The civil rights movement truly found its footing with Rosa Parks in 1955 and the bus boycotts that followed in Montgomery, AL. Four years later in 1959, when water fountains were still labeled "white" and "colored", MGM released a truly bold film called The World, The Flesh and The Devil.
The film stars Harry Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a miner trapped in a cave-in on Ellis Island. Upon digging himself out, he finds that he is the last living man on the island. When he drives a boat across the harbor to New York City he finds it too is deserted.
Ralph eventually finds Sarah Crandall, played by Inger Stevens, who seems to be the last living woman on earth.
So, in 1959 we have a story about the last man and woman on earth and it just so happens that the man is black and the woman is white.
The two develop a friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer), a white man who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. The rest of the film centers on the relational and racial tensions between the three.
I first saw The World, The Flesh and The Devil on TNT late one night when I was in middle school. I sat there mesmerized by the post-apocalyptic emptiness of the big city. I still find the abandoned New York streets of Tom Cruise's nightmare in Vanilla Sky to be stunning. So, it's that much more amazing when you realize that this film shows an empty New York on a grander scale way back in the late nineteen-fifties.
When I saw the trailer for the Will Smith film I Am Legend, I thought (and hoped) it might be a remake of The World, The Flesh and The Devil. Now I know it was a zombie vampire horror movie based on the novel of the same name and that that novel had already spawned two other adaptations: 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man. But unlike those films, I Am Legend, like The World, also features a last-man-on-earth-in-an-abandoned-New-York-City scenario.
The sad truth is that MGM never released this film on DVD despite the fact that it could easily have been transferred from laser disc as so many other early DVD releases were. In May of 2008, someone wrote on the IMDB message board for the film's page that Warner Brothers were planning on releasing it on DVD. To my knowledge that never happened.
Once in a while, the film is shown on Turner Classic Movies. If you get a chance to watch it, I encourage you to do so.
Here are a couple scenes from the film:
The film stars Harry Belafonte as Ralph Burton, a miner trapped in a cave-in on Ellis Island. Upon digging himself out, he finds that he is the last living man on the island. When he drives a boat across the harbor to New York City he finds it too is deserted.
Ralph eventually finds Sarah Crandall, played by Inger Stevens, who seems to be the last living woman on earth.
So, in 1959 we have a story about the last man and woman on earth and it just so happens that the man is black and the woman is white.
The two develop a friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer), a white man who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. The rest of the film centers on the relational and racial tensions between the three.
I first saw The World, The Flesh and The Devil on TNT late one night when I was in middle school. I sat there mesmerized by the post-apocalyptic emptiness of the big city. I still find the abandoned New York streets of Tom Cruise's nightmare in Vanilla Sky to be stunning. So, it's that much more amazing when you realize that this film shows an empty New York on a grander scale way back in the late nineteen-fifties.
When I saw the trailer for the Will Smith film I Am Legend, I thought (and hoped) it might be a remake of The World, The Flesh and The Devil. Now I know it was a zombie vampire horror movie based on the novel of the same name and that that novel had already spawned two other adaptations: 1964's The Last Man on Earth and 1971's The Omega Man. But unlike those films, I Am Legend, like The World, also features a last-man-on-earth-in-an-abandoned-New-York-City scenario.
The sad truth is that MGM never released this film on DVD despite the fact that it could easily have been transferred from laser disc as so many other early DVD releases were. In May of 2008, someone wrote on the IMDB message board for the film's page that Warner Brothers were planning on releasing it on DVD. To my knowledge that never happened.
Once in a while, the film is shown on Turner Classic Movies. If you get a chance to watch it, I encourage you to do so.
Here are a couple scenes from the film:
