Hacker Cinema
The World, the Flesh and the Devil
1959 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Ranald MacDougall
Ralph Burton is a miner who is trapped for several days as a result of a cave-in. When he finally manages to dig himself out, he realizes that all of mankind seems to have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He travels to New York City only to find it deserted. Making a life for himself there, he is flabbergasted to eventually find Sarah Crandall, who also managed to survive. Together, they form a close friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. At this point, tensions rise between the three, particularly between Thacker, who is white, and Burton, who is black.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Whether it was the original plan or not, by the time the movie gets to the end credits the parallels to a lynching are incredibly explicit.
I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
Yeah, this and a few other comments: I'm firmly in the "a film should be an hour and a half camp", but if I'm captivated enough that doesn't matter. Last one of those for me was Everything Everywhere.
I also think there are two kinds of audience, in a sort of bimodal distribution. Some people are looking to pass the time. As long as you display some nice images, they're happy. They don't mind that the episodes of Stranger Things have got longer, because that's what they're spending their time with. At the other end you have people who constantly feel an awareness of what they could be doing with their time, and once they feel that a filmmaker is wasting it you've lost them.
(Last night's film was, in honor of the death of Harry Belafonte, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_Devil_(1959_film) ; much of it is just beautiful long shots of empty New York, and the character parts make heavy use of awkward pauses or unspoken conversations, and yet it's captivating. I suppose I should warn modern audiences that it's also unremittingly ""woke"", and even more so by 1959 standards)