devil cast Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a mining engineer who escapes the deadly atomic dust (reflecting its pre-Hiroshima origins, the deadly radioactive menace that lays waste to the world in this story is not an explosive device, but a toxic dust that irradiates the world; this is also the atomic weapon at the heart of Robert Heinlein’s fascinating 1940 short story “Solution Unsatisfactory,” in which the invention of radioactive dust as a weapon forces the rest of the world to accept a benevolent dictator even though no one, including the dictator himself, is particularly happy about that) because he’s been trapped underground by a cave-in for five days. He manages to find a car in working order that he can jury-rig to start and drives it from Pennsylvania, where the accident happened, to New York City. Ralph is able to approach the quality of his former existence by accumulating canned food and restoring power through a generator he discovers at a now-closed radio station. He also starts broadcasting to see if anyone answers and hence is still alive. Ultimately Ralph discovers there’s at least one other survivor in New York, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), and the two of them drift into a guarded relationship of sorts. It’s explained that she survived the deadly radioactive dust by being in an experimental laboratory while the dust attack happened. Then a third person shows up, a white guy named Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer), who’s still mourning the deaths of his wife and two children from the dust.

The three principals settle into an edgy co-existence in which the big dramatic issue becomes which of the two men Sarah will pair up with – a plot twist Bob Dylan parodied in his song “Talking World War III Blues,” in which in a post-apocalyptic future he gets his face slapped by a woman after he approaches her and says, “Let’s go play Adam and Eve.” Ultimately Benson stumbles on a gun store and he and Ralph start stalking each other around New York City with murderous intent – until Ralph spots an inscription on the wall of a New York church quoting the Biblical passage about turning swords into plowshares and not learning wars anymore. That reminds him that the murderous attitudes that are driving both him and Benson at the moment are the same ones that got the world into this pickle in the first place. Ultimately Ralph leaves New York and Benson gets Sarah, while Ralph says he’s determined to find other survivors (he’s already talked to one, though the one who’s answered his radio calls spoke only French and Ralph spoke only English) and mobilize them to rebuild the world. The ending is a bit of a cop-out and is rendered even more ironic by the fact that, though Inger Stevens was (like Marlene Dietrich) notorious for seducing the leading men of all her movies, she was also secretly married to a Black man, producer Ike Jones. Of course, since this was a Harry Belafonte movie made at a time when he was far more famous as a singer than an actor, he gets to sing three songs in it, including a minor ditty called “I Don’t Like It Here” (co-credited to Belafonte and MacDougall) which he sings in the caved-in mine in which he’s trapped in the opening, as well as “Gotta Travel On” (three years before he recorded the song on his album The Midnight Special) and “Fifteen.” The World, the Flesh and the Devil has its silly aspects, including a cop-out ending that denies us the thrill of having Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens pair up together (at the time the Production Code, with its prohibition against miscegenation, was still in effect, and it’s not hard to imagine how MGM’s Southern distributors would have reacted to an Adam-and-Eve story in which Adam was Black), but mostly it’s a surprisingly gripping tale that makes its anti-war and anti-racist points effectively without making us feel like we’re being hit over the head with them.