1953: FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE

What’s it about?

Two young friends work together on a scientific project under the encouragement of a benevolent and fatherly doctor. The arrival of an old childhood friend -- a girl they were both once in love with -- gives them fresh inspiration to overcome the technical obstacles in their way. At last, they complete a working prototype of a machine capable of replicating any object. As they begin the much less interesting work of marketing their invention, one of the scientists announces he and the girl are now engaged.

The other scientist is heartbroken by this turn of events, but keeps his pain to himself. He works night and day to find a way to modify the replicator to work on living creatures. Ultimately successful, he begs the woman to let him duplicate her so that both of the men can have their own copy and be happy.

Is it any good?

Not surprisingly for a movie about lone scientists pushing the boundaries of knowledge, FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE has a lot in common with FRANKENSTEIN or THE FLY -- but is better in many ways than either of those. I don’t recognize any of the actors, but the two male leads make a fantastic irrepressible scientist tag team. The laboratory is appropriately full of wonderful scientific machinery -- a lot of dynamos and big electronic things with switches and oscilloscopes. It’s never really clear what all the machinery is for, but it does make the replication trick fun to watch even the third or fourth time they do it.

A lot of the movie -- probably too much, in fact -- follows the development of the various iterations of the replicator. As a result, it does feel like they shortchange the existential and emotional ramifications of duplicating a human being in favor of showing more of the experiments. Things obviously don’t go exactly as planned, and though the ending is not as riveting as it might be, it’s not a total let-down either. What is disappointing, however, is that the woman who gets duplicated never really gets to say anything about how she feels about it, even though the choice is ostensibly hers. She seemingly goes through with the process out of pity for the unmarried scientist, but it’s frustrating that she’s sidelined so much both before and after the duplication.

But in general this is a really juicy sci-fi flick about a pretty unusual situation. The high-tech 1950s lab is very neat, the actors are fun, and it mostly moves along at an exciting rate. I would actually have liked it to be a bit more melodramatic about the implications of everything -- most of the characters seem to take the idea of duplicating a human far too much in stride. And I would definitely have liked to have seen the female lead have more of a say in things. But all in all it’s an enjoyable and fairly unique 1950s sci-fi movie. It’s also worth noting that this is one of the earliest Hammer science fiction movies, which means that everybody in it is as British as is humanly possible.

What else happened this year?

-- THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made in any year, and is absolutely something you should go check out right away if you have any interest in this kind of thing.
-- I’m also very fond of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, which I would say deserves to be a minor classic of 1950s sci-fi.
-- INVADERS FROM MARS is not nearly as good as either of those movies, but has a lot of imagination and a pretty wild ending that makes for a fun midnight movie experience.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1953...

There’s no question that it should be THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.