“Abel Gance's first sound film has long been considered a ‘lost' film and tonight's print is an extremely rare one. Its spectacle of the approaching doom of the earth--with time out, of course, for a good deal of eroticism in the process--remains most impressive, and many of the scenes were used again in a different though related context at the end of his 1937 J'Accuse. Variety, reviewing the film in 1929...referred to Abel Gance as a ‘megalomaniac' director turning out oversize and overlength films without regard to the box office or the investors' money. If indeed Gance was a ‘megalomaniac' then so were Griffith, Welles and von Stroheim, and we have had all too few of them. Actually, of course, the primary problem with Gance's films was lack of faith in them by their distributors.... La Fin du monde admittedly has problems. Gance does go overboard in using himself as a Christ figure (much as he used Victor Francen in J'Accuse) and the film in its present form is one he was always dissatisfied with. It was initially conceived as a silent but Gance was forced by his backers to turn it into a talkie. He threw himself wholeheartedly into converting it and apparently was quite pleased with the results, especially in the closing reels. But feeling that the early sound period was not one where grandiose epic experiments were needed, the distributors cut it down to size. While Gance was not unused to this treatment, he felt that far more damage was done to this film than to any other subjected to such severe editing.” William K. Everson