Inger Stevens

(On Cable TV, April 2020) What an interesting film. Decades before I am Legend, here is The World, The Flesh and The Devil featuring one black man (Harry Belafonte) alone in post-apocalyptic New York City, except that he meets a white woman (Inger Stevens) at the beginning of the second act and they fall in love except when another man enters the picture (Mel Ferrer) at the beginning of the third act and then the action gets downright primal. Often meditative, but simply eloquent by the choice of featuring a lead black actor (playing an engineer, no less) romancing a white woman as the (potentially) last two people on Earth, this is a film worth remembering for its explicit acknowledgement or racism and mental illness due to isolation. Belafonte was Sidney Poitier before Poitier, and he gets to show his charisma and singing abilities here, either by himself in the early minutes of the film, alongside Stevens later on, or in an increasingly antagonistic relationship with Ferrer late in the film. Some haunting shots of late-1950s Manhattan, completely empty of people, are good for a frisson or two. The ending doesn’t quite satisfy—it seems to push things to a breaking point, then draws back for less than convincing reasons. But at least it’s an ending everyone can live with.