I can perhaps be forgiven if I replaced my beloved boyhood Berkley Highland edition of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) with the 1996 Signet tie-in to that year’s screen version starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. That was out of loyalty to one of my idols, John Frankenheimer, who had been hired—not for the first time—to replace the original director of the film, sadly considered a train-wreck both on- and off-camera. But like several of his others, Paul Lehr’s Berkley cover remains etched in my brain, with its virtually all-red palette; desolate, mountain-backed landscape; burning sun above a nearly naked, bearded man in the foreground; and figures, some with tails, glimpsed behind him.

   An introduction presents the novel as a narrative by private gentleman Edward Prendick, found among his papers and published, unsubstantiated, by his nephew and heir, Charles Edward Prendick. Presumed drowned after “the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1º s. and longitude 107º e. [on February 1, 1887, he] was picked up [11 months later] in latitude 5º3′ s. and longitude 101º e in a small open boat… [supposedly from] the missing schooner Ipecacuanha,” captained by drunken John Davis. In the dinghy for eight days, he had been alone since a struggle during which an unnamed seaman and fellow passenger Helmar, having drawn lots for cannibalism, fell overboard.

   Picked up by Davis, en route to Hawaii, Edward tells Montgomery—to be landed on the nameless island where he lives—that he “had taken to natural history as a relief from the dullness of my comfortable independence.” An “outcast from civilization [who] lost my head for ten minutes” 11 years ago, the medico is returning from Africa with a menagerie (dogs, llama, puma, rabbits) and misshapen attendant M’ling, hazed by captain and crew. Having run afoul of Davis, Edward is dumped with Montgomery and a white-haired man who meets him with a trio of “strange, brutish-looking fellows”; on their arrival, some of the rabbits are released to “Increase and multiply,” replenishing the island’s meat supply.

   Told that his uninvited guest “had spent some years at the Royal College of Science and had done some research in biology under Huxley,” the white-haired man says, “We are biologists here. This is a biological station—of a sort,” where they see a ship about once a year. Overhearing his secretive host’s name, Edward recalls the “Moreau Horrors” of a decade past, as the “prominent and masterful physiologist…was simply howled out of the country [for] wantonly cruel” experiments in vivisection. While Montgomery evades his questions about M’ling’s furry, pointed ears and other odd attributes, Edward hears cries of pain from the puma, emanating from the locked enclosure nearby and lasting for hours.

   Walking in the forest, Edward sees a “grotesque, half-bestial creature” on all fours, clad in bluish cloth, drink from a stream, and finds a rabbit with its head torn off; in a glade, three porcine humanoids gibber rhythmically with the refrain of “Aloola” or “Baloola.” Using a stone to fell the Leopard Man pursuing him through the forest, he finally makes his way back to the house, where Montgomery gives him a sedative, but no explanations. The next day, the cries of pain are clearly human, yet when Edward flings open the door that Montgomery had forgotten to relock, he sees only “something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged” before Moreau hurls him back inside his room.

   Fleeing in fear of ending up as “a lost soul, a beast…after torture [and] the most hideous degradation it was possible to conceive,” he is led by an apelike Beast Man to the others, and taught the Law. “Not to [go on all Fours/suck up Drink/eat Flesh nor Fish/claw Bark of Trees/chase other Men]; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”; the chanting also deifies Moreau: “His [is/are] the [House of Pain/Hand that makes/Hand that wounds/Hand that heals/lightning-flash/deep salt sea/stars in the sky].” The Sayer of the Law notes, “None escape…the punishments of those who break [it],” whereupon Montgomery and Moreau appear, pursuing and cornering Edward on the beach, his fate presumably unspeakable…

   They drop their revolvers, and he agrees to return to the house for Moreau’s explanation, which contradicts his assumptions about being rendered bestial; “that vivisected human being” he saw was the puma, one of the “humanized animals…carven and wrought into new shapes.” Deeming Edward’s focus on the pain he inflicts “the mark of the beast,” he says, “I am a religious man…I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you—for I have sought His laws, in my way, all my life…” Joined by Montgomery and six Kanakas—who later deserted, taking his yacht—he has devoted almost 11 years to “the study of the plasticity of living forms,” untroubled by ethics or his early failures.

   But “the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back again…I mean to do better things still. I mean to conquer that,” and his trouble with hands and claws, intelligence, and the emotions. Turned out when “the beast begins to creep back,” they gravitate toward huts built by the Kanakas, living “a kind of travesty of humanity,” governed by the Law, even marrying; “I have some hope of that puma; I have worked hard at her head and brain…” The 60+ surviving Beast People “had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds,” forestalling a violent uprising, but are constantly breaking the Law that “battled in their minds with the deep-seated, ever rebellious cravings of their animal natures.”

   M’ling lives in “a small kennel [inside] the enclosure…the most human-looking of all…a complex trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill, a bear, tainted with dog and ox,” loyal to and trained in domestic duties by Montgomery, who is dismayed when he and Edward find a gnawed rabbit. “Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” raising fears of “the inevitable suggestions” of tasting blood, so Moreau insists on making an example of the presumed culprit, the Leopard Man, calling the Beast People with “a huge cowherd’s horn.” Reminded that a lawbreaker “goes back to the House of Pain,” he bolts, but as the terrified creature is encircled by both men and Beast Folk, Edward mercifully shoots him.

   Weeks later, catastrophe strikes: pulling her fetters from the wall, the puma escapes into the wood, breaking Edward’s arm; with Montgomery and M’ling, he fights off aggressive Beast Men as they seek Moreau, who did not return from the pursuit. Told he is dead, the quick-thinking Edward says he watches from above and “has changed his body,” the old one found with its head battered in by the fetters and the mutilated puma nearby. Laying it on a pile of brushwood, they “put an end to all we found living” in the lab, but during a drunken “bank holiday,” Montgomery burns the boats, ending any hope of escape, while amid a riot that claims him and M’ling, Edward upsets a lamp, incinerating the enclosure.

   Alone with the Beast Men, Edward asserts control, invoking the Law; arms himself with revolvers, hatchets, and whip; orders the bodies, including the Sayer of the Law, cast into the sea; drives off the Hyena-Swine, who had also tasted blood; and establishes an uneasy 10-month peace amid the huts of the rest, a Dog Man his inseparable ally. The inevitable reversion leaves their huts loathsome, so he builds “a hovel of boughs” in the enclosure’s ruins, but the Hyena-Swine kills the Dog Man and is in turn shot. At last, a boat with two rotting bodies—one apparently Davis—floats ashore, and after gathering what provisions he can, Edward drifts for three days until “a brig from Apia to San Francisco” finds him.

   A vice president of the H.G. Wells Society and the author of an update, Moreau’s Other Island (aka An Island Called Moreau, 1980), Brian W. Aldiss writes in his afterword that Wells “followed his great teacher, Thomas Huxley, in his devotion to the fresh truths and insights that evolution was bringing to human affairs….We were up from the apes, not down from the angels. We carried in our anatomies proof of the ancestral beast….[The] island stands as a model for the world and Moreau himself as a model for God the cruel experimental scientist.” Unsurprisingly, the novel—which Wells later called “an exercise in youthful blasphemy”—was controversial, yet its notoriety helped make it a best-seller.

   The first and decidedly best screen version, Island of Lost Souls (1932), was made before Wells adapted his own work into Things to Come (1936) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937). Erle C. Kenton directed the rare foray into the genre by Paramount and, later, Universal’s Golden Age horror films The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). Displaying his diversity, he worked with W.C. Fields in You’re Telling Me! (1934) and Universal’s other cash cows, Abbott and Costello, in Pardon My Sarong, Who Done It? (both 1942), and It Ain’t Hay (1943), although replaced by Charles Lamont on Hit the Ice (1943) after problems with Costello.

   Among those reportedly laboring on the long-gestating screenplay were Joseph Moncure March; Cyril Hume of Forbidden Planet (1956), also a mainstay of the Tarzan series; and Garrett Fort, whose seminal contribution to the Universal cycle includes early, uncredited work on the Wells adaptation The Invisible Man (1933). The eventual script credit went to Waldemar Young—a frequent collaborator with Lon Chaney and Tod Browning (e.g., London After Midnight, 1927)—and Philip Wylie, the co-author (with Edwin Balmer) of the novel When Worlds Collide (1933). George Pal produced the 1951 screen version, as he would the Wells-based The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960).

   Charles Laughton, who had made his Hollywood debut opposite Boris Karloff in James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932) for Universal, dominates the film as totally as his character of Moreau does his creations. He went on to earn an Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), plus nominations for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957); star in perhaps the definitive version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); and direct one extraordinary film, The Night of the Hunter (1955). Cast as Edward Parker (né Prendick), Richard Arlen had a key genre role as the hero of The Lady and the Monster (1944), the first adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain (1942).

   Bankrupt after Universal—for whom he re-created his defining stage role in Browning’s Dracula (1931), which Fort co-wrote—terminated his contract, Bela Lugosi is the Sayer of the Law; Wally Westmore’s makeup was, ironically, perhaps as heavy as the one that made him reject Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). Selected in a nationwide contest among 60,000 entrants, fashion model Kathleen Burke played Lota, the Panther Woman, a new character developed by Fort and Wylie. Renamed, she is a fixture in the Burt Lancaster (1977) and Brando remakes, plus The Twilight People (1972), which—like Terror Is a Man (1959)—was an uncredited Filipino-American version produced by Eddie Romero.

   The film benefits greatly from the work of cinematographer Karl Struss, an Oscar-winner for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1929) and nominee for Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), and location shooting on both California’s Catalina Island and the S.S. Catalina, which fortuitously encountered actual fog, specified in the script. The S.S. Covena picks up the S.O.S. of the Lady Vain—also bound for Apia, where he is to marry Ruth Thomas (Leila Hyams)—and Parker, who has Montgomery (Arthur Hohl) send her a radiogram. Captain Davies (Stanley Fields) drops him with Montgomery and M’ling (Tetsu Komai); although offering passage to Apia, the whip-wielding Moreau has “something in mind.”

   He wishes to know if Lota, presented as “a pure Polynesian” and enjoined to secrecy, will be attracted to Parker; she is, but cannot avert his horrifying look into the laboratory, and drawing the wrong conclusions, he tries to flee with Lota. They are stopped by the Beast Men, whom Moreau convenes with a gong, evoking a recitation by the Sayer of the Law, shown in extreme close-up and wringing every drop of agony from, “His is the House of Pain.” Back at the house, with childish glee, Moreau boasts, “Oh, it takes a long time and infinite patience to make them talk. Someday, I’ll create a woman, and it will be easier,” while “some of my less successful experiments” serve as slave labor, generating power.

   Moreau asks, “do you know what it means to feel like God?”—almost verbatim the line that the censor insisted be obscured by a clap of thunder in Frankenstein one year earlier. The next day, the schooner in which Montgomery was to convey Parker to Apia is found “mysteriously” wrecked; when the Covena arrives, the American Consul (George Irving) forces Davies to reveal the truth, and has Captain Donahue (Paul Hurst) take Ruth to the island (latitude 15º s. and longitude 170º w., near Tonga, for you cartographers). There’s a priceless moment when Parker, having noticed Lota’s claw-like nails, bursts in saying, “Moreau, you don’t deserve to live!,” to which he urbanely replies, “I beg your pardon?”

   After Parker refuses to play the mating game, Moreau laments to Montgomery that he’d been tipped off by “the stubborn beast flesh creeping back,” but he vows, “This time I’ll burn out all of the animal in her…time and monotony will do the rest.” He admits Ruth and Donahue, yet when Parker wishes to leave, he warns that traveling a mile back to the ship through his jungle at night would be dangerous, so they accept his hospitality. Their meal is interrupted by chanting, and Moreau observes, “the natives…are restless tonight,” plying Donahue with drink as Montgomery unusually abstains, but during the night, ape-man Ouran (wrestler Hans Steinke, “The German Oak”) seeks to break into Ruth’s room.

   Finally fed up, Montgomery lets Donahue out to summon his crew, hoping to join them, but Moreau sends Ouran to strangle him, sealing his own fate—learning who ordered it, the Sayer proclaims, “Law no more,” and confirms, “He can die,” as does loyal M’ling in his defense, while Lota sacrifices herself to save the escapees from Ouran. The horrific ending (arguably more effective than Well’s anticlimax), as the Beast Men descend upon the screaming Moreau in his own House of Pain, resembles that of Browning’s Freaks (1932); both were released the same year and banned in Britain. Wells dismissed Island as a vulgarization of his work, but today it remains as an undisputed classic of the genre.

Up next: The Invisible Man
   

      Sources/works consulted:

Aldiss, Brian W., afterword to The Island of Dr. Moreau, pp. 207-216.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Bojarski, Richard, The Films of Bela Lugosi (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1980).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Clarens, Carlos, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (New York: Paragon, 1979).
Dello Stritto, Frank, and Andi Brooks, Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain (Los Angeles: Cult Movies Press, 2001).
Everson, William K., Classics of the Horror Film (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1974).
Fischer, Dennis, Horror Film Directors, 1931-1990 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)
Island of Lost Souls, unsigned laserdisc liner notes (Universal City, CA: MCA Home Video, Inc., 1994).
Wells, H.G., The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Signet, 1996).
Wikipedia

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/island-of-lost-souls-1932-70-min.-charles-laughton-bela-lugosi-jonzee.

   I have enjoyed the work of Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) on page and screen for as long as I can recall, his filmography encompassing such notable names as Bert I. Gordon, Ray Harryhausen, Byron Haskin, Nathan Juran, Nigel Kneale, George Pal, James Whale, and Philip Wylie. I graduated from the oversized trade paperbacks of The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898) bought at grade-school book fairs—which I am unable to identify—to the uniform, mass-market Berkley Highland editions (1964-1967), most with striking covers by Paul Lehr. I have not read them in decades, so in this series, I will revisit six major H.G. Wells novels, comparing each with my favorite film version.

   Along with editor Hugo Gernsback, Wells and Jules Verne (1828-1905) are often called “the father of science fiction,” their respective first and last writing decades overlapping. An immediate success that decisively ended an upbringing in poverty, The Time Machine (1895) was Wells’s first novel, one of four seminal works that, incredibly, he produced in as many years, followed by The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). And, for you bibliophiles, it’s the only one of the seven volumes in the Berkley boxed set (of whose existence I only recently learned)—containing all of the novels I’ll be discussing, as well as the unfilmed In the Days of the Comet (1906)—with cover art credited to the legendary Richard Powers.

   “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him)” explains his theory to his friends Filby, a Psychologist, Provincial Mayor, Medical Man, Very Young Man, and the unnamed narrator. As “experimental verification,” he produces “a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock,” a model time machine that took two years to create, and—using the Psychologist’s own finger to preclude trickery—presses a lever that makes it vanish into the future, or perhaps the past. In his laboratory, he shows them an unfinished larger edition of nickel, ivory, rock crystal, and “twisted crystalline bars” of apparent quartz; on this, “I intend to explore time….I was never more serious in my life.”

   He is late to their next Thursday dinner in Richmond, the returning Psychologist, Doctor, and narrator joined by a Journalist, a Silent Man, and Blank, “the Editor of a well-known daily paper.” The Time Traveller arrives—dirty, disheveled, shoeless, pale, and haggard, with a limp and a half-healed cut on his chin—and, after cleaning himself up and wolfing down some mutton, agrees to tell his story, if uninterrupted. He relates that the machine, finished that morning, “began its career” at 10:00, and as the lab goes dark, servant Mrs. Watchett enters without seeing him, but “seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket,” and after a dizzying trip through time, he stops, the impact throwing him from the saddle.

   Beside the overturned machine, the Time Traveller finds himself amidst a hailstorm in a garden, with a White Sphinx of marble on a bronze pedestal looming beyond, and as the sun breaks out, he is approached by a beautiful and graceful but frail four-foot-high man. Unafraid, humankind’s distant descendants speak in “a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue,” and as they examine the machine, whose dials record a date of 802,701 A.D., he prudently unscrews and pockets its control levers. Childlike, indolent, frugivorous, and oddly lacking in interest, they bring him into a huge, dilapidated hall, where he is fed and begins learning the language of “humanity upon the wane,” however Edenic their setting.

   “Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness,” the success of “the social effort in which we are at present engaged” having removed our salutary challenges. After a walk, our hero finds his machine gone, apparently taken into the pedestal, but unable to effect ingress, he must be patient; befriending Weena, whom he saves from drowning, he learns that the Eloi fear the dark. Ventilating shafts and deep wells dot the land, and watching a small white, ape-like figure descending into one, he discovers metal foot and hand rests that form a ladder, deducing that humanity “had differentiated into two distinct animals”—one subterranean.

   The Eloi and Morlocks, whom the Time Traveller believes took his machine, seem to be the ultimate separation of the Capitalist and Labourer, the Haves and Have-nots, an idea familiar to viewers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)…which Wells, ironically, trashed in a New York Times review (April 17, 1927) as “the silliest film.” Overcoming the Eloi’s contagious disgust, he enters the well, whence emanates a hum of machinery, noting that the Morlocks, who flee his dwindling matches, are carnivorous. Barely escaping, he goes back to the surface, seeking nighttime safety for himself and Weena in the far-off Palace of Green Porcelain from the Morlocks, for whom he believes the Eloi are “fatted cattle.”

   In the Palace, an ancient museum, the Time Traveller finds a weapon (a lever snapped off a corroded machine), more matches, and camphor to serve as makeshift candles. Hoping to penetrate the Sphinx the next day, he plans to traverse and sleep beside a nearby forest, protected by fire, but a blaze he starts to cover their retreat turns into a forest fire, routing the photophobic Morlocks and leaving Weena—who faints amid the chaos—missing and presumed dead. Returning, he unexpectedly finds the pedestal open, yet as he enters and approaches the Time Machine, the panels clang shut, and surrounded by the Morlocks in the dark, he is barely able to fit the control levers over their studs by touch and activate it.

   Escaping further into the future, the Time Traveller finds a huge, red sun, “the salt Dead Sea…poisonous-looking…lichenous plants…thin air that hurts one’s lungs [and] monster crab[s]…” (This follows a deleted section Wells reluctantly added at the behest of editor William Ernest Henley, in which he encounters kangaroo-like creatures, possibly human descendants, and a giant centipede.) Finally, more than 30 million years hence, he spots “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps [with] tentacles…hopping fitfully about” in the snowy and silent desolation and decides to return home, with the machine reappearing in his lab “the exact distance from my little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx…”

   Despite his audience’s skepticism, the Doctor admits, “I certainly don’t know the natural order of these flowers,” produced from the pocket into which Weena had placed them, à la Zuzu’s petals. The next day, carrying a camera and a knapsack, our hero vows that if given half an hour, he’ll “prove you this time travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all”; suddenly remembering an appointment, the waiting narrator enters the laboratory just as the machine vanishes with its inventor, like a phantasm. “I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned,” he writes, speculating about his fate in an epilogue…

   Displaying a rare commitment to SF and fantasy, George Pal (1908-1980) produced, and often directed, a dozen features that had a profound impact on the genre; many had their origins in literature, notably his Wells adaptations The War of the Worlds (1953)—more on that one later—and The Time Machine (1960). Born Marincsák György to Hungarian stage parents, the unemployed architect was employed by Budapest’s Hunnia studio as an apprentice animator. Marrying and moving to Berlin, Pal next rose to the top of the UFA studio’s cartoon department until the Nazis’ rise to power drove him out of Germany, and then resided and worked in various European countries before he immigrated to the U.S.

   Pal earned an honorary Academy Award in 1944 for developing the “novel methods and techniques” in his Puppetoons animated shorts. His debut feature, The Great Rupert (aka A Christmas Wish, 1950), was among the first that combined stop-motion and live-action footage, but following this transitional effort, directed by actor Irving Pichel, Pal focused solely on live-action efforts, although animation still featured in many of his productions. Also directed by Pichel, Destination Moon (1950) was adapted by genre giant Robert A. Heinlein from his own young adult novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), and set a cinematic standard rarely equaled, dramatizing the lunar flight with scrupulous scientific accuracy.

   Based on Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s 1933 novel, Rudolph Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951) was the first of five films Pal made for Paramount, including the biopic Houdini (1953) and collaborations with director Byron Haskin on The War of the Worlds, The Naked Jungle (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). With the fantasy tom thumb (1958), Pal moved to MGM, where he would remain for the next decade, and assumed the directorial duties he retained on his next four efforts. As with those of Destination Moon, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, and tom thumb, the special effects of The Time Machine, by Gene Warren and Tim Baar, also received an Academy Award.

   The largely undistinguished screenwriting career of David Duncan ranged from Monster on the Campus (1958), a low point for director Jack Arnold, to being one of four credited on Fantastic Voyage (1966), which earned Hugo and Academy Awards. In an interview with Tom Weaver, he said, “Like most of Wells’ science fiction novels, [it] was as much a social document as a tale of science adventure….[By then] this forecast of the future no longer carried any plausibility—if it ever did. Labor unions were strong [and high wages and] fringe benefits had moved most blue-collar workers into the middle class.” Instead, air-raid sirens drive the Pavlovian Eloi into the shelters built by the Morlocks’ ancestors.

   Duncan clearly had his work cut out for him, since the brief novel’s characterization and dialogue are minimal, and the film’s visuals are unsurprisingly its greatest strength. Cast as the Time Traveller, known as George (a plate on his machine reads, “Manufactured by H. George Wells”), was Rod Taylor, co-star of World Without End (1956), a time-travel film sufficiently similar to inspire legal action by the Wells estate. The film opens at the second dinner as Mrs. Watchett (Doris Lloyd) admits David Filby (Alan Young) with Dr. Philip Hillyer (Sebastian Cabot), Anthony Bridewell (Tom Helmore), and Walter Kemp (Whit Bissell); on George’s arrival, we then flash back five days, to December 31, 1899.

   Urged to offer his inventive skills to the government for the Boer War, George laments to David (named by Pal in Duncan’s honor), people “call upon science to invent new, more efficient weapons to depopulate the Earth.” Composer Russell Garcia’s dramatic flourish accompanies our first look at the iconic full-sized machine designed by MGM art director Bill Ferrari, a wondrous creation resembling a sled with a rotating clockwork disc behind the saddle. George’s voiceover clarifies the action, while numerous devices visualize the transitions (e.g., a time-lapse candle and flowers; a window mannequin wearing changing fashions), hindsight enabling Pal to depict two World Wars before an atomic one in 1966.

   Stopping in 1917, he encounters uniformed James Philby (Young), whose father, killed in the war, refused while serving as George’s executor to allow the sale of his house, certain he would return someday. This poignant encounter considerably humanizes the story, but the elderly James’s return as an air-raid warden, just before London is destroyed, evoking nature’s volcanic retaliation, is less successful. The film is almost half over when George arrives in 802,701; the limited skills of inexperienced Yvette Mimieux (which reportedly improved enough for some of her earlier scenes to be reshot) made eminently suitable her casting—at Pal’s insistence—as Weena, who with rampant implausibility speaks English.

   Weena shows George the Talking Rings (voiced by Paul Frees), which supply exposition about a 326-year “war between the East and West” that filled the atmosphere with germs, and the Eloi/Morlock division. Duncan conflates the encounters with the latter (executed by William Tuttle, MGM’s makeup wizard for more than twenty years and, like Frees, a frequent Pal collaborator) into a climactic descent as George seeks both his machine and the somnambulic Weena. Brawny, blue-skinned, long-haired, and more imposing than in the novel, they are a better match for Taylor’s two-fisted hero as he seeks to reawaken the spirit of self-sacrifice among the Eloi, whom he leads into a fiery, subterranean rebellion.

   Separated when the panels close, George is unable to bring Weena back to his own time, and while attempting to rejoin her on his next trip, from which he never returns, he takes three unidentified books, with which he hopes to help the Eloi rebuild their world. Pal’s biggest box-office success, the film was remade for television with John Beck (and, in a different role, Bissell) in 1978 and as a feature with Guy Pearce in 2002, as well as being ripped off on countless occasions. Pal long hoped to direct a sequel and, in 1981, shared a posthumous byline with Joe Morhaim on Time Machine II, novelizing an unproduced script featuring a second-generation Time Traveller, the offspring of George and Weena.

   After Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961), a letdown on every count, Pal collaborated with Charles Beaumont on The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), co-directed with Henry Levin, and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964). Even a reunion with Haskin could not save The Power (1968) from friction with MGM’s régime du jour, which dumped it with minimal promotion; his final film, Doc Savage—The Man of Bronze (1975), showed how sadly out of step he had fallen with current tastes. Abortive projects included an effort to adapt William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s novel Logan’s Run (1967) and, in his last years, two with Robert Bloch, The Day of the Comet and The Voyage of the Berg.

      Up next: The Island of Dr. Moreau

      Sources/works consulted:

Batchelor, John Calvin, introduction to The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (New York: Signet Classic, 1984), pp. v-xxiii.
Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).
Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).
Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).
Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995).
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb)
Warren, Bill, Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2 volumes; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982-6).
Wells, H.G., review of Metropolis (The New York Times, April 17, 1927), reproduced by Don Brockway on his (then) Time Machine Home Site (December 25, 2002),
https://erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.Wells_on_Metropolis%201927.htm.
—-, The Time Machine, in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, pp. 1-103.
Weaver, Tom, Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988).
Wikipedia

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/the-time-machine-1960_202203.

   Portions of this article originally appeared on Bradley on Film.

GATTACA. Columbia, 1997. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Gore Vidal, Jude Law, Xander Berkeley, Jayne Brook, Alan Arkin. Screenwriter/director: Andrew Niccol.

   In the not too distant future, societal advancement won’t be determined by one’s resume or skill set, as much as by one’s blood. That’s the underlying premise of Gattaca, an intelligent science fiction thriller that showcases a fictional world officially devoted to the ideology of eugenics. If one happens to have had a natural birth or, worse still, a genetic defect, one’s opportunities in life are severely limited.

   Enter Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), a janitor born of natural birth with a heart problem. His only dream is to be an astronaut and see the stars. These things are simply impossible in the society he was born into. With the help of a shadowy underworld figure named German (Tony Shalhoub), Freeman takes on the identity of the genetically superior Jerome Eugene Morrow (Jude Law) and starts work at Gattaca, an aerospace corporation helmed by Director Josef (Gore Vidal), in his quest to beat society’s rules.

   When a top ranking executive at Gattaca is murdered, Vincent fears his cover will be blown. Especially with the intrepid Detective Hugo (Alan Arkin) on the case. Complicating matters further is Morrow’s growing affection for co-worker Irene (Uma Thurman).

   There’s something rather operatic about Gattaca, a movie that relies heavily on intricate set design, exotic interiors, and orchestral music to tell the story of one man’s quest to escape his predetermined fate.

   It’s intelligent sci-fi that also has the capacity to entertain. True, it takes the suspension of disbelief to really get into the story. But once you do, you’ll find a compelling lead in Ethan Hawke’s character. Don’t expect a lot of action, however. This is a far more cerebral exercise than a physical one.

   Final assessment: with a great cast that takes the downbeat subject material seriously, Gattaca might not be something you’d watch again and again, but it’s solid, mature science fiction that is increasingly difficult to come by. Occasionally slow, but never boring.

HOTEL ARTEMIS. 2018. Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Brian Tyree Henry, Jenny Slate, Zachary Quinto, Charlie Day, Dave Bautista. Director: Drew Pearce.

   Although apparently a bomb at the box office, I haven’t been as cinematicly impressed with a movie since seeing Blade Runner for the first time. Blown away, I was. It takes place maybe 20 years in the future during a riot in downtown Los Angeles over the shortage of water in the city. (Some problems never end.)

   That’s only the background, though. The entirety of the film takes place inside the Hotel Artemis or just outside its entrances or the rooftop. What its exclusive clientele consists of are criminals who pay a membership fee, in lieu of medical insurance, for its top of the art medical facilities.

   Jodie Foster plays the elderly Nurse in charge, in her 60s perhaps, a woman who on the outside is tough and organized and ultra competent. But on the inside, over the night the film takes place in. another part of her personality is revealed, showing a huge weariness, sadness and melancholy resulting from the death of son several years ago.

   There are several additional stories attached to the patients who make their way to the hotel that evening, which I won’t go into, but as the paths of the assorted thieves, paid assassins, illegal arms dealers and general all around bad guys and henchmen begin to crisscross and intersect, it’s quite a dizzying task to keep at all straight who’s doing what to whom and why.

   The linchpin to all this (and don’t forget the massive riot going on outside) is the Nurse, trying to hold everything and (I think you can tell) not panic. And as the action never stops, some secrets are revealed, more than one.

   But if a pregnant police office can get an Oscar in another, totally different and otherwise straightforward crime thriller, my vote for this year’s one would have been for Jodie Foster.

   Watch the trailer. As trailers go, it’s a good one.
   

FREQUENCY. New Line, 2000. Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Shawn Doyle, Elizabeth Mitchell, Andre Braugher and Noah Emmerich. Written by Toby Emmerich(?) Directed by Gregory Hoblit.

   This’ll grab ya, even as you feel your credulity strained. And we all know how painful that can be.

   Quaid and Caviezel carry the story very capably between them as a Firefighter who dies in a warehouse fire in 1969, and his now grown-up Policeman-son in 2000. A freak cosmic storm in 1969 and a matching event thirty years later (ouch!) enable them to contact each other when Caviezel comes across his dad’s old HAM radio just in time to warn him of the upcoming warehouse inferno (Owww!)

   But saving Daddy’s life triggers a host of unforeseen consequences involving a serial killer, the murder of their wife/mother, death by cancer, Quaid arrested for murder, and a lot more, all of which have to be fixed and re-fixed by father and son working across time together-yet-apart.

   This is the sort of thing that has to be done fast and gaudy to keep the viewer from switching channels in mid-movie disbelief. It also has to be clearly explained each frame of the way for said viewer to keep up with the constantly changing realities. And it also has to offer clear segues from past to present and back again.

   That’s an order of beanstalk dimensions, but Frequency  mostly succeeds, thanks in hefty part to the skillful editing of David Rosenbloom, who eases things through with graceful and easy-to-grasp transitions. And it’s a good thing we got ’em because the screenplay, though credited solely to Toby Emmerich, shows the work of many hands.

   It’s not that there are loose ends — more like dead ends. Plot developments terminated abruptly, characters who arrive late and leave early, and a ninth-ending come-from-behind plot twist that just hasn’t been prepared for.

   But somehow I found myself forgiving all this for the sake of some really ingenious ideas, and the pace and style with which Frequency  delivers them.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN. Universal Pictures, 1940. Virginia Bruce,John Barrymore, John Howard, Charlie Ruggles, Oscar Homolka. Directed by A. Edward Sutherland.

   More a low-key screwball comedy than a horror feature, The Invisible Woman is a genial, albeit rather forgettable affair. Released in 1940, seven years after James Whale’s The Invisible Man, the film has a light tone that makes it breezy fun, but not much more than that. Based on a story co-written by Kurt Siodmak (The Wolf Man) and directed by A. Edward Sutherland, the movie does what it is supposed to; namely, provide an hour plus of escapist entertainment.

   When oddball Professor Gibbs (John Barrymore) puts an advertisement in the paper for someone wanting to become invisible, he gets more than he bargained for when working girl Kitty Carroll (Virginia Bruce) shows up. Sassy and strong-willed, she’s determined to use her newfound ability to torment her sexist and demanding boss. While the invisible Carroll gets caught up in a love-hate relationship with playboy millionaire Richard Russell (John Howard), the zany professor is targeted by a gangster (Oscar Homolka) who wants the invisibility machine so he can safely return from his Mexican exile and visit the home country.

   The special effects, by today’s standards, are really nothing special. Truth be told, even for a 1940 feature, there’s nothing particularly impressive doing on in this realm. Director James Whale certainly did it all better years before in the original entry into the Invisible Man series.

   Still, there are some laughs to be had in this comedy. Did I mention Charles Ruggles plays a bumbling butler, devoted – at least financially – to Russell? I guess I would see this one again with a crowd, should the opportunity arise. But to watch it again on VHS? Probably not.

PHILIP K. DICK “The Defenders.” Novelet. First published in Galaxy SF, January 1953. First reprinted in Invasion of the Robots, edited by Roger Elwood (Paperback Library, April 1965). First collected in The Book of Philip K. Dick (Daw, paperback original, February 1973). Along with two of Dick’s other stories, “The Mold of Yancy” and “The Unreconstructed M,” the basis for his novel The Penultimate Truth (Belmont, paperback original, 1964).

   The story begins with a married couple unhappily having breakfast together. The war news is good, but there is an uneasiness to their conversation that suggests that not all is well. Gradually it is revealed they are several miles underground, and the war on the surface is being fought with robots (called leadies) on each side. Because of uncontrolled radiation, the Earth itself is uninhabitable.

   Strangely enough, the husband is called into his lab to learn that one of the leadies that has been brought down for a progress report is not radioactive after all. Baffled, a team including our protagonist is sent to the surface to investigate.

   I will not spoil your enjoyment of this story by telling you what they learn, but if you have read enough of Philip K. Dick’s work, I imagine you can guess what the twist is well enough on your own.

   Of course, though, that’s the point of the story, but what Dick also manages to do is describe living conditions not on, but inside the Earth so well that we, the reader, can feel the oppression of a life that is so subtly unbearable, although it has been made as palatable as technology can do it.

   It’s short for a novelette, only 25 pages long, but I think it was long enough to make a noticeable impression on SF readers of the day. My only personal unhappiness with it is that the ending seemed to me to be an overly happy one. To me, it was a case of too quick, too soon.

RAY BRADBURY Something Wicked This Way Comes. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1962. Bantam H2630, paperback, September 1963.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. Walt Disney Productions, 1983. Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, Diane Ladd, Royal Dano, Vidal Peterson and Shawn Carson. Screenplay by Ray Bradbury and John Mortimer (uncredited.) Directed by Jack Clayton and Lee Dyer (uncredited.)

   I first read Something Wicked This Way Comes back in High School. Then again in College. Since then, I’ve come back to it every ten years or so, and each time found the story enchanting, the imagery compelling and Bradbury’s prose irresistible.

   Reading it this year, fifty-five years on and gray-bearded, puffing on a pipe I carved out of deer antler, reflecting that this is likely the last time I shall visit these pages, I was taken out of myself and transformed once again into the boy of wonder whose story this is.

   Or rather boys, not boy. Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade. A dark circus come to their small town to trap the townsfolk’s souls and the boys fall into that childhood dream of forbidden knowledge, the evil only they comprehend, and only they can battle.

   As created by Bradbury, Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival is a thing of splendid nightmare, promises of wonder paid with misery amid gaudy colors and laughing crowds. And once they learn its secret, the boys become the prey of brutal Mister Cooger and sinister Mister Dar k — along with a panoply of grotesques passing themselves off as freaks and entertainers.

   Bradbury conveys all of this in poetic prose that never slows down the action or becomes self-important. This is, in short, not so much a novel as a treasure to be taken out and enjoyed .

   A lot of folks in Hollywood took a lot of interest in Something Wicked, including Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas and Sam Peckinpah, but it ended up with the folks at Disney, where it was filmed, then re-edited, re-shot, re-scored and partly rewritten, all at great expense. The result was a great white elephant of a movie that cost almost twenty million to make (back when that was a lot of money) and grossed less than half that. And along the way to failure, they insulted Bradbury and antagonized his fans, feeding Ill feelings all the way around — almost like the Pandemonium Carnival itself!

   Too bad, that, because the film actually borders on greatness at times. It stays mostly faithful to the novel, casts the boys (Vidal Peterson and Shawn Carson as Halloway and Nightshade respectively) effectively, and embodies Mister Dark chillingly in Jonathan Pryce.

   The makers also get a thoughtful and well-judged performance from Jason Robards as Will’s father Charles — here promoted from janitor to librarian in the opulent small-town library. If Will and Jim are the motivators of the story, Charles is its firm anchor, and Robards rises to the occasion wonderfully. The confrontation between him and Jonathan Pryce is masterfully written, fluidly directed, and played to the hilt by two actors who seem to know they’re on to a good thing — pure movie magic!

   If none of the rest of the film quite lives up to this moment, well it supports it quite nicely indeed, and Something Wicked This Way Comes – book and movie – are literary/cinematic friends I’m glad I’ve known.

         Taken from the Murania Press website:

   The award-winning journal of adventure, mystery, and melodrama is back! After a two-year absence Blood ‘n’ Thunder returns as a book-length Annual, its 264 pages crammed with articles, illustrations, and fiction reprints. As always, the emphasis is on pulp magazines, vintage Hollywood movies, and Old Time Radio drama.

   The Annual’s first section is a centennial tribute to the legendary detective pulp Black Mask, which celebrated its 100th birthday last year (an event planned for recognition in the canceled Spring 2020 issue of BnT). In addition to a history of the Mask, our tribute includes two reprinted articles from old writers’ magazines: a 1929 issue analysis by literary agent August Lenniger and a 1934 feature on pulp fictioneering by the Mask‘s most famous editor, Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw.

   Also, Will Murray profiles aviation-pulp writer George Bruce (one of the few pulpsters to hit the big time as a Hollywood screenwriter); Tom Krabacher discusses the fantasy-adventure novels written by Spider scribe Norvell W. Page for Unknown; Denny Lien examines the 1936 one-shot pulp featuring Flash Gordon; Gilbert Colon compares the prose and filmed versions of H. P. Lovecraft’s classic yarn “Dreams in the Witch-House”; Matt Moring reveals the true identity of enigmatic pulpster “W. Wirt”; and Sai Shanker offers a history of the Butterick Company, the New York dress-pattern company that published Adventure, Romance, and Everybody’s magazines.

   Additionally, Will Oliver covers the abortive Weird Tales radio show and a later attempt at supernatural horror, The Witch’s Tale. And there’s a lengthy excerpt from the new book by Martin Grams and Terry Salomonson on the creation and early development of the Lone Ranger radio program. BnT editor-publisher Ed Hulse contributes well-researched essays on the 1929 film adaptation of A. Merritt’s Seven Footprints to Satan, the 1943 Republic serial Secret Service in Darkest Africa, and the early career of well-regarded “B”-movie director George Sherman.

   Finally, the Annual reprints “Mountain Man,” the 1934 first installment in Robert E. Howard’s hilarious Western short-story series featuring Breckinridge Elkins.

PRICE INCLUDES SHIPPING TO BUYERS IN THE U.S. ONLY. INTERNATIONAL BUYERS MUST CONTACT US FIRST TO DETERMINE ADDITIONAL SHIPPING COSTS.

A(BRAHAM) MERRITT – Boni & Liveright, hardcover, 1928.  First published as a five-part serial in Argosy Allstory Weekly between July 2 and July 30, 1927. Reprinted many times, both in hardcover and paperback, including Fantastic Novels Magazine, January 1949.

SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN.  First National, 1929. Thelma Todd, Creighton Hale, Sheldon Lewis. Screenplay by Richard Bee (Benjamin Christensen), based on the novel by Abraham Merritt. Title Cards by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich).  Directed by Benjamin Christensen. First released as a silent film and later as a part-talkie.

   The club is the Discoverer’s Club in New York, and the uneasy narrator is James Kirkham, adventurer and explorer, who is about to find himself in an urban nightmare out of the Arabian Nights by way of the Twilight Zone, as in short order he will be confronted by his own double and find himself in a deadly real game with a fortune at stake, his soul in peril, and Satan incarnate spinning the wheel.

   Abraham Merritt is best known as a fantasist and author of scientific romances full of implausible plots, unclad other worldly women, and sensual lush prose pitting his heroes (Merritt heroes always seemed to be falling through mirrors or the equivalent into sensual violent dreams) against strange half worlds and ungodly creations. His best known titles like The Ship of Ishtar, Face in the Abyss, The Moon Pool, and The Metal Monster were highly influential on writers such as Lovecraft, Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith as well as the likes of Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, and many more. Merritt also wrote two famous horror novels where crime and the fantastic mixed in Creep Shadow and Burn Witch Burn (which features a cross dressing vengeance obsessed madman who turns living people into murderous dolls and was made into an MGM film with Lionel Barrymore).

   I won’t kid you that the plot here is ever plausible, but then neither does Merritt. His saving grace as a writer, beyond his graceful style and vivid imagination, was that he plunged headlong into the swirling madness that confronted his heroes and dragged the reader right with them. Merritt, like Dunsany before him, had a true gift at spinning fancies, terrors, and dreamscapes that were by turns gilded fantasy and soul numbing horrors.

   This one is a Gothic nightmare out of the true tradition of Shelley, Lewis, and Mrs. Radcliffe but with a modern pulp sensibility.

   In the dark Kirkham encounters a stranger (“I saw a dark, ascetic face, smooth-shaven, the mouth and eyes kindly and the latter a bit weary, as though from study.”) who engages him in a strange conversation:

   The curious man is Dr. Consardine and in very short order, he and a beautiful girl who calls herself Eve Walton claim Kirkham is the girl’s mentally unstable sweetheart and virtually kidnap him under the eyes of the police (The game was rigged up against me all the way…), delivering him to a mysterious destination somewhere in Westchester or Long Island (“I saw an immense building that was like some chateau transplanted from the Loire. Lights gleamed brilliantly here and there in wings and turrets.”) where he meets his mysterious host, who knows far more about Kirkham than he should and who finally introduces himself with a strange offer.

   It turns out Eve Walton and others in the employee of Satan are unwilling pawns in his game, an elaborate and hellish game where each individual must wager his life and free will against a promise of fabulous wealth. There are seven shining footprints of Buddha, three are holy, three doom whoever steps on them. Satan has set up an unholy game in an elaborate temple in which the players risk their souls to attain the three holy footsteps that lead to Nirvana on Earth, wealth, wisdom, love, happiness, health … all things men and women will risk their lives for.

   Kirkham, ever the gambler, has nothing to lose, but he is playing the game for higher stakes than even Satan imagines. As is usually true with Merritt, the conclusion is no disappointment with retribution, madness, drugged slaves, gunfire, explosions, and madness let lose when Satan overplays his hand.

   Seven Footprints to Satan came to the big screen in 1929 under the capable hand of director Benjamin Christensen and with title cards by a young Cornell Woolrich using his William Irish by-line. A well known cast including Thelma Todd and Creighton Hale starred, and the result might have been fascinating because Woolrich certainly knew something about wringing the last ounce of suspense out of purple prose and outlandish nightmare plots — but alas Christensen and the studio decided to make a comedy out of the book in the style of The Cat and the Canary, and the result is a mildly diverting mess that turns out to be a variation on Earl Derr Biggers’ Seven Keys to Baldpate. Without giving that plot away I will only say it is the most annoying in the genre.

   But we have the book, a fine mix of melodrama and terror replete with a satisfying bloody-mindedness where needed, a splendid larger than life villain, clever hero, and enough sheer gall and narrative drive to compel the reader through the unlikely goings on. It is far from Merritt’s best work, but it has its own loony internal logic if you give yourself over to it, and its author writes rings around most of the writers who attempt this kind of fancy.

   There are a few unfortunate, mostly mild, problems as with most books of this period, nothing too awful or offensive, but you have been warned. (Merritt is no Sapper or Sidney Horler, thankfully.) It stands as an Arabian filigree of romance, Gothic horrors, dream like qualities, and fancies that asks only that the reader be willing to surrender to it all, and still has its rewards if you do.