This strange film was either made by moral morons, or for moral morons. Bancroft is a communist mass murderer, cloaked in the classic socialist dispensation of doing any unspeakable atrocity in the name of "The People". The defenseless individuals he and his mob have given themselves righteous privilege to hunt down like animals are called "aristocrats". We see or hear of no crimes they have committed. they include old men,cripples and women with babies. All eventually will be murdered by the heroic Bolsheviks that Bancroft belongs to, all save for Miriam, who has fallen in love with the man who kills her friends, a lover, (Mowbray), and everything she's ever lived for. In the finale, they are joyously together, sailing off with a ship full of victorious reds, having massacred the whites in the city that might have been a refuge for all the other refugees we started the film with. Oh, there was a scene where some whites killed a peasant that wouldn't follow curfew orders. Maybe that's supposed to be some moral-relativism to offset the red terrors in the film. Pretty far stretch, especially if you have any working knowledge of Russian history of the previous fifteen years. If you ever thought you'd want to see what a Stalin-era soviet propaganda piece might look if a Hollywood studio made it, here it is.
Review of The World and the Flesh
