1959 science fiction, dir. Ranald MacDougall, Harry Belafonte, Inger
Stevens: IMDb. After the bombs
fall, only three people are left alive… and they can't get on.
Yes, Harry Belafonte. I know of him mostly as "the Calypso guy",
but he had an acting career too, and in particular he was interested
in making films about authentic Black life in America, rather than the
stereotypes that were a lot of the Hollywood output at the time.
So this ends up being a film of two halves. In the first half, mine
inspector Frank is trapped in a cave-in while the world dies under the
salted bombs (and, as in Five, nobody leaves behind a body). He
makes his way out and travels through the deserted world, then into
New York, on the basis that if anyone else is alive they may also have
made for there. He rigs up an apartment to be reasonably comfortable,
but the loneliness gets to him.
And then he meets Sarah, and the film takes a sharp turn into Fifties
Racism. Which was probably more relevant at the time than it is now;
sure, we still have racism, but it mostly doesn't take the form of a
nice young woman casually commenting that there's "nobody to marry"
while talking to (as far as she knows) the literal last man in the
world. It all gets awkward, especially when a white man turns up and
Harry deliberately steps back to try to get them together (nobody
thinks of giving her time to make up her own mind about what to do of
course). The men end up stalking each other through the ruins of New
York, then have an Epiphany, and the three of them go off together…
though whether this is meant to imply an ongoing platonic friendship
or a ménage a trois… cannot be stated in a 1950s film.
A decent film even so, an enjoyable film even, but I thought the first
half had a lot more to say about specifically the end of the world
than the second, which might as well have been set on a desert island.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.