The writer took an interesting premise and kept it going with some credibility for the first half-hour. But the moment that HARRY BELAFONTE finds that he's not alone in the world and INGER STEVENS enters the story, it falls apart faster than you can blink. Nor are the interracial aspects of the friendship between Stevens and Belafonte played in a realistic way.Even given the fact that this is science fiction, and we always have to suspend some disbelief to enjoy such a tale, there are too many plot contrivances that don't make sense. Stevens' character has been following Belafonte around for a couple of weeks before she dares to make a connection to him--highly unlikely. MEL FERRER turns up on a river barge having been all over the world looking for survivors and found none--apparently not even bodies. And yet we see pigeons on the streets of New York City early in the morning but a complete lack of corpses anywhere. Nevertheless, stores and wiring and electricity are almost untouched and there's even running water in the kitchen.But what keeps the film on a lower level is the talent involved. HARRY BELAFONTE gives the most genuine performance here, but that's not saying much when you have the wooden MEL FERRER and the overly emotional INGER STEVENS tossing off lines as though they were doing a run through rehearsal for the senior play. Belafonte is fortunate in that his character seems the most logical and inventive of the three, while the plot gets sillier the moment the men start arguing over the attractive blonde and some racial remarks are made.It doesn't help that the dialog is often childish or stilted and that Ranald MacDougall's screenplay and direction is unable to bring these characters alive and give them any depth. After the realistic first half-hour, the rest of the film is a letdown.Miklos Rozsa's score is fittingly as low-key as the scenes showing a deserted city, but it has to be one of his least memorable works.

I've seen many actors play the "last man on earth," and NO ONE ever played the part as believably as Harry Belafonte. There's his reaction when he's listening to those radio messages ; his shouting at the whole world to come back (I'm paraphrasing this) : "Where did you all go? What did I do?" ; his trying to live alone with the mannequins ; singing to himself ; his reaction when he finds out there's someone else ; his line when Mel Ferrer threatens him : "Is this World War IV ?" And Inger Stevens was extremely good in it, including her big argument with him, telling him she can live alone, with its almost funny little faux pas : "I'm free, white and 21." And Mel Ferrer, whose character (if I'm correct) was more arrogant in a GENERAL way than he was a bigot, seemed very right for that part. People have complained about the faulty science and similar things, but to me, those things pale alongside the actors and characters. One science fiction guidebook had a great line about this "last three people on earth" movie : "Well, at least one of them can sing."

The end of the world as we know it and only three people remain. With an intriguing title, THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL is a mostly forgotten film directed by Ranald MacDougall, screenwriter for some of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's vehicles from the late 1940s. It tries to flesh out a grim apocalyptic story about what would happen if the world and civilization as we know it came to an abrupt end, and all that was left, at least so far, was a smattering of humans, each of them believing that they were the only ones left.Post-apocalyptic stories have been around for ages -- since the Bible's own last chapter, "Revelations". When it wasn't an alien race deciding to take over our planet for their own purposes of blind conquer in H. G. Wells "War of the Worlds" it was the world turned upside down by the sudden mutation of humankind into vampires, as in Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend." Until the reality of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the mega-powers of the world experimenting with nuclear energy harnessed as the means of mass annihilation took force in the 1940s, science-fiction was little more than tales about Moon colonies, Martian cities, space adventures in other worlds and time travel. Robert A. Heinlein, one of the front-runners of social science fiction, was already writing stories around 1940 based on the potential for human extinction through nuclear warfare. His short story "The Year of the Jackpot" which appeared in 1952 and was part of an anthology called "The Menace from Earth" tackled the destruction of the Earth by nuclear warheads and is one of the most gripping stories of mankind's need for survival even when the odds are against it. The last paragraphs, where the man and the woman await their final end as the Sun sets, is haunting.THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL might as well have been a sequel to "The Year of the Jackpot" told by the points of view of the survivors of this horrific nuclear attack that has destroyed the Earth on a global level. The first half hour is an extended silent film where images of a desolate land prevail as the main character, Ralph (played by Harry Belafonte), emerges from the mine where he's been trapped and finds an overpowering, endless sea of a world where time has frozen and no one is to be found. His slow approach to the truth of the matter is gut-wrenching in its vapid horror -- seeing even little things, like an abandoned umbrella or an empty house. It recalls a much later movie about a different, but equally lethal situation in 28 DAYS LATER... as Cillian Murphy walks among the wreck of a deserted London, unaware he's not alone.But Ralph thinks he is alone. Arriving at New York in a progressive sequence of images is a knot of foreboding, quiet menace. It seems, at times, he must have fallen through a worm-hole and into a mirror image of the city. Enclosed in darkness, it looms at him so menacingly there is the feeling he would be better off doing an about-face and going elsewhere. The camera tracks his progress, making sure we know just how small he is in a sea of skyscrapers with not a single human in them. Once he discovers the truth, Belafonte's face is completely revealing in its anguish that can only express itself through his luminous face, haunted eyes, and single tear rolling down the side of his face. It's here he decides he must make do as the Last Man on Earth, trying not to lose his sanity when apparently, being sane is now as frightening as being alone.For a moment, then, the story becomes an exercise in a surreal dream. Belafonte will still be alone on camera for another stretch of time and he acts as if he still has people around him -- all the more unsettling. He has dinner with mannequins, he sings to no one in particular, and plays with his own shadow as if he were trying to make that shadow another person -- an extension of himself. When someone finally does appear, the story takes off into some different territory and loses some of its punch. When we see her, Inger Stevens is appropriately dressed in black and looks like she's just about lost her mind. She could well be in a state of extended mourning. Seeing another human should cause relief, but the movie has other melodramatic intentions, and from here on, it begins to fail. In most stories about people finding each other after a global catastrophe there's a sense of madness just underneath a facade of happy anxiety. After all, when you think you're the only person left alive and you see someone else, you're wary but equally overjoyed. MacDougall is good in focusing on this aspect -- he at first makes us see Stevens' feet as she follows Belafonte (though their appearance is too quick to make me believe Belafonte did not hear her behind him). It's when they begin interacting and she chooses to dress in suburban white and act as if nothing had happened that I felt the seams of credibility burst. Adding another male character -- Mel Ferrer's -- is good, but bad, because now it creates the basis of a possible conflict. The fact that Stevens and race is the source of conflict is practically unbelievable considering what they've gone through, but race was an issue in 1959. This of course is the problem: old patterns of conflict have to emerge in order to maintain a sense of familiarity, as in Stephen King's "The Stand." It's why these types of movies are good in concept, but fail in execution. THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND THE DEVIL would have fit as an episode of "The Twilight Zone", but not as a 90 minute feature-length film.

I first saw this picture, at a drive-in theater with my whole family. This was in Southern California. It was shown on a sultry summer night. I was a child/woman of 14... I did not tell my parents, because I did not know how or whether to describe the experience. It was my first recognition of a hormonal experience. Before seeing this movie I did not know I had hormones. My world, my being, was never the same. Belafonte will forever be my hero, my... I struggle with the chronology. This film predates American legislation on civil rights. I want to find this film again to begin a chronology. That will be my own personal history since 1959.