The World, The Flesh and The Devil

(MGM) is a passionately sincere, pictorially brilliant, monumentally silly example of how people who are obsessed with the race question tend to see everything in Black and White. In this instance, the audience is asked to believe that when most of humanity has been wiped out by a cloud of radioactive sodium, the three people who have managed to save their skins will spend most of their time worrying about the color of them.

The start of the film is striking. The hero, a young Negro (Harry Belafonte), is trapped by a mine cave-in. Five days later he digs his way back to the surface. "I made it!" he shouts in triumph, but nobody replies. The pit head is deserted. The town is deserted. The highways are deserted as the hero, panic-stricken, goes speeding off toward Manhattan, the nearest big city, in the first car he finds. At the Hudson River he is stopped short. The George Washington Bridge is jammed to the rails with abandoned automobiles, all arrested in a desperate plunge toward the suburbs of no return; the Lincoln Tunnel is the same.

The hero crosses to Manhattan in a rowboat with an outboard motor, wanders half insane with loneliness and terror through the enormous canceled city. "I'm alive!" he screams, "I'm alive!" But by this time he has lost all hope that anybody else is. He takes up residence in a pleasant apartment on lower Fifth Avenue, begins to make the best of his mournful immense inheritance of culture and convenience.

So far so good. But then the moviemakers feel obliged to give their black Adam a white Eve (Inger Stevens), and all at once the grand drama of humanity's survival collapses into an irrelevant wrangle about racial discrimination that has no more real significance, under the circumstances of the story, than a hotfoot in hell. Adam and Eve fall in love, but Adam refuses to accept the fact. He cannot begin a new world because he cannot forget the old; he cannot let social injustice die with the society that fostered it. At this point the moviemakers introduce a particularly amiable snake into their unedifying Eden. A cultivated white man (Mel Ferrer) wanders into town; and of course he too falls in love with the heroine.

The story falls into the predictable triangular pattern, which soon resolves into the predictable eternal question: Which boy will get the girl? In this instance, the answer is intended to answer the race question, but since Actor Belafonte's skin seems just about as light as Actor Ferrer's, the audience may justifiably wonder if the question itself is not almost academic. Anyway, black boy gets white girl--or seems to. But then in the confusing finish (which was reshot after a big front-office foofaraw), all three wander off together hand in hand--with the girl in the middle.

The Young Philadelphias (Warner), the film version of a popular novel by Richard Powell, is a sort of updated Kitty Foyle that has lost its wit and is fumbling for a moral: social status isn't everything. As in Christopher Morley's 1939 bestseller, the story tells what happens when a Philadelphia girl (Diane Brewster) tries to go beyond her station on the well-known Main Line. She marries into one of the very best families, but on her wedding night discovers that the blue blood has run pathetically thin. Frightened and confused, she flies back to the arms of her redbrick-Irish boyfriend (Brian Keith) and soon finds herself with child. She also finds herself without a husband: he smashes up his car and is killed. Coldly refusing to marry the man she really loves, she informs him that she is going to raise his son (Paul Newman) as though he were her husband's. "I want him to have the right chances."

He does. He goes to Princeton, falls in love with a rich girl (Barbara Rush), joins the town's top law firm, and rises rapidly up the shingle toward a partnership. The hitch comes when he realizes that in advancing his worldly status, he has neglected his spiritual state. For a moment there, it looks as if the picture is going to make an honest if not very original point. But before anybody can say Fish House Punch, the script gives the hero a splendid opportunity to save his soul without losing any money.

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