1970: BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES

What’s it about?

Astronaut James Franciscus arrives on the planet in question, hoping to find out what happened to the missing space expedition led by Charlton Heston from the first movie in the series. He soon discovers that he has traveled two thousand years into the future and has landed on a planet where talking apes rule over mute, primitive humans. While escaping from the ape city into the desert waste of the Forbidden Zone, Brent seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be an entrance to the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system.

Making his way through the subway, Franciscus encounters a colony of psychic mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb with incredible destructive powers. (Say that ten times fast.) He is briefly reunited with Charlton Heston before an attacking ape army forces them to try and stop the mutants from detonating the atomic bomb.




Is it any good?

I wanted to write about PLANET OF THE APES back when I was doing 1968, but I’m glad now that I didn’t since it means I won’t end up repeating myself. And since most folks are already pretty familiar with the first movie in the series, it’s maybe a bit more fun to talk about this one instead. Not that it’s anywhere near as good as the original -- BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was actually my least favorite of the series for a long time. (There are five ape movies in all, not counting Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.) These days I think it’s one of the best, but honestly there are things I like a heck of a lot about all of them.

One of the reasons I used to dislike BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is that the first half of the movie is really just a condensed and lower quality version of the original PLANET OF THE APES. The movie even starts with abbreviated versions of the scenes that end the first movie where Charlton Heston discovers that the planet of the apes was actually Earth all along. These scenes use the original footage from the first movie, but they are shortened and they aren’t nearly as effective as a result.

The rest of the first half follows James Franciscus as he rapidly picks up all the pieces he needs to figure out the mystery of the planet of the apes. The very first person he meets on the planet is Charlton Heston’s primitive girlfriend, Nova. She’s mute, but Franciscus recognizes the dogtags of the man he’s looking for, so he links up with her and they ride off in search of Charlton Heston. Next, he comes to the ape city where a gorilla general is publicly whipping up support for an attack on suspected human habitations in the Forbidden Zone. While in the city, Franciscus meets sympathetic chimps Zira (still played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (not Roddy MacDowell, alas), who give him aid and comfort before hustling him out the door. Zira later helps Franciscus escape from some gorillas who have captured him, and after that the first half ends with the discovery of the subway station that reveals the planet’s true origins.




I still don’t really like the beginning of the movie. The producers had naturally wanted Heston to star in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but he would only agree to appear in a cameo. (Besides a couple short scenes at the very start of the movie, he doesn’t show up until almost the end.) I have no problem with James Fransiscus -- he’s fine in THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, for instance -- but his Brent is no replacement for Charlton Heston’s cynical and independent Taylor. It doesn’t help that he looks a lot like Charlton Heston too.

Kim Hunter and the not-Roddy-MacDowell who plays Cornelius don’t get much more than cameos either. The only character who gets as much screen time as Franciscus is Linda Harrison’s Nova. And sadly, she is pretty much the most boring major character in the whole series -- no doubt in large part because she can’t talk and so just stands around looking surprised or afraid.

But that’s enough about the first half of the movie. Once Franciscus enters the ruined New York subways, things quickly get pretty amazing. For one thing, the subway sets are nifty, and though watching Franciscus put together the truth about the planet of the apes doesn't have the same kick as it did in PLANET OF THE APES, it’s still a great scene. It’s deeper in these same subways that he encounters the colony of psychic mutant humans that the apes are hoping to hunt out and destroy.

The mutants are underground survivors of the nuclear war that laid waste to the Earth and allowed apes to become the dominant species. (The other surviving humans are the dumb, animal-like surface dwellers like Nova that the apes round up and slaughter in organized hunts.) They have psychic powers -- defending their home with frightening illusions and piercing sounds -- and worship a powerful atomic bomb capable of destroying all life on the planet. They also wear masks that hide their horribly disfigured mutant faces.




This seems like a good time for an aside about that atomic bomb worship. It’s not totally clear what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is trying to say about religion with these scenes -- that is, if it’s really trying to say anything at all beyond throwing up the wildest images possible. Religion is sometimes portrayed in science fiction simply as rote ritual with no serious thoughtful underpinnings -- people just keep doing things because their ancestors did them, and on and on down through the generations. That’s not really my experience with religion, but it also doesn’t seem to be what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is positing either. The mutants aren’t dumb -- they seem educated and intelligent. But they also seriously believe that the atomic bomb is their god, and they refer to it as a “holy bomb of peace”. So if I had to guess, I’d say that the portrayal of religion in the movie is not really about religion at all. If anything, it’s more a satire of how educated and intelligent people can somehow accept an absurd idea like “mutually assured destruction” as necessary for peace.

Franciscus is captured by the mutants and put into a prison cell with Heston, and they are both then compelled to fight to the death. (“We are a peaceful people,” says one of the mutants. “We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”) But of course the two astronauts manage to escape that particular fate by working together -- that’s all as it should be. But the interesting thing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is what they end up escaping to.

By this time, the ape army has busted through the mutants’ psychic defenses and are pillaging the underground city, making their way to the cathedral where the atomic bomb is kept. Knowing their city is lost, the mutants are preparing to detonate the bomb. So Franciscus and Heston race to the cathedral and find the bomb almost entirely armed and gorillas everywhere. As they sneak towards the detonator to disarm it, they are both fatally shot by a hail of ape bullets. Franciscus in particular is pretty shockingly dispatched in a Bonnie-and-Clyde or Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid type of excessive fusillade. As he’s sliding down the wall with blood pouring out of the bullet holes in his forehead, it suddenly becomes clear that the sharp cynicism of the original movie has just been lying dormant in the sequel, waiting to erupt at the worst possible time for the heroes.

Things only get darker from there, though, as Heston survives just long enough to crawl towards the detonator and finish setting off the bomb. The screen goes white and a narrator drily informs us that the third planet from the sun has been destroyed. It’s an incredible ending -- and especially incredible for the time. Charlton Heston’s sci-fi flicks (the other famous ones are THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN) always have a thick sour streak, but having the ostensible hero destroy the entire planet is taking things a bit beyond the pale. Reportedly, Heston suggested the ending himself -- largely because he thought it would ensure that there wouldn’t be any more sequels. (Spoiler: There are three more -- but none with Heston.) But it’s in keeping with the endings of almost all the other movies in the series. These are movies with grim and depressing endings (most of them) that don’t pull any punches (most of the time). I’ll be re-watching all of the movies as I go along through the seventies, and I expect I’ll write about at least one more so I’ll save the rest of that discussion for later. For now I’ll just say that BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is not nearly as good as the original, but it’s still pretty amazing in its own way and well worth seeing because of it.



What else happened this year?

-- The 1970s version of Skynet seizes control of the world's nuclear arsenal and starts issuing orders to world leaders in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
-- Peter Watkins returns to his faux documentary style with far less interesting results in THE GLADIATORS, which follows a squad of young soldiers playing a deadly televised war game.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1970...

Pickings are pretty slim this year, but BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is pretty great. Or at least the second half is.

BONUS BLOG -- 1969: THE SEED OF MAN

What’s it about?

A young couple named Dora and Cino are diverted by a roadblock as they try to make it home from a trip one day. The officials at the roadblock administer medical tests, give them a six-month vaccine against all kinds of diseases, and tell the couple to strike out on foot across the countryside until they find a home to live in. No clear explanation is given, but it seems that plagues and wars have been raging across Europe (and possibly the world) and that the destruction of civilization as we know it is imminent.

Dora and Cino find a house on the seashore whose owner has apparently died of the plague. After disposing of his body, they move in to the house and begin hunting, farming and foraging to feed themselves. Cino also collects interesting artifacts -- like a giant wheel of Parmesan cheese -- and preserves them in a makeshift museum in the house. After weeks or months with no other human contact, a band of horsemen claiming to be representatives of the government arrive and tell the two that it’s their duty to help with repopulation efforts. But Dora is reluctant to bring a child into the post-apocalyptic world. Cino, though disappointed, seems to accept this state of affairs until the rotting carcass of a beached whale symbolically presages the arrival of a strange and beautiful woman who is more than willing to have children.




Is it any good?

Thanks to a few arbitrary formative experiences in college, I will forever believe that the stereotypical “European movie” mostly involves a couple of jaded and lethargic people hanging out on a barren and overcast beach, doing nothing much of anything while the sound of the surf and the wind drown out half the non sequiturs that make up the dialogue. THE SEED OF MAN is not exactly as bad as all that, but it also doesn’t do a whole lot to convince me that this stereotype isn’t at least partly based in fact.

The movie begins in a city somewhere in Europe -- presumably somewhere in Italy -- where Dora and Cino are eating in a restaurant. I was going to describe the restaurant as “futuristic” but honestly I’m not exactly sure if the movie is supposed to be set in the future or not. I’m not sure, for instance, if restaurants in Italy in 1969 would have plausibly had wall-sized televisions in them. (Seems unlikely.) And I don’t know whether the weird little jeep vehicle that Cino and Dora ride around in is just a run-of-the-mill ridiculous European car or if it’s supposed to be what cars look like in the future. (Can’t even guess on this one.)

But what is clear is that the world is undergoing some cataclysm, even though the exact nature of the cataclysm isn’t easy to discern. There are definitely both plague and war afoot, but it’s hard to tell how far-reaching they are and what countries they involve. A bombed-out London is mentioned, and there is a reference to the “electronic brains” that help wage the war. But once again it’s unclear whether we’re meant to understand that the militaries of the world are being controlled by computers (which would be futuristic), or whether the computers are simply enabling destruction on a wider scale than was ever possible before (which wouldn’t necessarily be).

It’s also never explained why Cino and Dora are picked out to be given vaccines and diverted to a relatively safe zone. Right before they meet the roadblock, they encounter a bus full of dead children -- presumably an indication that they’re getting closer to the epicenter of the cataclysm. The officials at the roadblock quiz them on their sexual health before giving them the vaccines, so it seems that there’s already some idea that the people they select will be those that can repopulate the country. But then they are simply told to start walking across the countryside, to find a home for themselves, and to live primitively until peace returns.




After Cino and Dora discover the seaside house, nothing much happens to disrupt their solitude for a long time. Cino talks about how he wants a child, and Dora rebuffs him. A blimp on the horizon that they go out to meet turns out to be an advertising balloon blown across Europe from England. Cino grows a neck beard and Dora starts wearing dresses she finds in the house. The surf and the wind drone on.

When the horsemen arrive, it seems like something unpleasant is going to happen to disrupt the peaceful life of Dora and Cino. But rather than a marauding gang, the riders turn out to be (or at least claim to be) representatives of the government. They inspect the house and ask why Dora isn’t pregnant yet. They even see the value in Cino’s museum and donate a typewriter and a painting to display in it. After taking blood samples from Dora and Cino, they tell them to start having children and ride off, never to be seen again.

The movie now enters its weirdest section. A sperm whale beaches itself within sight of the house -- an event that Cino is excited about but which depresses Dora. Not a lot of movies have beached whales in them, so it’s a pretty neat image on that level alone. Symbolically, the whale is supposed to represent -- well, I didn’t think about it that hard. Cino refers to the whale as Moby-Dick, so I guess lets just say it represents whatever Moby-Dick represents. The giant putrefying carcass of the whale eventually drives Dora from the house, but not before a beautiful and sexually available stranger shows up to seduce Cino and attempt to murder Dora.

I say “attempt to murder” since in the ensuing struggle it is actually Dora who kills the stranger. As if this wasn’t shocking enough, it’s strongly implied that she serves a human leg-roast for dinner that night -- which Cino unknowingly devours. I know this is the first part of the movie that actually sounds interesting, but frankly I wish that they had just cut out the stranger entirely if it was just going to end with murder and cannibalism. For one thing, it doesn’t fit the tone of anything else in the movie. For another, it just makes the main characters seem psychotic or callous. (Cino wonders for a minute where the stranger has gone, but then mostly shrugs it off as he gets a second helping of dinner.) None of it has any obvious consequences either -- it’s just another unconnected event like the advertising balloon that floats by early in the movie. The stinking whale carcass has more effect on the relationship of Dora and Cino than this murder. But while the balloon and the whale episodes feel like they are freighted with lyricism and symbolic possibilities, the bits with the stranger just feel absurd and clumsy.




The rotting whale carcass ultimately helps bring the movie to its conclusion. The smell drives Dora out of the seaside house to another that they discovered a little further inland. Throughout the whole movie, I had the feeling that the relationship was not really a very strong one. Perhaps Dora and Cino were just two young people out on a date, and world events beyond their control threw them closer together then they ever intended. That would at least partly explain Dora’s reluctance to have a child -- though there are of course plenty of other good reasons why she might prefer not to.

After the whale is completely skeletonized, Dora comes back again and the weirdness recommences. Cino devises a scheme to rape and impregnate her while she is asleep (presumably drugged) and then cruelly reveals the truth to her when she unwittingly begins to complain of the symptoms of morning sickness. But as Cino dances around Dora on the beach, taunting her, she suddenly explodes like a human bomb and the beach is left deserted of life as both of them are literally vaporized. And that is exactly the sort of confusing, ambiguous and unsatisfying ending I would expect from a stereotypical “European movie” -- so my prejudices and preconceptions are happily strengthened once again.

BONUS BLOG -- 1969: DOPPELGÄNGER

What’s it about?

A probe sent to investigate solar activity accidentally discovers a new planet in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the sun. The pan-European space agency that created the probe hits up NASA for a donation and uses the money to prepare a manned mission to the new planet. (Meanwhile, communist spies have infiltrated the agency and stolen sensitive data using high-tech eyeball cameras and -- actually, never mind. Turns out later none of that part is important at all.)

The two astronauts selected for the mission are for some reason put into a deep sleep for the three weeks that it will take to reach the new planet. When they’re revived, they discover they’re orbiting a habitable planet. But disaster strikes when they try to land on the surface, and as they escape from the wreckage of their spaceship it appears that they have somehow landed back on Earth. But not all is as it seems...




Is it any good?

DOPPELGÄNGER (aka, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN) was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the names (I wasn’t until very recently), they’re a husband-and-wife team who created a long string of distinctive British children’s sci-fi/adventure shows over six decades starting in the 1950s. They’re probably best known for the series they developed using the Supermarionation puppet process -- especially THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERIONS -- but they were involved in nineteen different series in all.

I actually don’t really know much about anything the Andersons did. I did check out THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO back when I was doing 1966 movies, but otherwise the only thing I have to go on are dim twenty year-old memories of CAPTAIN SCARLET. So obviously I don’t know how whether DOPPELGÄNGER is representative of the rest of their work or if it’s an anomaly. It is a live-action movie, so there aren’t any puppets. But the special effects (especially the buildings and spaceships) seem to use a lot of the same miniature techniques from the THUNDERBIRDS movies. If anything, the effects in DOPPELGÄNGER are even better -- or at least more realistic.

The movie really has three parts -- the first of which is probably the weakest. The first half hour or so is concerned entirely with things like getting funding for the mission, political maneuvering in the European space agency and abroad, and security concerns about leaks of sensitive data. I always feel like I’m hurtling through a cultural wormhole whenever I watch British sci-fi movies, because they spend so much time on such mundane things. This can be either refreshing or frustrating depending on how it’s handled -- in DOPPELGÄNGER it’s mostly just a confusing digression. But one amusing note is how dependent the European space agency is on American funding -- even in a British-produced movie, they still have to go begging to NASA when they want to launch a mission. American sci-fi flicks almost never give a single thought to funding, and the few that do certainly don’t solve the problem by getting foreign investment. (Possible exception: CONTACT? I can’t remember who ends up footing the bill in that one.)




In any event, the funding and security concerns are finally wrapped up and put away so we never have to hear about them again. Instead, the movie shifts into one of those “training for the mission” modes that directors seem to think we all love so much. I would not complain at all if I never see another astronaut ride a rocket sled again (this is the third movie from the 1960s I’ve seen so far with such a sequence), but luckily there are other things going on during this part of the movie that are a lot more interesting. One of the two astronauts, for instance, is an American who was brought into the project to help get the funding. Though he’s a Neil Armstrong-like superstar, he has problems in his personal life. His wife belittles him by claiming that the radiation in space has sterilized him, and meanwhile the pretty head of security at the space agency is making eyes at him... It’s all pretty soapy, but it’s nice to see astronauts with more or less realistic problems and flaws.

Once the rocket finally takes off, the movie takes another turn since Earth-bound problems must necessarily be left behind. The two astronauts go into their narratively convenient (but otherwise inexplicable) three-week sleep. When they awake -- well, at this point I should warn that some big spoilers are coming. If you think you might want to watch this movie, I’d recommend stopping here since the ending is a Twilight Zone kind of thing that’s probably better if you don’t know much about it going in.

For the rest of you, when the astronauts awaken from their sleep, they’re in orbit around the new planet on the other side of the sun -- or so they think. But after crashlanding on the surface, they’re immediately picked up by an English-speaking rescue worker hanging from a helicopter. The British astronaut is badly wounded in the crash and more or less sits out the rest of the movie wrapped in bandages in an iron lung. The American, meanwhile, is transported back to the European space agency (in secrecy, natch) where we learn that he’s only been gone three weeks instead of the expected six that a round trip should have taken. The top brass naturally figure that the astronauts turned the rocket around for some reason, but the American insists they did no such thing.




The American goes home with his wife and more domestic scenes ensue -- but things only get weirder when he notices that everything in his house (including all writing and numbers) is reversed. It takes a little while, but the scientists finally decide that the planet on the other side of the sun is an exact mirror image of Earth. When Earth launched its rocket, the mirror planet launched one of its own with mirror images of the astronauts inside. So the three-week journey really was a one-way trip, and the astronaut really is on the new planet on the other side of the sun.

This is, I admit, kind of stupid. We’re supposed to believe that the astronaut didn’t see any writing until he got home and glanced at a cologne bottle in the mirror. (You’d think he’d at least be asked to sign a statement -- or an autograph.) Not to mention that we also have to believe that the astronauts somehow failed to notice that the planet they were orbiting looked like Earth with the continents flipped. But at the same time, it’s kind of neat. I like the overall idea of a mirror world, though sadly not much ever really happens with it. Everybody is confused at first and they make a big deal out of the three-week/six-week discrepancy, but then as soon as the astronaut discovers the world is backwards they pretty quickly accept what’s going on. To confirm the theory, they decide to send the astronaut back up to a part of the spacecraft that’s still orbiting Earth. I guess to see if it’s backwards? Unfortunately, they expect the polarity of electricity to be reversed (turns out it ain’t) so things end badly and all the evidence is destroyed and, well, I may as well just stop here.

In any event, DOPPELGÄNGER is not a bad a movie and I enjoyed it well enough. But except for a few isolated interesting elements, it’s pretty forgettable overall. One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is that the special effects are really very good. Some of the vehicles and buildings are implausibly automated, but otherwise they are very cool. In particular, there’s a scene during the spaceflight where the sun rises over Earth that is truly something to see. The explosive ending -- in which flaming space wreckage lays waste to the space agency’s headquarters -- is pretty terrific as well.

1969: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

What’s it about?

A young Depression-era drifter encounters an irascible stranger played by Rod Steiger. They share a pot of coffee (and a couple of creepy death threats) and soon Steiger reveals that he’s covered in magical tattoos that come to life if they are stared at too long. They were put there by a mysterious woman who Steiger is now tramping in search of, and when he finds her, he’ll kill her.

Somehow not frightened off by this weird and threatening story, the young drifter hangs out a bit longer with the illustrated man. Over the course of a day, he sees three futuristic stories play out in the living tattoos. First, two concerned parents are worried when their children’s holographic playroom seems stuck on the same death-obsessed scene of African lions. Next, the survivors of a rocket crash make their way to shelter across the eternally rain-covered surface of Venus. And finally, two more parents are faced with a horrible choice when they learn the world is to end that night and they are expected to put their children out of their misery ahead of time.




Is it any good?

I didn’t really expect a whole lot from this movie for a number of reasons. Mostly, I think I was prejudiced because it’s an adaption of a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. And much as I have enjoyed Bradbury’s stories (he was my favorite writer for years), there don’t seem to be a lot of high-quality adaptations of his books for some reason. Furthermore, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN isn’t a novel -- it’s a book of short stories with a very thin framing story about a tattooed man. So I knew this was going to be an anthology movie, and that usually isn’t a good sign.

But, as I have been learning time and time again during this project, lowered expectations are the greatest gift you can give to a lot of semi-obscure sci-fi flicks. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, so I don’t remember exactly how much frame story Bradbury lays out, but I don’t think it’s very much. I do remember that he pretty quickly abandons it after he sets up the premise. After a couple stories, there aren’t any more hobo interludes at all until the very end of the book.

The movie version, on the other hand, spends a lot of time on the frame story -- which I think was probably a good idea. Not only is there a lot of interaction between the two drifters (mostly Steiger being menacing or grumpy), but there are a couple flashback scenes that explain how Steiger got the tattoos in the first place. These parts of the movie feel a lot like a modern play, since there’s not much going on except two guys sitting around talking dramatically. I guess if you’re a big fan of naturalism in movies, it might put you off. But I usually kind dig that sort of stagey, stylistic approach (at least for a little while) since it usually means that the movie thinks it’s going to say something deep and eggheaded.



The three vignettes are also shorter and simpler than I thought they would be. The first two I remember very clearly as Bradbury’s stories, and I’m pretty sure the movie vignettes are more or less straight transcriptions of the plots, characters, and a lot of the dialogue. (I don’t remember the third one at all, but I have no reason to believe it’s any different.) A lot of Bradbury’s stories are kind of like campfire stories already -- very straightforward with nasty twists at the end -- so it’s pretty refreshing to see them up on screen without much embellishment. I think that’s part of the reason why this movie works for me -- the focus is more on beefing up the frame story than on trying to mess with the stories or to interlock them somehow. The vignettes are also far too short to get boring, and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN doesn’t even exactly feel like an anthology movie as a consequence.

Another thing that helps is that many of the same actors appear in all of the vignettes -- Steiger, the other drifter, and Claire Bloom play the main characters in all three of them. I don’t really know that there’s too much to be gotten out of this -- it’s not like the stories illuminate the characters in the frame story very much. But it does make the movie feel more cohesive, and is almost a Treehouse of Horror approach to the stories.




It’s not really clear whether the illustrated man is actually the victim of supernatural shenanigans as he claims, or if the young drifter is just impressionable enough that he imagines the pictures coming to life. Steiger seems to believe that the woman who illustrated him was from the distant future, which is how she was able to illustrate events that haven’t come to pass yet. (There’s also a blank spot on Steiger’s shoulder which he says will show folks how they will die if they stare into it.) But the real sci-fi parts of the movie are in the three vignettes. Bradbury once estimated that only a third of his stories are science fiction (another third being fantasy, and another third being neither), but all three of the vignettes here are set in sci-fi futures.

I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about the plots of the stories -- there’s not much point since they don’t really have a lot of bearing on the movie itself. But I will say they are pretty neat little stories. I liked the first two the best -- the Venus one is especially good in terms of sets and atmosphere. The first one has a pretty neat futuristic house too, but it’s one of those sterile and uncomfortable ones that nobody would actually want to live in. None of the vignettes have much character development and none of them are particularly satisfying on their own -- they’re too short for anything like that. But they are fine diversions as long as you are willing to float along with the movie.




The very ending of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is perhaps inevitably where things start to get weird. First, there’s a long flashback of a very naked and very illustrated Rod Steiger wandering through an empty house as he looks for Claire Bloom, who has disappeared after putting the final tattoo on his body. Then the young drifter looks into the blank patch on the illustrated man’s back (I remember this happens in the book too) and sees an image of himself being throttled by the illustrated man. This leads directly to some struggling, some running, and an ambiguous ending. Steiger had been pretty creepy all along, so had he always planned to kill the young man? Or did knowledge of the future paradoxically precipitate a crisis that would otherwise have been avoided? Honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth trying to figure out the answer. I obviously enjoyed THE ILLUSTRATED MAN quite a bit -- more than I expected too, anyway -- but it’s more of a pleasure of the moment than the kind of thing you want to ponder after its done.

What else happened this year?

-- A journey to a newly discovered planet sharing Earth’s orbit (but on the exact opposite side of the sun) has an unexpected conclusion in DOPPELGÄNGER.
-- A couple of young Italians disagree over whether they ought to repopulate the world after a disaster in THE SEED OF MAN.
-- Ray Harryhausen just about perfects his dinosaur animations in the western THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, which results in amazing and unforgettable images like cowboys lassoing and bringing down an angry T-rex.
-- John Sturges directed MAROONED, in which three Apollo astronauts (played by Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Fransiscus) are marooned in orbit due to a technical fault. On the ground, NASA director Gregory Peck is forced to launch a dangerous rescue mission using an experimental spacecraft if they’re to be saved before they run out of oxygen.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1969...

Check out THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI unless you’re sick of me recommending things based on Harryhausen special effects. In that case, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is worth a look.

BONUS BLOG -- 1968: CHARLY

What’s it about?

Cliff Robertson plays Charly, a mentally challenged adult who spends his days sweeping up at a Boston bakery and his evenings fruitlessly trying to improve his reading and writing at night school. His teacher (played by Claire Bloom) suggests him as a candidate for an experimental surgery that has a chance of improving his intelligence.

Following the surgery, Charly at first doesn’t seems no different. But gradually his personality begins to change, and soon he’s performing better on aptitude tests as well. In only a few weeks, Charly outstrips his teacher and reaches genius levels of intelligence. But just as he seems to be adapting emotionally to his new condition, evidence suggests that the changes are only temporary.




Is it any good?

I thought I’d finished with 1968 a couple weeks ago, but then I went and watched CHARLY. I’d seen it before -- or at least most of it -- ages ago, and I’ve read FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (the Daniel Keyes novel it’s based on) at least twice. So I didn’t expect there to be many surprises, and for the first half of the movie there weren’t any.

I’ve always thought that the idea behind FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON is better than the book itself. For one thing, the story is pretty predictable once the trajectory is established. For another, it’s written as a first-person diary kept by Charly Gordon and the intentional misspellings and mistakes in the “dumb” chapters are pretty distracting to me. On the other hand, it’s a very memorable story and it raises a lot of interesting questions.




The first half of the movie is about what I expected (and faintly remembered). Charly goes about his daily life working at the bakery, going to night school, and riding on tour buses on his day off. He clearly misses a lot of what’s going on around him, and the guys at the bakery especially play some mean tricks on him. But he’s also functional enough to hold down a menial job and live in his own tiny apartment. The transition from dumb Charly to smart Charly happens pretty swiftly once it gets going -- there aren’t many intermediate stages between “mentally challenged” and “genius”. But there is one pretty great scene where the doctors are testing Charly after the procedure and there’s no noticeable improvement in his aptitude. But as Charly reacts in frustration to his failures, it’s suddenly clear that he’s already a different person with a different level of self-awareness. It’s a pretty subtle point that plays out in a neat way -- and shortly after that, Charly is confidently solving problems that would stump the average adult.

So far, so good. But about halfway through the movie, the story jumps violently off the tracks and never gets entirely back on again. It’s no surprise that as Charly grows more self-aware, he starts to notice that his night teacher is a very pretty lady. Soon, he’s head over heels in love with her, and shows up late one night at her apartment. There’s a very uncomfortable scene where he tries to kiss her, and she reacts very badly -- pushing him away and literally screaming that nobody would ever want him. Charly storms off into a psychedelic split-screen montage in which he apparently grows a beard, becomes a biker, and lives a wild rock ‘n’ life for a couple of weeks.

Here’s the montage:



Seeing it out of context, it’s hard to explain just how jarring and inexplicable it is. This is the first of a long series of what I believe are technically termed “weirdo expressionistic freak outs” in the second half of the movie. This particular one is a complete departure from everything -- we have never seen those bikers or dancers before and we never see them again. And except for this single minute and a half sequence, there is practically no reference ever made to Charly’s rumschpringa again. When he comes back, he’s cleanshaven, sober, serious-minded, and doesn’t seem inclined to talk about his experience at all. (When the teacher asks him what he learned, he says simply, “I’m back.”)

I should mention that this montage is neither the first nor last time that split screens are used in the movie, but it’s certainly the most dramatic. Up until this point, they are used mostly to show the faces of two different characters who are talking to one another at the same time. So in the earlier instances the split-screen feels almost anthropological -- like a scientific observation of human interaction. But this montage is clearly supposed to be some kind of psychotic, emotionally fractured breakdown.

Directly following this sequence, Charly and the teacher do end up romantically involved. Though this interlude isn’t what I would ordinarily call a “freak out”, it is certainly expressionistic. It’s all sun-dappled forests and glittering golden ponds, sensuous stretching and sweet murmured nothings. This is followed by a sequence where Charly is presented at a scientific conference. The psychologists and doctors begin to question him, and he has a kind of civilized freak out where he starts spouting cynical philosophical pronouncements.

Here’s the question segment (sorry for the aspect ratio):



The moment in that conference where Charly confronts the scientists with the knowledge that he will soon start losing his intelligence is the first time that this possibility is mentioned in the movie. Up until that point, it’s always been assumed that the intelligence boost is permanent. So immediately following this, there is the final expressionistic freak out, in which Charly is literally haunted by the specter of his former self. This is probably my least favorite part of the movie, since the “dumb” Charly looks so sinister and threatening. Of course, that makes sense -- Charly is afraid of losing his intelligence, so naturally he’ll imagine his old self as something to be feared. But it also turns the old “dumb” Charly (who was a very likeable character at the start of the movie) into a sneaking caricature. And since we don’t really get to spend any time with Charly after his intelligence is all gone again, these are practically the last images we see of what he will become. And it’s a much more depressing and frightening picture than what is shown at the beginning of the movie.

Anyway, here’s the final sequence:



Now, if you’re like me, then you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing by the very end of that clip. (Actually, if you’re like me, you were laughing back in the first montage sequence.) A lot of the last half of the movie dances right on the line between “earnestly artistic” and “unintentionally hilarious”. Times may have been different back in 1968, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that people were so different forty years ago that nobody thought of laughing during these scenes. A lot of humor comes from the unexpected -- and each of these freak outs is certainly unexpected -- and it would take a person of amazing skill to keep the sequences unpredictable but keep them from being funny. In any event, they definitely make for a unique ending to the movie. As I said, I’ve often thought the book is too predictable towards the end, and at least CHARLY does not make those same mistakes. I don’t think it accomplishes 100% of what it sets out to do, but when you start trying weirdo tactics you aren’t necessarily going to get predictable results.

BONUS BLOG -- 1968: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

What’s it about?

While on a visit to their father’s grave, a brother and sister are suddenly attacked by a lurching but persistent assailant. The sister manages to escape, but after encountering several other seemingly crazed people, she seeks refuge in an empty farmhouse. Deep in shock and unable to defend herself, she’s saved by the arrival of a survival-minded stranger who immediately starts boarding up the house while more of the monsters congregate in the yard outside.

After the house is secured, the basement door opens and reveals two more couples and a child who have been hiding down there the entire time. Disagreements about the best way to survive the situation lead to several heated arguments among the men. Meanwhile, a steady trickle of information from the radio and television paint an increasingly grim picture of what is happening. Eventually it becomes clear that the recently deceased are returning to life with the apparently single-minded purpose of eating the living. When the location of a local disaster shelter is revealed, the people must decide whether to make a break for it through the hordes of living dead, or to wait out the attack and hope their defenses hold.




Is it any good?

I’ve seen NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD a couple times before, but this was the first time I noticed how much like a western it really is. Replace the living dead with cowboys or Apaches, and you’ve got a new version of STAGECOACH or RIO BRAVO. Westerns have always been about tiny flickering flames of civilization struggling to stay alight in vast dark wildernesses. And they’ve always been about stubborn, bull-headed people unwilling to compromise, even when it threatens their lives. Those are exactly two of the things that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is about too.

The two original people in the house -- the sister, Barbra, and the stranger, Ben -- are more or less the main characters of the movie. The other folks who show up later mostly serve to add some uncertainty and danger to what might happen inside the house to complement the obvious dangers outside. But Barbra and Ben aren’t perfect heroes themselves. Barbra spends most of the movie completely useless -- sitting around in shock and probably guilt after watching her brother’s death. Ben alternates between trying to slap some sense back into her (another very western touch) and defending her from the criticism of the newcomers. Besides thinking nothing of slapping Barbra, Ben is also a quick-tempered hothead who feels entitled to be “the boss” because he’s the one who did most of the work securing the house. Eventually his desire for control leads him even as far as murder. And ironically, it’s the very survival plan that he was so strenuously rejecting (hiding in the cellar) that ends up saving his life from the living dead.

Now after having done my best to make in the interpersonal dynamics sound as interesting as possible, I should admit that in practice they are probably the least interesting part of the movie. The characters are all one-dimensional and they are sometimes given to irrational behavior. Most of the actors are also not nearly good enough to make even flat characters convincing, but what saves NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is that as long as something is happening, it’s always interesting -- and something is almost always happening.




For the first half hour or so, that something is Ben boarding up the house. The movie approaches this with admirable realism -- whatever little budget the movie had must have been largely spent in getting a house and furnishings that could be convincingly ripped apart. But even more interesting is what happens after the defenses are in place. First a radio and then a television set are discovered, and until the power goes out late in the movie one or the other is practically always playing in the background. Those broadcasts turn out to be the most relentlessly gripping part of the movie. Part of this is just that it’s easy to identify with frightened people trying to glean information from TV news broadcasts after a disaster, and part of it is the masterful way it’s handled. It’s telling that during the frequent moments when characters argue or talk over the broadcasts, I found myself always straining to tune out the people so I could hear what the TV was saying.

Just as the television is something that we all like to despise until a disaster reminds us how necessary it is, so too does the end of the movie make a similar case for rednecks and hicks. When the eastern third of the United States is overrun by flesh-eating living dead who can only be stopped by a bullet to the brain, who’s finally able to clean up the mess? Why, it’s the gun-loving, simple-living country folk who think nothing of some casual killing if it’s for a good cause. Honestly, I think this part of the movie gives me more of a surge of pride and appreciation than George Romero intended. After all, the very ending of the movie is bleak and depressing (and its all the fault of the rednecks). But ultimately I suppose I figure they’re no worse than our heroes in the house -- especially Ben who, when the chips were down, killed another human so he could keep being “the boss”. In any event, the continued possibility of zombie apocalypse is reason enough for me to agree that the right to bear arms is worth defending.




Note: I know I promised to do seven entries this week, but sadly I am not going to be able to get to anymore. So this will be the last one for a little while, since I am going on a pseudo-hiatus. I will keep updating, but probably not every week anymore. Anyway, thanks to everybody who has been reading so far. There is a lot more to come yet!

What else happened this year?

-- Daniel Keyes's novel FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON was adapted into the award-winning sci-fi drama CHARLY.
-- Charlton Heston and Roddy MacDowell starred in the truly awesome PLANET OF THE APES, which is the year's grungy, cynical counterpoint to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
-- Godzilla and all of his friends returned for DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.
-- Robert Altman made one of his first features (and one of his few sci-fi movies) with COUNTDOWN, the story of an American moonshot rushed into a dangerous launch to beat the Soviets.
-- And I can't quite tell whether Ingmar Bergman's SHAME counts as sci-fi. I've never seen it and every description makes it sound like an ordinary wartime drama, and yet there are hints that it might be post-apocalyptic somehow.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1968...

Oh man it has to be PLANET OF THE APES.

BONUS BLOG -- 1968: THE LOST CONTINENT

What’s it about?

A motley group of westerners fleeing Sierra Leone aboard a rickety boat (each for their own reasons) get a rude wake-up call when they discover that the ship is carrying a cargo of chemical explosives that react badly to moisture. As foul weather moves in, the hull starts to flood with water. Fearing an explosion, the captain orders the ship abandoned -- but not before mutinous activity by some crew members results in violence.

After weathering the typhoon (and losing a couple passengers to sharks) the lifeboat is blown into a massive patch of apparently carnivorous seaweed. Also caught in the seaweed is the ship they had all just abandoned -- apparently not in such danger of sinking as they had imagined. But the ship is not much of a refuge itself. Not only has the seaweed clogged its propellers, but soon they start to see strange creatures moving around out in the mist around them. When they are suddenly attacked by a raiding party of Spanish conquistadors, it’s clear that they are not trapped in your usual run-of-the-mill patch of carnivorous seaweed.




Is it any good?

I could fill another two paragraphs with additional plot -- the conquistador attack is only the beginning of the crazy hijinks to come -- but I suspect that it would all start to sound too much like I’m describing a dream I had once. And anyway, before I get into any of that, I feel like I should maybe explain why I am even writing about this movie. Most of the other ones I picked for this year are pretty widely recognized as “classics”, but what’s so great about THE LOST CONTINENT?

The short, unsatisfying answer is that there is nothing particularly great about it. I’ve never heard of the director or anybody in the cast, and I’d never heard of the movie itself before I stumbled across it on Netflix. It does have an interesting premise, and most of it is pretty well done. But it’s no better than half a dozen other movies I’ve watched that I enjoyed well enough, but didn’t think were compelling enough to write about. It’s a list that includes SPACEWAYS (1953), THE MONOLITH MONSTERS (1957), THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959), THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), SECONDS (1966), and a few others.

For whatever reason, these are movies that just didn’t grab me strongly enough to write seven hundred words about them. Which is fine -- except that not wanting to write an essay about movie doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable. THE LOST CONTINENT could have very easily ended up in this category too, so I’m writing about it partly to atone for all the enjoyable movies I’ve skipped over simply because they weren’t notable or surprising or artful enough. But it’s nice to know that there are still a few layers of worthwhile sci-fi movies underneath the well-known classics. When I started this project, I was afraid that I had already seen most of the good sci-fi flicks in the world -- but now I am sure that there will always be a layer of solid and entertaining movies that just never get talked about because nobody ever bothered to call them classics.




The second, possibly slightly more satisfying reason to write about THE LOST CONTINENT is that it’s the last Hammer sci-fi movie I plan to watch. There are a few more Frankenstein movies that I could do, but Hammer in the 1970s increasingly specialized in horror and horror-tinged thrillers. I’m no film historian, but the consensus seems to be that changing standards and the emergence of more film makers willing to take sci-fi and horror seriously helped squeeze Hammer out of the market. Hammer was out-gored and out-sexed on one side, and out-classed and out-arted on the other, and by 1979 they were out of business altogether.

So in some ways, THE LOST CONTINENT is the last gasp of Hammer’s sci-fi productions. Even at the end, the studio stayed true to a lot of the conventions that I wrote about in my entry for THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957). The movie starts out like an ordinary thriller, building tension out of character relationships and the dangers of the natural world. In this case, the conflict is between the captain and passengers on one side (all of them criminals, fugitives, or exiles who will not return to port under any conditions) and the increasingly nervous crew on the other side (who grow outright mutinous as the captain insists they sail a leaky boat with explosive cargo straight into a hurricane). This particular story is one of the better ones they came up with -- there are maybe a few too many loose cannonballs rolling about, but the general situation is very exciting, tense, and mostly believable.

After the crew abandons ship, they disappear and never return again. And, in fact, very little of the first part of the movie is important again after the hurricane is over. The survivors discover that the ship somehow managed to weather the storm without sinking or blowing up, so they transfer from the lifeboat back onboard -- and then promptly get stuck in the carnivorous seaweed. One of the strangest things about the movie is that nobody really talks much about that seaweed -- after a couple of dramatic demonstrations of its killing power, they all just take it as a fact of life. And since they can’t unclog the propellers without being eaten by the plants, they have to find some other way out of the mess.




I think I’m on record somewhere already as saying that plant monsters are not very scary. I still stand by that statement, but THE LOST CONTINENT does a pretty good job at least making the giant patch of seaweed creepy. The actual tentacles and gullets look pretty silly -- there’s no doubt about that -- but the seaweed has trapped dozens of ships in its mass, and the glimpses of their rotting hulls through the misty air is pretty effective. It’s from one of these ships that the conquistadors (or, more accurately, the descendants of the original conquistadors) come. It’s not totally clear what they’re after -- it seems that they just attack any new ship and try to raid it for supplies and possibly female prisoners.

The real pay-off with the conquistadors is their social system, however. They are ruled by a boy monarch who takes his orders from a corrupted version of the medieval Catholic Church led by a Klan-hooded inquisitor. This leads to a little bit of myopic protesting by one of the more Protestant newcomers, but his theological objections are made moot when the conquistadors start doing things everybody can object to -- like throwing people down a hatch and feeding them to the seaweed monster.

In any event, I’m not really sure where else to take this. I could keep describing the events of the movie, but I’d hope that anybody could figure out from what I’ve said so far whether they’d be interested in seeing it or not. Everything -- the acting, the special effects, the sets, the story, the monsters -- are either pretty good or at least serviceable enough. It doesn’t add up to anything except an entertaining movie. And honestly, in a lot of ways I preferred the ordinary thrills at the beginning to the sci-fi ones at the end -- at least partly because the characters become pretty flat and dull as soon as they start getting picked off one by one. It would be nice if I had some insightful observation to close this out with, but like I said at the beginning -- it’s not that kind of movie.