1964: ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS

What’s it about?

An errant meteor forces a spaceship orbiting Mars into evasive maneuvers that bring it dangerously close to the red planet’s surface. Unable to pull out of the descent, the crew eject in two separate escape pods, but only one astronaut and one monkey survive the landing. On the surface, the astronaut faces a quick succession of life-or-death challenges: staying warm during the cold Martian nights, replenishing his fast-dwindling air supply, and discovering a source of water and food.

Assisted by a healthy dose of dumb luck, the astronaut manages to solve most of the problems of basic survival. But he soon realizes that his biggest challenge will be reconciling himself to the possibility that he will be stranded forever alone on a dead planet with no companion except the monkey. Just as he is starting to crack under the strain of isolation, he discovers evidence that he may not so entirely alone as he imagined. The sudden arrival of a runaway alien slave provides the astronaut with the companionship he seeks -- but differences in cultures and the return of the alien captors create unexpected problems.




Is it any good?

A movie about an astronaut struggling to survive on the real Mars would be short, grim, and all too predictable. But luckily for ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, there were very few hard facts known about conditions on the surface of Mars back in 1964. So even though the astronaut and his monkey have things pretty rough, they at least have a fighting chance to survive. Nights are cold, but not instantly deadly. Air is thin, but can be breathed for fifteen minutes at a time. Water and edible plant life are scarce, but not entirely absent.

But even though the first half of the movie is devoted to the question of basic survival, this is not really a movie about a man overcoming a hostile environment on his ingenuity alone. The astronaut does use his brain to solve a few problems, but the deciding factor is really that the bare necessities of life are all available right at hand. Most convenient of all, an apparently very common yellow rock not only burns like coal (providing heat for those freezing nights) but releases life-saving oxygen in the process. Meanwhile, water and food are not necessarily easy to find, but a smarter man would have figured out the key to locating them after just a couple days on the surface.




But for better or for worse, there’s more to the movie than a simple survival story. In the second half, the astronaut discovers that alien visitors use disposable slave labor to extract minerals from Mars. One such slave escapes, joins up with the astronaut, and becomes a sort of “man Friday” for the space age. It’s a little hard to figure out exactly what the movie is trying to say about the Friday character. He looks, dresses, and talks like an American Indian (though his hairstyle is ancient Egyptian) and has practically no alien characteristics despite hailing from a different star system. It briefly seems as though the escaped slave is not going to be satisfied meekly playing the Friday role -- he remains perfectly mute and aloof for days, then refuses to respond to the astronaut’s attempts to teach him English or to give him a new name. But before long he’s caved on all fronts and is speaking broken English and responding to the name Friday.

The survival bits at the beginning of ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS are pretty good, and even the arrival of the modern Friday turns out to be more interesting than expected. But the end of the movie takes a sharp turn towards the silly and the predictable when the aliens come looking for the fugitive slave. (Why? The slaves are disposable anyway -- why care if one survives instead of dying with the rest?) The alien spaceships do a lot of really boring blasting of the Martian surface, and the two friends do some slightly less boring fleeing to the north pole. But up to the last twenty minutes or so, the movie is really pretty interesting. And it’s worth noting that Adam West and his amazing voice have an all-too-brief role early in the picture as well.




What else happened this year?

-- THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is one of the better movies to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion special effects. Besides awesome alien monsters, it also delivers much of the same humor and excitement that the H.G. Wells novel does.
-- No one really ever needs to see SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS, but a snowy December evening could be worse spent. It obviously requires a high tolerance (and preferably affection) for low budget film making, but it has enough weirdness to please. The only missed opportunity is a climactic robot/polar bear fight that is teased but never materializes.
-- HERCULES AGAINST THE MOONMEN delivers both the ancient Greek strongman and several different monstrous bad guys (some, as promised, from the moon). It’s diverting enough as long as you ignore the usual shortcomings.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1964...

This was a weak year for sci-fi flicks -- thus the pathetic list above -- but THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON is really pretty great.

BONUS BLOG -- 1963: THE NUTTY PROFESSOR

What’s it about?

After being bullied by jocks once too often, nerdy science professor Jerry Lewis resolves to beef himself up. When bodybuilding doesn’t work, he turns to chemicals to get the job done. But instead of making him strong, the formula he concocts turns him into the ultra-hip swinger Buddy Love -- a cool, confident cat who also happens to be a pretty big jerk.

As Buddy Love, Lewis woos pretty coed Stella Stevens, who is alternately attracted and repelled by his egotistical attitude. Adding to the difficulties is the fact that the formula is unpredictable, kicking in and wearing off at inopportune times. Soon the effects are wreaking havoc with both of Lewis’s personalities, and the whole situation inevitably comes to a head when both the klutzy professor and Buddy Love are expected to be at the same place at the same time.




Is it any good?

I know next to nothing about Jerry Lewis and even less about the old Martin and Lewis comedy team, so unfortunately I can only write about THE NUTTY PROFESSOR from a place of supreme ignorance. I do know that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had broken up their act several years before this movie was made and Lewis had already become a bankable star on his own, but the character of Buddy Love is clearly a riff on the cool Rat Packers that Dean Martin was hanging with. Without any context, it’s hard to know whether Lewis was skewering his one-time partner or whether he was simply goofing on a persona that even the Rat Pack didn’t take all that seriously. But whatever the origins, Buddy Love is a magnificent creation and a truly charismatic jerk.

The genius in the movie lies in the unpredictability of Buddy Love. During his first appearance, he’s aggressive and egotistical, but always charming. He has an exciting carpe diem philosophy, and ultimately melts Stella’s objections by making her see how much he really digs her. But on Buddy Love’s second appearance, the mix of personality is slightly off. He’s just ever so slightly less charming, and suddenly his whole act looks boorish and pathetic. Whether from personal experience or close observation, Jerry Lewis apparently knew exactly where the dividing line lay between charming and obnoxious.




The nerdy professor character is a bit harder to swallow -- he’s a complete stereotype and it’s hard to see exactly what Stella Stevens is supposed to see in him. (She goes back and forth between the two throughout the movie.) Besides a battery of annoying tics, the biggest problem with the professor is that he has no spine whatsoever. This is resolved a bit at the very end when he gives up the Buddy Love personality for good, but still one imagines that Stella Stevens must be one forgiving gal to even consider him romantically.

All in all, this is a pretty awesome movie, and as reluctant as I am to agree with the French about anything I do think they may be on to something with this Jerry Lewis guy. If nothing else, this movie will hopefully continue to help future generations of “nice guys” better understand why ladies sometimes prefer “charming, exciting, but jerky” over “nice but always boring”.

BONUS BLOG -- 1963: MATANGO

What’s it about?

Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.

The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.




Is it any good?

MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.

For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.




Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.

It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.

1963: THE BIRDS

What’s it about?

Serious lawyer Rod Taylor and free spirit socialite Tippi Hedren have a classic screwball meeting in a San Francisco pet store. He despises her, she loathes him, and no sooner is he out the door than she’s hatching an elaborate prank/flirtation that involves two love birds, a strongly worded letter, and a two-hour drive to a hick town up the coast called Bodega Bay. When Hedren arrives in town, she slowly begins to realize that Taylor is the unblinking eye of a whirling cyclone of female attentions -- including schoolteacher Suzanne Pleshette, jealous mother Jessica Tandy, and an adoring ten year-old sister.

Hedren’s prank is barely implemented when she takes a nasty cut on the head courtesy of a dive-bombing sea gull. As her relationship with Taylor blossoms over the next couple of days, there are several more bizarre bird-related incidents. Things take a frightening turn when a flock of birds brutally attacks a group of schoolchildren -- and from then on out, Bodega Bay is under siege by birds. As more and more birds amass in the town, the residents try to flee -- but Taylor and his family end up trapped in his house for a long and terrifying night.




Is it any good?

So far as I know, THE BIRDS is the only movie that Alfred Hitchcock ever directed that has anything approaching sci-fi themes. And even though the premise is right out of the 1950s sci-fi book of plot lines (crazed animals attack town!), Hitchcock doesn’t really play the sci-fi elements straight. The beginning of the movie really does feel like a screwball comedy, and it’s a good while before the avian antics in Bodega Bay add up to anything worrying. But when they finally do -- watch out! This is also one of Hitchcock’s bloodiest and most explosive movies, with one bird attack ending with a gas station and several cars bursting into bright orange fireballs.

A lot of directors who took on sci-fi movies in the 1950s and 1960s had done work primarily in other genres -- including Howard Hawks, Robert Wise, Irwin Allen, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, Jack Arnold, and others. So it wouldn’t necessarily have been out of place for Hitchcock to turn out a more traditional sci-fi movie. But THE BIRDS is all over the place as far as tone and style goes, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The screwball opening quickly becomes a Gothic mystery when Hedren arrives in Bodega Bay -- the women who orbit Taylor in the tiny town are like characters out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Then, of course, there’s the frantic action of the bird attacks, long stretches of suspense, and a few horrifically gory moments. In fact, the one genre that Hitchcock doesn’t seem much interested in is sci-fi itself. No reason for the bird attacks is ever given (except for a hysterical accusation that Hedren somehow instigated it) and it’s taken as a given that there’s nothing anybody can do about it except to try and get away.




It’s pretty obvious that the birds are meant to be some kind of symbolic manifestation of psychological something or other. I have no doubt that plenty of papers and theses have been written on what exactly it all “means”, so I’ll leave any speculation in that department to the experts. Instead, I’ll talk about superficial things like special effects. In most of the attack scenes, the birds are superimposed on the film of the actors, presumably using some variation of a green-screen process. It all looks very good from a technical point of view, but there is a bit of a nagging feeling that the actors and the birds aren’t occupying the same physical plane. (Probably because they’re not.) So for me the creepy, suspenseful parts were much more effective than most of the actual bird attacks. The attacks that do work are those that don’t require the birds and actors to interact directly -- there’s a justly famous scene with Hedren trapped in a telephone booth as birds fly amok all around her. But I was equally chilled by neat little touches like a row of broken teacups in a silent house showing that the birds had been there.

I don’t think anybody likes all of Hitchcock’s movies -- not even all of the most famous ones. For me, NORTH BY NORTHWEST and VERTIGO are the weak links. I used to think that THE BIRDS belonged in that category too -- the first time I saw it, years ago, I thought it was horribly boring. These days, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting movies that Hitchcock directed. There are parts of it that I definitely think don’t work too well, but overall the weird world of Bodega Bay, the constantly changing styles, and a few sequences of terrific suspense really add up to something pretty great.




What else happened this year?

-- Jerry Lewis directed and starred in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR.
-- Roger Corman continued to move into the world of (relatively) higher budget pictures with X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.
-- Ishiro Honda took a break from giant monsters to direct MATANGO, also sometimes called ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE.

If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1963...

I am not usually a big fan of comedies, but in this case I’d say that THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is the best movie of the year. THE BIRDS isn’t far behind though.

BONUS BLOG -- 1962: PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

What’s it about?

Ray Milland packs his wife and two teenaged children into the family camper and sets off early in the morning for a fishing trip. A few hours into the mountains around Los Angeles, the family suddenly sees a bright flash behind them. When they stop to look, an enormous mushroom cloud is spreading over the city. The family at first turns back towards Los Angeles, but soon Milland begins to have his doubts about this course of action. As more and more panicked people pour out of the city towards the mountains, they first seek out a grocery store and hardware store in a small town for supplies, and then head off into the wilderness.

All does not go smoothly, however. A misunderstanding in the hardware store ends with Milland pulling a gun on the proprietor and making off with a stash of goods without paying for them. Later, another confrontation on the highway escalates until son Frankie Avalon wounds a man with a shotgun blast. Even after arriving at the secluded fishing camp, the family finds they’ve been followed by both the hardware store owner and the hoods they shot at on the road. With no law for miles, the family finds itself harassed with no choice but to fight back with deadly force. But when one of them is wounded as well, they must risk leaving the relative solitude of the wilderness and venture back to the cities again for medical treatment.




Is it any good?

I don’t know an awful lot about Ray Milland, but he was a well respected actor in the 1940s (even winning an Academy Award for THE LOST WEEKEND) who ended up acting in a lot of low budget sci-fi and horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Milland once reportedly said that he didn’t particularly enjoy acting, and he considered it simply a way to pay the bills. In light of that, it’s tempting to look at his transition from romantic leading man to B-movie icon as the career move of a cynical or apathetic actor. But in addition to starring in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!, Milland also directed the picture. And he once said that the movie he was most proud of besides THE LOST WEEKEND was the Roger Corman cheap and quick sci-fi thriller X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). So regardless of what motives were primarily behind the switch to genre pictures, he clearly had some interest in sci-fi above and beyond collecting a paycheck.

It’s hard to tell exactly where PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! wants the sympathies of the audience to be. As law and order break down around him, Ray Milland’s character pretty quickly crosses the line from law-abiding citizen to single-minded desperado doing whatever he must to protect his family. He holds up a hardware store, causes a multi-car pile-up on the highway, almost runs down a group of men trying to defend their town, and ultimately ends up blowing away two unarmed no-goodniks with a shotgun. Less egregiously, he also refuses to trust anybody outside of his family -- going so far as to turn away an abused girl looking for help before his son points out how heartless he’s being. Presumably we’re meant to think that Milland is doing what he has to do to protect his family, but that his single-minded objective obscures his judgment from time to time.




PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! doesn’t have much interest in the nuclear war other than as a vehicle for creating the lawless situation that Milland and his family must survive. There is no attendant Soviet invasion and no secondary effects from the nuclear blast beyond the destruction of Los Angeles and several other cities -- no fallout, no radiation sickness, no hint that this is anything except a temporary disruption of normalcy. The movie is surprisingly bleak in places, and it’s pretty surprising to see the “good guys” so willing to level shotguns at everybody they meet. Even the idea that Ray Milland would put a gun in Frankie Avalon’s hands and tell him to blow a guy away if he makes a wrong move is kind of crazy.

On the other hand, the dialogue and story are not that deep. The mother particularly gets the bad end of the script -- she spends much of the beginning of the movie as a kind of ineffectual conscience before her big conversion when she gets a few rounds off at the hoodlums trying to rape her daughter. Speaking of hoodlums, kids get a bum rap in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! too. Even Frankie Avalon is depicted as far too trigger happy -- he enjoys toting around a gun too much and Ray Milland seems to think he is teetering on the verge of running wild like the hoodlums who terrorize them. Add to this the fact that the attempted rape is disturbingly scored with hep jazz music, and it starts to seem like part of this movie’s agenda is a “get off my lawn” message from a cranky old man.

1962: LA JETÉE

What’s it about?

A soldier in post-apocalyptic France is captured by the enemy and sent to a prison camp in dark catacombs under a city that appears to be Paris. In fact, all survivors of the war now live underground to escape the deadly radiation that permeates the surface of the Earth. Realizing that the irradiated world above no longer has the resources to support humanity, the enemy scientists begin work on a time travel program designed to cull necessary resources from the past and the future. Prisoners are used for the dangerous experiments -- and when it comes the French soldier’s turn, several subjects have already died or gone insane as a result of the experiments.

Sent successfully back in time, the soldier encounters a woman he remembers glimpsing once in his childhood. They strike up a friendship, and then a romance. The woman -- a memory of an almost forgotten pre-war world -- becomes a focal point for the soldier’s time traveling, and eventually he is able to visit the past almost at will. But no sooner does he realize this then the scientists fling him forward in time to beg help from humanity’s futuristic descendants. Knowing he will be executed after completing his mission, the soldier seeks a way to escape through time back to the days of his childhood and the woman he has grown to love.




Is it any good?

Only half an hour long, LA JETÉE is not a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, the story is told entirely through a montage of black and white still photographs combined with narration, music, and sound effects. As such, it’s very simple -- characters exist only as faces and short narrated descriptions. It’s less dramatic than even a radio play or a short story, and yet even stripped down to such bare essentials it is still very interesting indeed.

The short running time helps, of course. And even though the images themselves don’t move, they do change every few seconds. Paradoxically, this means that LA JETÉE often shows more of any particular scene that a typical motion picture does -- instead of cutting back and forth between two people exchanging dialogue during a two-minute scene, the photographs here can roam around and show the actors and environment from every possible angle. And each shot is carefully framed to communicate either information or emotion. Watching LA JETÉE isn’t like looking at photo stills or a storyboard for a movie -- it’s like paging through a book of carefully composed photographs.




The extreme simplicity of the movie also gives the story a fable-like quality that doesn’t really feel like any other sci-fi movie that has come before. In some ways, it feels so startlingly different that it seems it must have sprung fully-formed from the mind of a visionary, rather than being the natural product of organic developments in the genre. But even though there may not be film antecedents to LA JETÉE (and I don’t know for sure there aren’t), there were certainly many sci-fi novels and stories in the 1950s and 1960s that formed the tradition it draws from. So, taken in the context of the other movies of the time, LA JETÉE is a reminder of how little of the genre’s possibilities had yet been explored on film even by 1962.

Though the post-apocalyptic catacombs and the future world are briefly depicted, it doesn’t seem that LA JETÉE is really interested in speculating on fantastic worlds. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary world of every-day modern Paris, which is what the time-traveling soldier sees as fantastic. The movie is a meditation -- it’s absorbed in its own premise and in no hurry to trade quiet contemplation for action or character or plot. The basic story was later used by Terry Gilliam as the basis for his movie 12 MONKEYS (1995), but watching LA JETÉE is a very different experience indeed.




What else happened this year?

-- John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE casts Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in a paranoid conspiracy thriller about brainwashing, McCarthyism, communist plots, and political assassinations.
-- Actor Ray Milland took one of his few turns as director with the nuclear war thriller PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
-- I can’t really in good conscience recommend THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE to anybody, but it has a couple unforgettable scenes at the very end. HANDS OF A STRANGER, on the other hand, is less memorable but overall a better movie about the same kind of themes.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1962...

It might as well be LA JETÉE. It’s easier to watch than it sounds, but if you prefer something less experimental then go with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE instead.

BONUS BLOG -- 1961: THE RETURN OF DR MABUSE

What’s it about?

German police inspector Gert Frobe is assigned to investigate the murder of a courier who was transporting evidence against an American criminal organization called “the Syndicate”. Despite the lack of any apparent connection Frobe almost immediately suspects the crime was commissioned by the mysterious Dr Mabuse -- a mentalist and criminal mastermind who was presumed dead years earlier. Frobe’s hunch is verified when his investigation takes him to a local church where the bad doctor (still unseen) starts issuing cryptic warnings through the public address system.

Other brazen murders (including one committed by flamethrower) put Frobe on the trail of a sophisticated gang that appears to be operating out of “cell block D” at the local penitentiary. Soon, an FBI agent and a pretty young journalist join the investigation as well. By pretending to send the FBI agent to prison on a trumped up conviction, they infiltrate the organization and learn that the evil Mabuse plans to use an army of prisoners under the influence of mind-control drugs to sow mayhem and destruction throughout the world. Frobe and friends must stop the first plot to blow up an atomic power plant and unmask Mabuse before it’s too late.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

Dr Mabuse is practically unknown in the United States, but the character is reportedly a horror phenomenon on par with Dracula or Frankenstein in parts of Europe. Approximately ten Mabuse movies were produced over a span of five decades -- starting with a couple of Fritz Lang films in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rest following mostly in the 1960s. I’ve seen six of the Mabuse films so far and I would describe myself as a fan, but even I am not totally clear on exactly what the attraction is. One thing I am sure of is that Dr Mabuse is far more than the sum of his parts, so any single Mabuse movie (except perhaps the original four-hour silent epic MABUSE THE GAMBLER) is likely to be disappointing taken in isolation.

THE RETURN OF DR MABUSE isn’t even the best of the 1960s Mabuse flicks, but it follows pretty closely the pattern for the movies. Step one: Murder! Step two: An investigator (preferably a character or actor who has appeared in previous installments) irrationally suspects Mabuse despite having no evidence. Step three: Everyone else points out that Mabuse is dead. Step four: Mabuse reveals himself unnecessarily by issuing warnings. Step five: Mabuse’s plan to sow anarchy throughout the world using some sci-fi contraption is foiled. Step six: Mabuse is unmasked, revealing he is some character from earlier in the movie, and he escapes to plot another day. There are other elements that recur time and time again: masks, facial disfigurements, disembodied voices, player pianos, wooden legs, hidden surveillance, faked deaths, switched identities, mind control, the use of numbers instead of names, and even a group of actors (including Gert Frobe, Wolfgang Preiss, Peter van Eyck, and Werner Peters) who each appear in several different roles throughout the franchise.




Taken individually, the movies are often confusing, weird, unsatisfying, cliched, or some mixture thereof. They feel like second-rate procedurals or thrillers where people behave irrationally for the sake of twists, and where everybody’s plans are far more complicated than they need to be. The plots are difficult to follow, the characters are simply puppets acting for or against Mabuse, and the movies often lapse into dullness. And, seemingly worst of all, Mabuse is forever a cipher. He only appears in the final moments of the movie when he is finally unmasked -- otherwise he’s reduced to simply barking orders or threats from behind concealment. But strangely, as the series goes on and the movies reinforce each other, they acquire this weirdly compelling symbolic dimension. The recycled actors, characters, situations, themes, and objects give them a dreamlike, half-remembered quality. They all blend together effortlessly into a single plotless and surreal entity. More than once I’ve had nagging recollections of some mythical Mabuse movie that I could swear I’ve seen, but turns out to be simply something my memory has assembled from pieces borrowed from all the others.

In this hazy blend, Mabuse actually somehow becomes a compelling character (or at least a compelling concept). He is literally evil incarnate -- he has no motives, no objectives, no personality, and he seeks nothing more than to plunge the world into chaos and anarchy. As such, it’s fitting that he is often hunted down by simple lawmen. Mabuse’s foils are usually ordinary homicide detectives or FBI agents -- schlubby guys who doggedly work leads and follow hunches and put clues together. It’s also interesting that these guys are always irrationally obsessed with Mabuse, as though they have some ancestral memory and hatred of him that drives them to track him down even when everyone else is convinced he’s only a myth. Mabuse always executes his diabolical schemes through agents (usually controlled by hypnotism or some similar method) while he himself remains obscured in the shadows, and at the end he’s always revealed to be another character in disguise just before escaping the clutches of the law at the last moment. It’s a weirdly faithful retelling of the same story, very similar to other deathless franchises like Frankenstein or Dracula or Godzilla that revisit the same territory again and again and again. In the case of Mabuse, the story about the tendency of evil to emerge precisely when we think it’s been destroyed, the way it hides itself within seemingly good men, and the need for ordinary folks to be diligent in rooting it out whenever it arises.




If anybody is interested in the Dr Mabuse movies, I would suggest starting with one of the three that Fritz Lang made. At four hours long, the silent MABUSE THE GAMBLER is like the rest of the series in microcosm: by the time it’s over, you’ve forgotten where it began and all that remains is an impression. It’s also the movie where Mabuse is most developed as a villain. Meanwhile, THE TESTAMENT OF DR MABUSE (1933) sets some of the template for the movies to come. In an attempt to ground Mabuse in the real world, Lang pits him against the Inspector Lohmann character from M (1931) even as Mabuse develops fantastic plots to overthrow the rule of law in the world. Finally, in THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), Lang introduces many more elements -- including several actors -- who would recur repeatedly in many of the other Mabuse movies of the sixties.

1961: VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

What’s it about?

A fancy new atomic submarine on its first mission in the Arctic Circle is buffeted by giant blocks of sinking ice. Though nobody seems particularly concerned about the fact that ice suddenly has a greater density than water, the sub surfaces anyway to see what’s going on. What they discover is that the entire sky is on fire -- apparently something to do with the gases in the Van Allen Belt igniting and bathing the Earth in deadly radiation that has already raised surface temperatures to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (Presumably all this happened while the sub was submerged.) Two scientists aboard the sub -- one of them the admiral that designed the boat -- quickly calculate a solution to the problem: shoot a nuclear missile into the Van Allen Belt that will cause the energy to disperse harmlessly outward. (If you don’t quite follow how any of this could be remotely possible, I’m sure a science professional would be happy to explain it to you.)

The sub makes full steam for the United Nations in New York City, where the scientists plan to present their solution. However, they find that the U.N.’s scientific advisors have already decided on a bold “well, let’s just see what happens” course of action, believing that the Van Allen Belts will burn themselves out when surface temperatures on the Earth reach a mild and balmy 170 degrees Fahrenheit. (So why worry?) Not happy with this, the scientist/admiral commandeers the atomic sub, intending to launch the missile anyway. For reasons so stupid that the movie doesn’t even try to explain them, the missile must be launched from a specific point in the Pacific Ocean at a specific hour on a specific day. To save the world, the sub must make that rendezvous -- but first it must survive a bevy of underwater perils and the combined forces of the world’s navies (i.e., one other sub) trying to stop them.


Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller


Is it any good?

Golly goodness, no. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA was produced and directed by “master of disaster” Irwin Allen, who would later be responsible for movies like THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO. But whatever you may think about his disaster flicks (personally I like them), he is clearly not a man who cares much about science fiction. Everything about this movie is either stupid, boring, cheap, or some combination of the three. But it is a pretty good case study of a certain kind of overblown sci-fi epics that would be infuriating if they weren’t so dumb.

As in his later disaster movies, Irwin Allen pulls together a motley crew of recognizable but mostly second-string actors to fill his sub, including Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Eden, Joan Fontaine, Michale Ansara, Frankie Avalon, and Peter Lorre (in full-on slumming mode). Yet despite the medium wattage star power of the cast, none of the characters are particularly interesting. The conflict between the monomaniacal admiral and the sub’s more humane captain is meant to be a tense human drama running parallel to the end-of-the-world plot. But nobody is going to mistake VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA for THE CAINE MUTINY (or even THE GHOST SHIP) anytime soon. It’s pretty indicative of the movie’s leaden handling of its characters that it requires not one, not two, but THREE different saboteurs (all with different motives, mind you) onboard to wring the tiny bit of drama from the crew dynamics that it gets.




Effective -- or even merely enthusiastic -- special effects cover a multitude of sins in dull sci-fi flicks, but VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA falls flat on its face in this department too. Irwin Allen was a notorious cost-cutter, and it shows. One anecdote about the 1960 re-make of THE LOST WORLD has it that Willis O’Brien was slated to do stop-motion effects, just as he had in the 1925 original. But to save money, Irwin Allen instead decided to glue plastic horns onto lizards and pretend that they looked like dinosaurs instead. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is rarely as bad as that, but it does include the world’s most boring fight with a giant squid -- boring because its tentacles apparently only move when its victims kindly offer to thrash them about. Besides the squid, the crew also survives dull encounters with the sinking ice blocks mentioned above, an onboard fire, a couple of sharks, a giant octopus (that’s right: this movie has a giant squid AND a giant octopus), and a hostile submarine. One sequence with a field of undersea mines actually seems like it might turn out to be suspenseful or exciting, but fortunately it comes to a quick conclusion before anything really interesting can happen.

The most disappointing thing about VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA is that it clearly isn’t the product of an incompetent, exuberant madman like Ed Wood -- instead, it’s the product of competent professionals who just don’t seem to care that much. The film makers didn’t care about writing a plausible sci-fi story, or about depicting any actual undersea dangers or wonders, or about creating interesting characters, or even about showing whiz-bang special effects. The only hints of personality come from the cheesy theme song performed by Frankie Avalon, and during a short scene where Barbara Eden dances spastically to his searing hot trumpeting. But otherwise it’s just a lot of people blandly going through the motions of a forgettable sci-fi pseudo-epic.




What else happened this year?

-- Though not nearly as stupid as VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen’s THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND is one of the less interesting epic adventures those two collaborated on. Still, it features a great fight with a giant crab.
-- The world was introduced to another one of Godzilla’s many future foes in MOTHRA. (This one is a giant moth.)
-- Fred MacMurray starred as THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR in the first of Disney’s sci-fi comedies about the bouncy substance known as flubber.
-- And fans of goofy (but imaginative) B-movies should find many things to enjoy in THE PHANTOM PLANET.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1961...

It’s been many years since I’ve seen it, but I remember MOTHRA being one of the best Japanese giant monster movies.

BONUS BLOG -- 1960: THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

What’s it about?

A klutzy delivery boy at a flower shop is on the verge of being fired when he convinces his employer to give him one more chance -- but only if a rare plant he’s been growing at home becomes an attraction for the shop within a week. At first the plant (named “Audrey Jr” in honor of a pretty shop assistant the delivery boy has a crush on) looks small and sickly. But while sitting up and caring for Audrey Jr during the night, the delivery boy accidentally discovers that it perks up as soon as it gets a taste of blood. He feeds it first by pricking his fingers, but the plant quickly grows too big to be satisfied by mere drips and drops.

The nutrition problem is temporarily solved when the delivery boy inadvertently causes a man’s gruesome death at a train yard. Searching for a way to dispose of the body, he takes it back to the flower shop and feeds the dismembered pieces to Audrey Jr. Nourished by so much food, the plant quickly grows to an enormous size and becomes a prize attraction at the shop -- but each night it craves more and more human blood and the delivery boy is driven to increasingly desperate means to keep it alive.




Is it any good?

Produced and directed by Roger Corman, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS is unlike any other sci-fi movie that I’ve seen from the years leading up to 1960. First and foremost, it’s a black comedy fueled by a mix of oddball characters, ethnic humor, deadpan jokes, and goofy sight gags. The horror is practically nonexistent -- partly because it’s constantly undercut by the humor, and partly because plants are just not that scary no matter how many people they eat. Despite the central presence of a carnivorous talking plant named Audrey Jr, the movie doesn’t feel very much like a sci-fi flick either. In fact, the movie it most reminded me of is another Roger Corman picture -- A BUCKET OF BLOOD from 1959, in which a hapless beatnik wannabe discovers the fame he seeks only when he accidentally encases a cat in plaster of Paris. Like the delivery boy in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, he too soon graduates to cheerily sacrificing humans to keep the fires of his success burning.

Weirdly, it’s impossible to feel anything but sympathy for either of Roger Corman’s murderous protagonists because they are both come off as such well-meaning (and borderline idiotic) innocents propelled to their acts by forces greater than themselves. To the extent that this is intentional satire, it’s more pointed in A BUCKET OF BLOOD, but there is still something strangely compelling (and, at least to my mind, hilarious) about following the exploits of a good-hearted murderer in THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Even when the hero is feeding chunks of an undercover cop to his pet plant, I can’t help but root for him.




It’s also worth noting that the entire movie (except for a few exterior shots) was reportedly filmed in two days on existing sets for only $30,000. Yet, even though it’s clearly a low-budget B-movie, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS still feels far more like a visionary labor of love than the cheap-and-dirty quickie effort that it apparently was. (Roger Corman himself considered the final product so inconsequential that he didn’t even bother registering the copyright, which ultimately led to the movie falling into the public domain.) Although the ending is pretty weak, the rest of the script is efficient, funny, and sometimes even satirical. The special effects are not really all that special, but the homemade absurdity of Audrey Jr only adds to the humor -- especially once it starts talking in a hilariously un-plantlike voice. The oddball characters aren’t especially deep or well-developed, but they are almost always interesting. And one of them is played by a very young and exuberant Jack Nicholson. In other words, there are plenty of reasons to watch THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS even despite its many, many ragged edges.

Epilogue: No doubt as a result of being in the public domain, the movie was often shown on TV in the 1960s and 1970s (see also: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE) and eventually became popular enough to inspire a stage musical in the early 1980s. This was then made into another film in 1986, starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin -- probably one of the first examples of the now increasingly common movie-based-on-a-musical-based-on-a-movie phenomenon.