A Lutheran church funded short subject which illustrates mankind's propensity for cruelty and self-destruction, ostensibly by dint of the rejection of God.
Veteran actor LEW AYRES, himself a notedly resolute pacifist, narrates this chronicle of our steady march toward armageddon since the time of Christ, and offers us a glimpse of the horrors humanity may face in the near-future. The film's animation technique using puppets and miniatures is largely just a consecution of dioramas. Here and there, a character will raise an arm or turn their head, but it's primarily the camera which is in motion, scanning the dramatically lit, but mostly static shadowbox displays. The culminating doomsday sequences are a bit more kinetic, envisioning the Earth's destruction in a choppy swirl of collapsing miniature structures, combined with practical pyrotechnic effects. Iconographically, it's rather primitive by modern standards, but audiences of the late 1940s probably found it forceful.
Long unattainable before its beautiful restoration at UCLA, THE WAY OF PEACE is, expectedly, a bit on the preachy side, but it imparts a calling for peace on Earth which transcends compartmented belief systems. Too, it may well feature cinema's earliest depiction of nuclear Doomsday. While it lacks the terrifying punch of more recent films such as THREADS and THE DAY AFTER, it amuses as a quaintly naive forerunner.
