Monday, December 11, 2017

The Story of Mankind (Cambridge Productions/Warner Bros., 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched one of the downright weirdest movies ever made, The Story of Mankind (“Are you sure we have time for it all?” Charles joked when I announced the title), a 1957 Warner Bros. production by producer-director-co-writer Irwin Allen, who previously had made only documentaries but who would become a major force in the movie business in the mid-1970’s when he specialized in disaster movies with all-star casts and turned out two back-to-back blockbuster hits, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. (Though disaster movies have been made before, it was these two films that established “disaster” as a movie genre.) The Story of Mankind — this project, anyway — began life as a pop world-history book by Dutch author Henrik Willem Van Loon, first published in 1922 and which I remember reading in junior high school (before junior high school got renamed with that awful appellation “middle school”), which became famous not only because Van Loon was able to tell a reasonable approximation of the story of mankind in one slim volume but also because of the clever little drawings with which he illustrated it. (I remember one called “Propaganda” which showed a line of people marching off a cliff, obviously induced to do so by some dictator’s propaganda.)

For some reason Irwin Allen decided there was a movie in Van Loon’s book, and what he and screenwriter Charles Bennett (best known for the six Alfred Hitchcock films he worked on between 1934 and 1940 — indeed I’ve argued in these pages that Bennett was to Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford) came up with was a framing story in which humankind has invented the “super H-bomb” (I think it was pretty much the same as the “solarbonite bomb” that figured prominently in Ed Wood’s messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space), not knowing that its use will mean the immediate destruction of Earth as a viable human habitat. So a “Celestial Tribunal” headed by “High Judge” (i.e., God) Cedric Hardwicke has been called to determine whether humanity should be allowed to destroy itself with the super H-bomb or whether the celestial tribunal should intervene and destroy the bomb before it can be used, thereby sparing humanity indefinitely. The two representatives who appear as attorneys for both sides — “The Spirit of Man” (Ronald Colman, surprisingly dignified and impressive in what turned out to be his final film), arguing on the side of humanity’s existence; and “Mr. Scratch’ (Vincent Price), a.k.a. the Devil (the same pseudonym used for the Devil in William Dieterle’s 1941 film All That Money Can Buy, a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which Walter Huston played him), arguing for our destruction — are allowed to cite various incidents from human history to argue that humans are either good or evil. The trial kicks off with Pharoah Khufu of Egypt (John Carradine) — who has a bone to pick with Mr. Scratch because the latter promised him immortality (I couldn’t help but joke, “And all I got to do was be in terrible horror movies, just like you!”) — who according to the script consigned a million human souls to the Devil by forcing them to build the Great Pyramid. The Spirit of Man cites Moses (Francis X. Bushman) as a counter-example of someone good who came out of ancient Egypt. It goes on pretty much like that from there, with Price denouncing the ancient Greeks and Romans as warmongers and Colman citing the beauty of the art and culture they created as well as the ways they extended scientific knowledge.

Some of the sketches provided to illustrate various parts of human history are pretty risible — Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx all appear but not in the same scene; instead Chico plays a monk who tries to talk Christopher Columbus (Anthony Dexter) out of his mad plan to try to reach the Indies by sailing west instead of East; Groucho is Peter Minuit, skillfully swindling an Indian out of Manhattan Island for $24 (he’s one of the few stars in this film who actually got to play pretty close to his normal typecasting); and Harpo is Sir Isaac Newton, playing his harp in an apple orchard (his song is Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” actually written over a century after Newton’s time, and I couldn’t help but wish that a giant ape had come on and picked him and his instrument up as he played) when an apple falls on his head and gives him the idea for the theory of gravity. (This is Harpo’s only color film, so we finally get to see his famous wig the red color it was on stage rather than the “blonde” it looked like in the Marx Brothers’ joint movies.) Peter Lorre makes a quite good Emperor Nero (and Allen and Bennett blessedly avoid letting us hear him attempt to sing) even though he seems to have been patterning his performance on Emil Jannings’ in the 1924 German-Italian co-production of Quo Vadis? (I’ve never seen that movie, but I have seen how Jannings posed as Nero in the stills), but Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra (I’m not making this up, you know!) and Helmut Dantine as Mark Antony seem to be the warmup act for the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton misfire on the same story. The film earned the usual critical brickbats for casting 42-year-old Hedy Lamarr as 19-year-old Joan of Arc (and they had her wear her hair close-cropped as usual in Joan of Arc movies even though contemporary art depicts the real one as having long brown hair), but she’s actually one of the better cast members even though the brevity of the “turns” means it’s unfair to compare the performances here to actors playing the same roles in full-length features about their historical characters.

Agnes Moorehead is surprisingly good as Queen Elizabeth I, though the script for her sequence — William Shakespeare (Reginald Gardiner) reads her a bit of his patriotic poetry and this inspires her to resist and ultimately defeat the Spanish Armada instead of surrendering to it — is preposterous. The French Revolution sequence suffers from the dippy casting of dumb-blonde Marie Wilson as Marie Antoinette, though Franklin Pangborn is marvelous as the Marquis de Varennes — and of course Allen and Bennett couldn’t resist having her say, “Let ’em eat cake,” though that’s been pretty well debunked now (it was a long-standing urban legend about clueless royals and had first appeared in print a century before Marie Antoinette’s time). There’s also the unlikely casting of Dennis Hopper as Napoleon (with Marie Windsor as an appropriately slatternly Josephine), and a final montage sequence of Adolf Hitler, alternately represented by sound recordings of the real one and film clips with Bobby Watson (repeating the role he’d played in To Be or Not to Be and quite a few other World War II-era movies, when he’d been Hollywood’s go-to guy for Der Führer) shown over a backdrop of shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s dark masterpiece Triumph of the Will. That’s hardly the only use of stock footage in this film; we also get clips from Land of the Pharoahs, Helen of Troy, King Richard and the Crusaders, Captain Horatio Hornblower and, I suspect, John Ford’s The Searchers to represent the cruelty with which the Anglo-American settlers repressed and wiped out the Native Americans. (Oddly, this movie is one of the most blatantly pro-Native films turned out by Hollywood before the early 1970’s, when movies like Little Big Man and, later, Dances with Wolves made pro-Native Westerns fashionable; when Vincent Price made the point that the white Europeans in America wiped out the Indians and enslaved the Blacks for a workforce, I joked, “He sounds like Howard Zinn.”)

The Story of Mankind is one of those film projects that seems to have been misbegotten from the get-go — according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, when Ronald Colman was asked if the project were based on a book, he said, “Yes, but they are using only the notes on the dust jacket” — one wonders who Irwin Allen and the “suits” at Warners who green-lighted it thought the audience was going to be. And yet it’s good enough it didn’t really deserve the designation it got from the Medved brothers as one of The 50 Worst Films of All Time in their book of that title. Most of whatever quality it has comes from the lead actors, Ronald Colman and Vincent Price; Colman tackles his nearly impossible assignment with grace, dignity and a quite sense of commitment (I can think of quite a few major stars whose last films were considerably worse than this one!), and Price goes into the “camp” mode that was his default setting whenever he had to cope with an especially ridiculous and clichéd script — though there are moments here that evoke memories of the finest performance he ever gave, as Oscar Wilde in his 1977 one-man stage show Diversions and Delights. (I hate to keep mentioning this play, which doesn’t seem ever to have been recorded or filmed and is therefore lost, but I was lucky enough to get to see it and it was magnificent, a daunting challenge to which Price fully and vividly rose. Though he spent decades making increasingly wretched horror films that wasted his talents, Vincent Price could act.) Hardwicke’s presence as the divine judge of the celestial court is also welcome — it’s interesting that at least three of the actors here played major roles in Universal horror films in the early 1940’s (Price in The Invisible Man Returns, Hardwicke in The Ghost of Frankenstein and Carradine in The Mummy’s Ghost) — and overall The Story of Mankind is a compelling movie in its sheer weirdness, even if it’s not “good” in any lasting artistic sense and one can see why one contemporary critic said that if Price’s character had waited a bit longer, he could have cited the movie The Story of Mankind as one more piece of evidence arguing for our destruction.