FORBIDDEN PLANET. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1956. Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, Richard Anderson, Earl Holliman, George Wallace, James Drury, Robby the Robot. Screenplay: Cyril Hume. Story (credited): Irving Block and Allen Adler; (uncredited): Bill Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle. Director: Fred McLeod Wilcox.

    As the deep space cruiser C-57D approaches the planet Altair 4, the captain, J. J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen), receives a radio message from Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) not to land; but Morbius offers no explanation valid enough for Adams to leave, so he sets his ship down.

    The main reason the C-57D has come to Altair 4 is to determine the fate of another spaceship, the Bellerophon. Morbius’ account of what happened to the Bellerophon — that it was destroyed by some unknown force while attempting an ill-advised takeoff, killing everyone except Morbius, his wife (who later died), and his daughter — just doesn’t ring true to Adams’ skeptical ears, and he decides to investigate further.

    It isn’t long before this “unknown force” is roaming abroad once more. It leaves deep footprints in the sand, warps thick metal steps, and makes salsa of the ship’s communications officer. Eventually it reveals itself in a frontal assault on the C-57D, “as big as a house” and able to absorb billions of volts of plasma energy from the ship’s heavy weapons.

    However, as Commander Adams won’t learn until it’s almost too late, the murderous thing he has just fought against isn’t really the one who destroyed the Bellerophon. No, the killer he’s seeking is all too human ….

    So much has already been written about Forbidden Planet that I won’t waste any time on the great visual effects (including Anne Francis), the mind-boggling concepts (such as the Krell and their Great Machine), the unique musical score, or the leaden direction.

   Instead, let’s very briefly explore the notion that Forbidden Planet is a detective film, much like Them! (reviewed earlier here ), with Sherlockian overtones.

    Not only are the wonders of the Krell civilization revealed to Adams, the ship’s doctor (Warren Stevens), and his exec (Jack Kelly), but these marvels have the practical effect of being diversions that take their attention away from the true killer.

    Like Sherlock Holmes, however, Adams never loses sight of his mission: to determine what happened to the previous expedition, despite all the razzle dazzle. Much like that legendary Hound haunting the moors of western England, there is a serial killer loose on Altair 4, and Adams aims to catch him.

    At every opportunity, Adams returns to the Bellerophon’s fate. Each time the monster goes on the prowl, it confirms his convictions that, despite every obvious indication, people have died due to a human agency, one that is beset by human foibles like fear and jealousy and pride — and since there are only two humans presently living on Altair 4, Adams must choose between someone he admires and someone he loves.

    So what we have here — Robby the seemingly harmless robot, an analogue of a certain family retainer; a rampaging monster not dissimilar to the Hound of the Baskervilles; and a monomaniacal scientist ostensibly absorbed with his studies, the Krell this time instead of butterflies on Grimpen Mire — are all familiar elements of detective fiction that in the past usefully served a certain Scottish mystery author as both plot developments and red herrings.

    Therefore, in conclusion it’s possible to view Forbidden Planet as more than a sci-fi movie. It just might be the most intellectually stimulating detective film of all time.

    Or maybe not. You decide.

Note: Forbidden Planet is scheduled for broadcast on TCM Friday, February 19th.

THEM! Warner Brothers, 1954. James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Onslow Stevens, Sean McClory. Screenplay: Ted Sherdeman. Story: George Worthing Yates. Director: Gordon Douglas. 94 mins.

    “Oh, yeah,” you’re probably thinking, “the one with the giant ants.”

    After 55 years, I guess the bug’s out of the bag about who the “bad guys” are in Them! But what most viewers seem to miss is how closely this film hews to Jack Webb’s Dragnet formula. In fact, I think of Them! as a Dragnet episode with monsters.

    Them! neatly divides into three parts: The crime, the discovery of the identity of the perpetrators, and the pursuit and “capture” of the baddies in the denouement.

    The crime:   In the sparsely populated New Mexico desert, people are disappearing — and some are dying. Based on the available evidence, the police believe it’s the work of a psycho. How else to explain a caved-in trailer and a country store whose owner is found hideously mangled with his .30-.30 rifle broken like a matchstick but no money stolen from the till?

    This segment is played for mystery, shot in low light levels with darkly saturated areas often filling the screen — a very noir-ish look, if not in theme. Even though the first few scenes take place in bright desert sunlight, we’re soon moving with the investigating officers through the darkness of a dust storm to the discovery of the store owner’s bloody carcass.

    The whole sequence is played for maximum mysterious effect: the wailing of the wind; a lamp swinging in circles, blown by the wind because the side of the store has been pulled OUT, not crushed IN; a disembodied voice in another room that turns out to be a radio left turned on (and it’s clear we are meant to infer that the store owner didn’t have time to turn it off while he was being attacked); and the man’s crushed corpse, briefly glimpsed in the light of the swinging lamp.

    The discovery of the identity of the perpetrators:

    The middle section of Them! has the investigators searching for the cause of these atrocities. In another dusty desert wind storm the perps are finally revealed.

    The mystery is over; now it’s not a matter of whodunit but how do we catch ’em? After all, they’re from 9 to 15 feet long and couldn’t care less about arrest warrants. The lower level members of the gang are killed, but Mr. (really Mrs.) Big makes a getaway, and the chase is on.

    The pursuit and “capture” of the baddies in the denouement:   Catching Mrs. Big proves to be a major headache, since she has nearly unlimited mobility because she can fly. The authorities try to keep the pursuit a secret as long as feasible in order to avoid panic.

    Finally, thanks to slogging, shoe leather grinding police work — tracking down every possible eyewitness report that might even be remotely related to their hunt — the investigators locate Mrs. Big in the sewers of Los Angeles (shades of The Third Man and also another film — see below).

    Sixty tons of sugar are stolen from a railway car in the marshaling yards, and a little boy has gone missing, two events that are closely related. Fearing the worst, our tireless investigators go from one thin thread to another in trying to find the kid, even interrogating the normally unreliable inmates of a nearby asylum.

    It’s a race against time now. Unless our heroes locate the perps’ hideout, it won’t simply be the life of one little boy that will be at stake but also — dare I say it? — the fate of the world.

    Not only does Them! remind me of Dragnet but it also invites comparison with He Walked by Night (1948), a suspenseful hunt-the-man-down film noir.

    Switch giant ants for Richard Basehart and you pretty much have Them! I regard He Walked by Night as the template which Jack Webb followed in his radio and TV series. In fact, Webb appeared in He Walked as, of all things, a crime lab technician.

    So there you have it: a Dragnet episode blown up to giANT proportions. Only the names have been changed to protect the … producers.

● MURRAY LEINSTER – The Monster from Earth’s End. Gold Medal s832, paperback original; 1st printing, January 1959.

● THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS. Realart Pictures, 1966. Mamie Van Doren, Anthony Eisley, Billy Gray, Bobby Van, Pamela Mason. Director: Michael A. Hoey.

   Interestingly, a couple decades after “Who Goes There?” John W. Campbell’s story which was the basis for The Thing from Another World (reviewed here ), Murray Leinster visited that neck of the woods for The Monster from Earth’s End, which is a splendid book despite a cover that looks like a naked blonde in the clutches of a giant booger.

   It’s set on a remote Antarctic island serving as a way station for people and things going to and from the South Pole, and Leinster starts off splendidly, with the creepy arrival on the island of a plane carrying a mysterious cargo; most of the crew has vanished, and the pilot kills himself on landing.

   From here on the tension never lets up, as Leinster takes up the mood Campbell established in his tale and sustains it for nearly two hundred pages of solid chills. I particularly like the way he draws his characters as individuals — like those in the Howard Hawks film — and lets them carry as much of the story as the monsters do. And trust me, these are some very creepy monsters indeed.

   The Monster from Earth’s End was filmed (rare for a paperback original) as The Navy vs. the Night Monsters in 1966 by Michael Hoey, son of the fondly-remembered Dennis Hoey and a busy movie-maker in his own right, though never a very distinguished one: he worked on a few Elvis Presley movies and a lot of Television and that’s about it. Navy may mark some notable point in his career, high or low, depending on your tolerance for schlock.

   As such, it’s … well … let’s be charitable and say it’s not completely successful. There’s some lurid photography by Stanley Cortez (Night of the Hunter), some of the characters are a bit deeper than usual, and there was obviously an attempt to re-capture the ambiance of Hawk’s The Thing, with spots of banter and sexual repartee among the principals (Mamie Van Doren, Anthony Eisley, Bobby Van…)

   Unfortunately, it all falls terribly flat in Hoey’s oven-mitts. Where The Thing benefited from Hawks’ overlapping dialogue and relaxed mise-en-scene, the characters in Navy/Monsters look like they were stood up in front of a camera handed their lines and that’s it. The comedy relief is very clearly labeled: “Comedy Relief” with posed pratfalls; love scenes are marked: “Love Scene” with syrupy underscoring, and the scary bits…

    …well, there’s another problem. Where Leinster could toss off a line like “Half the plane now was filled with monstrous, moving, incredible horrors,” and let the reader’s imagination do his work, and where Hawks tingled our spines with brief glimpses of some big nasty-looking Thing, Hoey has to trot out a few silly-looking rubber monsters and let them flop their limp tentacles about rather aimlessly while the actors try to look scared.

   It’s all a bit disappointing, and the resolution comes off as particularly lame, as if at some point they decided to just end the damn thing. Too bad they didn’t do it 90 minutes sooner.

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD.   RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, James R. Young, James Arness. Based on the short story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell. Directors: Christian Nyby, Howard Hawks (the latter uncredited).

   John W. Cambell’s classic short story, “Who Goes There?” (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1938, under his Don A. Stuart pen name) should be taught in Creative Writing courses for the way it propels a fast-moving story across a vivid background of bitter isolation.

   Set at the South Pole, “Who” sketches the tale of a group of scientists discovering a flying saucer, complete with scary alien, frozen in the Antarctic ice for countless years. They lose the saucer but manage to bring the frozen monster back to their spartan base camp — with unexpected and very unpleasant results.

   Campbell’s writing is terse and to-the-point, with every word exactly right, and none of them wasted. The characters may be a bit two-dimensional, but they serve their purpose and get out of the way of a story-line that stops for nobody. A classic of its genre.

    “Who Goes There?” was filmed in 1951 by Howard Hawks, and I’m afraid all the best things about this fine movie have already been said, mostly by Robin Wood, in his book Howard Hawks (Doubleday, 1968.)

    I can only echo his points about The Thing (from Another World) coming across as a quintessential Hawks film, which is pretty high praise wherever you take it.

    Wood observes that the groups in this film (scientists or soldiers) are not so much cohesive units as ad hoc collections of individuals, each with something to contribute. He describes Margaret Sheridan as the equal of any of the men, yet intensely feminine, in the mold of other Hawks heroines, like Lauren Bacall and Angie Dickenson.

    And he points out how the action, as in Rio Bravo, consists of gradually increasing tension, punctuated by short, sharp bursts of coordinated violence. Yes, The Thing is a brilliant film, fun to watch, and just I wish I’d said all those nice things about it before Robin Wood did.

NIGHT LIFE OF THE GODS. Universal, 1935. Alan Mowbray, Florine McKinney, Peggy Shannon, Richard Carle, Theresa Maxwell Conover, Phillips Smalley , Wesley Barry. Based on the novel by Thorne Smith. Director: Lowell Sherman.

   Speaking of the Obscure and Bizarre, I had the good fortune to run across a tape of Night Life of the Gods, a long-lost comedy based on a book by Thorne Smith, from a studio that was never much good at comedy.

   Despite the typical Universal clumsiness — or maybe because of it — Night Life captures the flavor of Smith’s unique style quite nicely. The plot (something about a scientist who can turn people into statues and statues into people) lurches forward in typical Smith fashion towards nowhere in particular as our hero-scientist (Alan Mowbray) contends with insipid relatives, a loving secretary, a host of soliloquizing drop-ins and amorous women, all of whom, in typical Smith-fashion, seem to be pursuing plots in books of their own.

   The result is hardly Great Comedy (Thorne Smith was always more whimsical than humorous), but it’s an effective translation of Smith’s peculiar ethos from page to film.

   As for the actor playing the lead — in a flattering wig with his chins taped up — Alan Mowbray was always one of my favorite Unknowns. He generally played pompous, rather dull Englishmen (no one who sees him in THE KING AND I will ever remember him), and if you recall him at all, it’s probably as the Shakespearean ham in a couple of John Ford Westerns, but he was by all accounts a witty and charming man off-screen — he was one of the loyal coterie of friends who looked after John Barrymore in his later years — and his film career included highlights like the rakehell Cpt. Crawley in Becky Sharp, a bizarre Butler in the Topper films, The Devil once and George Washington twice.

THE 27th DAY. Columbia, 1957. Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovec, Prof. Klaus Bechner, Arnold Moss, Stefan Schnabel. Based on the novel by John Mantley, who also wrote the screenplay. Director: William Asher.

   The novel this black-and-white sci-fi movie was based on was also one of the first selections I purchased when I joined up with the Science Fiction Book Club, and when I was 14, which I was at the time, I thought it was one of the best I’d ever read.

   Nor have I ever forgotten it in all of the years since, though what I have just now discovered is that I never watched the movie, even though for all of those very same years, I thought I had!

   I think what happened is that I created my own movie out of the images the book created in my head, and that’s what I remembered all this time. Two minutes into the movie and I knew I’d never seen it before.

   And this is true even though I have a feeling that the movie follows the book very closely. It’s just that it’s different than the one I’ve been remembering all along. It’s very strange (and humbling) to realize that your memories can be invalid and unsubstantial — and yet seemingly so solid! — as this

   The premise? Well, to begin with and right from the start, mankind is in trouble. An alien from another universe kidnaps five representative members of mankind and gives them the sole means of deciding whether humanity lives or dies: (1) A Russian solider. (2) A young English woman. (3) A European scientist. (4) A Chinese peasant girl. And (5) a Los Angeles newspaper reporter.

   Each is given a weapon that can destroy all human life on the planet Earth. If they can keep the leaders of the world from using any one of them in the next 27 days, we’ll be given a reprieve and they’ll quietly go away.

   The primary protagonists are (2) and (5), played by Valerie French and Gene Barry respectively, whose characters immediately go into hiding together.

   But do the aliens play fair? No. They also immediately take over the TV sets around the world and name the five people who have been given the weapons. Instant paranoia and panic naturally run rampant.

   This is a pretty good example of what science fiction looked like in the movies during the cold war 1950s, with the added bonus of there being no ugly mutated monsters, only ourselves as our own worst enemy.

   Which is fitting, as the ending is this movie’s own worst enemy. It seems as though the aliens had the power all along, a rather miraculous one, one that can — well, that would be telling.

   I suppose the movie-makers’ intentions were good, and it fits in perfectly with the cold-war fantasies of the 1950s, but all in all, it makes for a pretty lame movie. Awkward and ham-handed are other words that come to mind — all in the interest of making us feel good about ourselves, disregarding the truth of the matter that in this film (a) the aliens did it, and (b) in the real world, there are no aliens.

   As for the book, I’m awfully curious and I’m very much tempted, but I don’t think I’ll read it again. The memories I have of it might be better off if left alone. Just maybe.

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE. Mascot, 1935. [12-episode serial] Gene Autry … Gene Autry, Frankie Darro, Betsy King Ross, Dorothy Christy, Wheeler Oakman, Charles K. French, Warner Richmond, J. Frank Glendon, Smiley Burnette. Directors: Otto Brower & B. Reeves Eason.

   Viewing [and reviewing] Batman led on to The Phantom Empire, but I couldn’t start that till I read James Churchward’s 1931 opus The Lost Continent of Mu.

   Churchward’s book is non-fiction, of a sort, dealing with his discovery of ancient clay tablets in Burma telling of an advanced civilization somewhere to the East, which he compares to inscriptions from the Mayans and Aztecs locating the cradle of civilization somewhere to the West.

   He then takes similarities in oriental picture-writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics and pre-Columbian artifacts from the New World, and concludes that there must have been an advanced society somewhere in the Pacific that spread its culture over the world, then sank into the sea, which he calls Murania, or Mu for short.

   Well, I don’t know about you, but for me that’s kind of a stretch. Churchward spends the book supporting this theory, but I keep running into phrases like, “geologists are wrong…,” “Egyptologists are wrong…,” “archaegeologists are wrong…” till I wonder how he got a monopoly on Truth.

   And as his story gets more and more embroidered, with details about the advanced civilization, its people (Who, he insists, must have been white.) and the aftermath of its fall, this sounds less like Science and more like the ramblings of Siegel and Schuster.

   Closing the book, I had to wonder why anyone ever took it seriously in the first place, but apparently someone did, and still does, because the book and its sequels keep getting reprinted.

   All the reference books say The Phantom Empire was clearly based on Churchward’s work, but I couldn’t see it myself. Empire deals with Gene Autry’s efforts to save Radio Ranch from unscrupulous land-grabbers trying to get to a secret uranium deposit on the property, and the people of Lemuria who inhabit an advanced underground civilization (also called Mu for short) which can be reached only by an elevator which opens up somewhere near the uranium deposits on Radio Ranch.

   Yeah, it’s kind of Out There, particularly with Gene Autry constantly trying to escape from the bad guys in time to get back to the ranch and do his weekly mortgage-paying radio show, but I found it no harder to ingest than Churchward’s hoke, and considerably faster-moving.

   Mascot serials were never believable, but they were somehow always fun, and the underground kingdom, with its robots, death rays and sexy queen offer a lively time for anyone who can descend to their level. As for The Lost Continent of Mu, I have to say that for a book about an advanced civilization sinking into the sea, there are some awfully slow spots.

    

SECONDS. Paramount, 1966. Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph, Will Geer, Jeff Corey, Richard Anderson, Frances Reid, Murray Hamilton. Based on the novel by David Ely. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Director: John Frankenheimer.

   There are moments in the movie, filmed in glorious black-and-white, that are among the creepiest — not the scariest, per se — but the get-under-your-skin or the into-your-mind-and-can’t-get-it-out kind of nightmares that haven’t been surpassed by any other film that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

   Basic scenario: a secret organization has discovered ways of changing your identity, if you’ve gotten tired and weary of the one have, into another.

   It takes a skilled medical staff, a large support system, and a lot of stuff you really don’t want to ask about — and voila! An aging banker (John Randolph) whose marriage has long ago had all its passion sucked out of it becomes someone who looks a lot like Rock Hudson.

   And if things don’t go well, don’t ask about that either.

   A lot of the credit for what makes this movie work as well as it does has to go to cinematographer James Wong Howe, who uses innovative lighting, extreme closeups, high angle shots and hand-held camera work to create a world of depressive darkness that’s infinitely capable of causing heartfelt, emotional screaming not so much verbally — although there is that, too — but on the inside, where it really counts.

   It’s what’s in our heads that makes who we are, no matter how well disguise our facades to the world, and the older you get, the more you’re aware of that, and the harder it is to get away from it.

   It’s not an entirely successful movie, though, and by taking a few days to think it over, I believe I know why, at least in part. Individual scenes are often small gems, but there’s no cohesion, not enough connective tissue between them.

   It’s not that there’s not enough back story, as I thought at first — the actors in this film are utterly perfect in their parts, and we can see from their faces alone who they are and why they are doing what they are doing — and also that they’re wrong, most of them, or evil without knowing that they are and convinced they’re doing good; or in case of others, that they’re making the right decisions, only to find out that perhaps they’re not.

   Sagging the most is the middle of the movie, the transition from opening scenes to end game that needs the most support and doesn’t quite get it, wherein Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson begins to discover, belatedly, that a new body is not enough, not even when he meets a good-looking neighbor on a lonely California beach (Salome Jens).

   A long wine-crushing festival with a commune of naked hippies is followed by an even longer cocktail party literally from hell, but neither packs a wallop as solid as, well, when Tony Wilson does try the impossible: to go home again.

   A foolish attempt, that. It can’t be done.

WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE? 1966. Originally released in Czechoslovakia as Kto chce zabíc Jessii? Director: Vaclav Vorlicek.

   Despite the title, Who Wants To Kill Jessie (1966) is not a murder mystery, but a Czechoslovakian pop-art sci-fi satire (you know the type) made the same year as Alphaville and sharing many of that film’s fetishes for pop culture and politics.

   An eminent (and rather dowdy) female scientist invents a serum designed to purge dreams of their unsettling elements, leading to happy, productive dreams (“No longer will people be allowed to dream anything they wish.”) and when she discovers her husband dreaming of a scantly-clad comic-strip heroine constantly menaced by a cowboy and a superhero, she purges his dream, only to have the characters materialize and begin a comic chase through their society.

   A basic situation that could have led to facile clowning or heavy moralizing in lesser hands is handled here with charming slapdash panache and innocent energy delightful to watch.

   Director Vaclav Vorlicek mixes sight gags and verbal humor (that survives the subtitling surprisingly well) with a deft touch and an obvious love of the comic-book culture he’s exploiting, and his players (whose names would mean nothing to you) convey a conflict of bureaucratic buffoonery and pulp-paper passion with that sincerity which is the essence of Comedy. A film that deserves a bigger reputation.

   By the way, I know I said the cast names would mean nothing to you, but for the sake of Academic Correctness, I should add that the actress who plays the comic-strip-heroine starred in some enjoyably gaudy English-language films (like The Vengeance of She) and eventually found her way into the December 1969 issue of Playboy.

   Just thought I’d mention it.

Editorial comment:   And on the cover of the March 1964 issue. Worth mentioning, too, perhaps?

NIGHTFLYERS. 1987. Catherine Mary Stewart, Michael Praed, John Standing, Lisa Blount, Michael Des Barres. Based on the novella by George R. R. Martin; director: Robert Collector.

   Nightflyers is a science-fiction movie that starts out well, but then before you know it, it’s turned to sci-fi (pronounced skiffy). Where have you heard that before? Read on.

   It begins sometime in the next century, with a crew of scientists and adventurers with less than creditable credentials on an organized hunt through space for a race of aliens said to be far more advanced and intelligent than mankind.

   One problem. The trail they’re following may be created by only random radio noise. The creatures may be nothing more than figments of mythological fiction; the stuff legends are made of. The lure of the unknown may lead nowhere.

   The crux of the story is the ship they’ve chartered, though. It holds far more in store for them than any mysterious race of never-before-seen aliens. There is no crew, and the captain appears to them only in the form of a three-dimensional hologram. More, it soon becomes clear that the ship itself is intelligent, nor is it — or should that be he? or, perhaps, she? — is particularly interested in having them aboard.

   The captain himself is strongly attracted to Miranda (Catherine Mary Stewart), the project’s good-looking co-ordinator who narrates the tale, and he may wish to leave as well, but if so, it would hardly be with the ship’s good wishes.

   Except for perhaps the movie Blade Runner, the settings in Nightflyers are more authentically 21st century in appearance than any other movie I’ve ever seen.

   Unfortunately, the story doesn’t come close to matching it. It ends up, as I’m sure you may have guessed, in a bloody battle with the malevolent computer that is running the starship — complete with decapitations, stabbings and noisy explosions in space. The usual stuff.

   And none of it means. anything, even to the survivors. (And I suppose you can count me among them.)

   The science fiction that I’ve read by George R. R. Martin — I haven’t read this particular one — has been adventure fiction in part, but it’s always had some intelligent thought behind it. The second half of this movie hasn’t any at all. (Or what there is, if I’m not giving too much away, is of the artificial variety only.)

[UPDATE] 01-18-09. After reading this review, I think I’d like to see the movie again. That line I wrote about the settings intrigues me. Could the staging of a small-budget movie like this have impressed me that much?

   I could do without the horror film this movie turns into, though, and so … what are the chances I’ll start tracking down a copy? Realistically? I haven’t seen this movie in over 17 years, but unless someone comes up with a good reason that will tell me why I should, I probably won’t, not for a while longer yet.