FANTASIA OBSCURA: The Post-Apocalyptic Film From 1959 That May Be Our Future
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, it’s hard to say what’s on your mind unless it’s just the right moment…
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959)
(Dist.: MGM; Dir.: Ranald MacDougal)
Science fiction pretends to look into the future, but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. — Ray Bradbury
Bradbury’s statement has been evident time and again since the beginning of the science-fiction genre. The tradition is well established, with Wells’ The War of the Worlds being a metaphor for colony-building imperialism and Pal’s film adaptation of that novel being an expression of Cold War fears as an example of how a story can stand in for a discussion the audience is unwilling to speak plainly about. Sometimes, if the topic is just unable to be broached directly, then there may be no way except through fantastic fiction to even think about the matter.
Case in point, MacDougal’s film about surviving a nuclear attack that really had nothing to do with atomic war, and everything to do with racism (with a side discussion about sexism, too):
(Speaking of speaking about things, the only way to really delve properly into this film is to provide major spoilers for the movie; if you want to see the film first before reading, there’s plenty of other good content on this site from the fine staff of REBEAT to read…)
Supposedly based on M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, though actually owing more to the short story “The Comet” written by W. E.B. Du Bois, which appeared in his collection Darkwater in 1920, our film opens deep in a coal mine, where Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) is the engineer inspecting an unsound tunnel.
While he’s there, there’s a cave-in, which traps him there five days, at the end of which, the sound of digging to free him suddenly stops. Fearful that his rescuers have given up on him, he digs his own way out, only to find that everyone above ground is gone, having fled to die off-screen thanks to an international conflict leading to poisoning the atmosphere with intense radioisotopes, a passive strategic-level neutron bomb that leaves buildings standing empty of people.
Some scrounging for provisions later, Ralph decides to head to New York City. Which, on one hand seems an odd choice, as common sense might encourage you to avoid major cities after a nuclear war. On the other, the fact that MacDougal and his crew could shoot on location in New York early on weekend mornings in a truly empty city gives the film powerful images that project how truly alone Ralph is as we watch him desperately call out amid the canyons of Wall Street for someone, anyone, to reply.
Ultimately, just as Ralph comes to accept that there’s no one else around, burying himself in restoring power to the apartment he’s a squatter in, he discovers New York has a second occupant, Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens). Sarah followed Ralph, literally staying in the dark, unable to believe that another person lived, and ultimately unable to accept that the only man left alive was “not one of her kind,” to use the coded language of the day.
It’s this inability to let the past go that keeps the two of them apart; every few moments they are together, one or the other falls back into pre-cataclysmic behavior, ruining the connection they want to have with each other with a careless remark or a joke that just kills the mood. And it’s really the meat of the film here — how racial attitudes dehumanize us and keeps us from accepting each other as people; as in Du Bois’ “The Comet,” there’s the underlying implication that if the last man and woman can’t overcome these prejudices, then the human race is doomed to extinction, which adds a subtle element of dread to the proceedings.
That tension between the two characters gets changed up when a white man comes on the scene, in this case Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer) who Ralph and Sarah nurse back to health. The minute he gets hale and hearty, Benson unleashes his insufferable racism on Ralph, while Sarah threatens to unleash her carnal yearnings on Benson; her attention for him is strictly out of sexual frustration, something she probably would have resolved long before that had she not been prejudiced herself.
Which in itself is significant, in that we get a female protagonist who not only is not being passive sexually, but acknowledging her own carnal needs without judgment, a potent message for a 1950s audience alongside the racial considerations they had to make as well.
This ultimately culminates in a competition between Ralph and Benson for Sarah, which ticks her off as she’s not willing to be the passive prize. The terms of the contest are simple: Each man takes a rifle and chases the other through New York, and the survivor claims the girl for himself. This proceeds as expected until Ralph finds himself before the Isaiah Wall at Ralph Bunche Park:
Inspired by this, Ralph throws down his rifle and seeks out Benson to talk him out of resolving this with guns. Confronted with a man who refuses to hate him, Benson cannot bring himself to hate in return, and the contest is abandoned, leaving Sarah to choose whom she wants to be with. And she does: Both of them, at the same time, as she locks arms with both men and walks down the deserted streets while the final credit swells up: THE BEGINNING.
It’s a bold move to make a film about the need for racial understanding along with some sexual acceptance at a time when the average audience just did not want to look at serious issues. Even the fact that it had to take the end of the world to allow characters in the film to rise above years of bad programming and discuss such subjects openly may have been too much for the viewer of the day.
The film came out only a few years after Dore Schary lost his job for pushing message pics, and the production lost money for MGM, which made the Lowes Corporation feel they were right in avoiding getting preachy and Belafonte unable to do another film that suggested tolerance for each other.
Although science fiction is more a metaphor about today than a prediction of tomorrow, the fact that the film does give us an oblique taste of the coming Civil Rights movement and feminism that the Sixties would bring gives it some creed in the prophecy department. And while we haven’t really had our “THE BEGINNING” yet ourselves, we can always hope for the future.
NEXT TIME: Everyone’s talking about HBO’s new series based on a film from 1973; the follow up film from 1976, not so much…
