Sci-Fi Films of the 1920s

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1920 Famous Players-Lasky Corporation

OK morality play horror

silent

Is it science fiction?

To separate the good and evil natures of man… using a somehow scientifically developed drug. So it is science fiction.

He takes the drug himself. (For science?)

Barrymore transforms before our eyes, contorting his face. (In contrast, the 1932 adaptation has Jekyll transform almost to an animal, by use of lots of latex.)

Note: there had been already at least five direct film adaptations of the story. Another was produced the same year as this, and more every decade after, and spin-offs, besides.

The film is in the public domain in the U.S., and copies are available on-line.

L’uomo meccanico
The mechanical man

1921 Milano Film

−− criminals use robots for evil

silent

Less than half of the film has been recovered. Copies are available on the Internet, however.

A scientist creates a big mechanical man, which the criminal Mado uses to commit terrible crimes.

Аэли́та
Aelita, Queen of Mars

1924 Межрабпом-Русь (Mezhrabpom-Rus)

− dream of society on Mars

silent

Date: 1921

Radio stations around the world receive strange signals. In Russia, they joke that the message might be from Mars.

The sets and outfits are pretty wild, extravagant.

Is it really sci-fi? Inasmuch as it all turns out to be a dream, not really: it is, explicitly, fantasy. There’s little science to the fantasy, only the idea that travel to Mars, and being on Mars, might be possible would now be deemed science fiction. (At the time, few could have made the distinction, though.)

Wunder der Schöpfung
(Our Heavenly Bodies
or
A Trip to the Planets)

1925 Kulturfilm

+ science education with sci-fi fantasy

silent

This is the best, most complete, dissemination of its time about the cosmos, and very much a forerunner of Carl Sagan’s series Cosmos. The science fiction is only a fantastical segment of what is otherwise a science documentary.

Vehicle: a “phantasyship” with electric motors (later called a “spaceship”). A curious contraption, looking like a combination airship and submarine, in a sort of globe.

Features what appears to be footage from rocket or balloon launches; a depiction of launch of the spaceship from a futuristic city.

The spaceship lands on Mars, where men crawl out, and proceed to bounce around as though on trampolines. They go on to travel to the speed of light and beyond, and visit different sorts of stars. They travel as far as the edge of the Milky Way… beyond which the film speculates whether there is anything at all. This is because, until the year the film was being made, the fact that other galaxies lie outside the Milky Way was still a matter of debate.

About Sagan’s Cosmos: The similarities are very strong: Sagan had his “Ship of the Imagination” in which he explores the cosmos.

Could he have seen this film? I have my doubts. By the time he was an adult, the film was well and lost, and a big war had been fought. Could he have seen it as a child? A German import into the U.S., between the wars? Could he have talked with someone who had seen it? This last possibility seems very strong to me: an expatriate German scientist, filled with wonder at an old educational film he had seen in his home country.

The Lost World

1925 First National Pictures, Inc.

+ dinosaurs discovered

silent, with stop-action

This is the first full-length dinosaur movie, and generally a very fine production. A few scenes of the stop-motion dinosaurs are all most people have seen of it. But this is an epic action-adventure, with character development and an arc, and seen in its entirety, it’s pretty entertaining.

The animations are excellent — the dinosaurs breathe and emote. They’re at least as good as anything that appeared until Harryhausen’s animations of the ’60s.

Place: “…somewhere beyond the reaches of the Amazon”

Like many of the films of the era, the originals of this film were lost, and most of the copies disintegrated in time. Only a few scenes reappeared over the years (sometimes as a cheap and fast way to insert dinosaurs, sometimes as ridicule of old-time filmmaking). Researchers found eight partial copies, only by carefully searching many film archives; this sufficed to restore most of the original. My edition is:
2000 Edition Produced by Serge Bromberg, David Shepard
Restoration Editor Mathieu Duboscq
Lobster Films, Paris

The acting of the principals is very good, given the styles of the times. Challenger and White are particularly believable.

On the other hand, the portrayal of South American natives is poor. There’s a girl who might belong in a Mexican cantina, except for her grass skirt, and a guide played by a white man in blackface. Was this really necessary?

Before the team even reaches the land of the dinosaurs, they are beset by a band of fanged ape-men and chimpanzees! Well, ape-men appeared in the book, and presumably, the chimp represents an ape-man. For me, it detracts from the main premise.

The dinosaur menagerie includes: pterodactyl, brontosaurus, allosaurus (who beats up on … a duck-bill something), triceratops and baby, triceratops with spiny shield.

It’s a girl who gets the ball rolling, of course:

“I will only marry a man of great deeds and strange experiences — a man who can look death in the face without flinching!”

(And she returns to playing with her cat with a mouse on a string.)

Metropolis

1927 UFA

++ future class society & androids

silent

This is a great film that has affected science fiction films ever since. It’s also a great story.

Most of the original film was lost or destroyed. Researchers reconstructed the film from fragments of prints that they discovered over the years. Some sequences are known only from one low-quality damaged print. Some sequences of the film may be lost for good.

The style is high Art Deco.

Titanic machines, cityscapes. Elevated roadways and rail lines; biplanes fly between buildings. The boss communicates with a 2-way video screen.

Armies of workers, heads bowed, are barely able to step in line. The workers’ city is deep below. At the “Club of the Sons”, sons of the rich exercise, and damsels entertain them. You know this isn’t going to go well.

The son, Freder, of the richest guy, there meets Maria, who is just trying to get them to help poor kids, and there is your boy-meets-girl.

Choreographed workers operate a huge steam machine “M-Machine”. A worker falters, and it overheats, men are thrown everywhere! Before Freder’s eyes the machine becomes the man-devouring Moloch!

The machine-woman is, in the film, a re-creation of the Inventor’s lost wife, Hel. This aspect is like the Frankenstein story. But there is more than one guy mad with his own badness: Fredersen wants to use her to crush the workers. They conspire to give the machine-woman the likeness of Maria, each for his own reason.

The scene of Maria in the preparation tube was directly ripped off by The Fifth Element.

The machine-woman-Maria is much like Maria but with more mascara and a twisted smile and walk — her transformation from saintly to wicked is one of my favorite parts of the film. She raises hell among the young rich in the “Yoshiwara” district (this taken from an official prostitution district in Tokyo).

I had the pleasure of seeing the reconstructed film with a live orchestral accompaniment at the Babylon in Berlin. I can attest that musical accompaniment greatly adds to the experience.

“The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart!”

High Treason

1929 Gaumont British Picture Corp. (UK)
1930 Tiffany Productions, Inc. (USA)

OK future engineering/political fiction

different versions for silent and talking

Date: 1940 (talkie version), 1950 (silent intertitles)

Scenes use elaborate miniature models to depict transportation in future London. Especially, dirigibles, autogyros, other aircraft, and speedboats appear.

Some scenes take place in a tunnel across the English channel.

A fancy car appears: a rickety, very cramped, but streamlined little contraption, with two spoked wheels in front and one wheel behind. It sounds like an unmuffled 2-stroke motorcycle engine when it runs.

The politics is very silly. In the future, national borders have been erased, and replaced by “continental federations”, the main ones being “Federation of Europe” and “Atlantic States” — the latter including the U.S. and Latin American countries, but not Canada.

The provocation for war is a border shooting of booze runners (because in the Atlantic Federation U.S. alcohol prohibition is still in place.) (The only place this could have happened would have been in the present U.S.-Canadian border.)

The main message is overwhelmingly anti-war.

Ladies often wear pantsuits!

Scenes suggest someone might be nude in the privacy of their own bathroom, and scenes of ladies in their underwear. This was surely risqué at the time.

They put a lot of effort into futuristic costumes and interior design. Architecture is a fanciful, glittery Art-Deco.

There is also a protracted ballroom dance, with music that sounds very much like 1920s big-band jazz, and a swirling dance where everybody periodically freezes. One guy conducts all the band instruments, which play themselves. A couple of lady fencers take over the dance stage, and fence to the band music. (Well, why, exactly, not?)

Odd-looking, skinny, handguns keep appearing — which are also surely props.

There is “daily television news”, and a two-way video telephone.

Although the topic is explicitly international, only one (evildoing) Japanese individual has lines.

Some of the dialog is intentionally humorous (but not very funny). Overall, the dialog is pretty bad, but this is partly because this film was on the very cusp of the introduction of talkie technology.

In fact, it was originally filmed and released as a silent, but the studio insisted on a talkie version. The director re-shot many scenes, and overdubbed others, to produce a much shorter talkie for distribution in the U.S.

Evidently, I saw a restoration that incorporated both the full-length silent and the cut-down talkie versions.

Altogether, the film’s naive politics and romance, and its clumsy dialog, detract badly from the experience. Its depiction of a future world comes off better, though.

Frau im Mond
Woman in the Moon

1929 UFA

++ intrigue and moon flight

silent

This is a long movie. It has plenty of time to treat the central topic of travel to the Moon, but luxuriates in complicated and dubious intrigues, both before the trip and on the Moon.

A woman wrote the story, and women figure into the action importantly. There is a cigar-munching female industrialist, a breathtakingly pretty poisoner, and Friede, who besides being an assistant and an astronomy student, serves as photographer and nurse on the mission, and voice of bravery and calm, as well as the pinnacle of a love triangle.

Reason for going to the Moon: its mountains are made of gold!

Vehicle: Friede. A stubby bullet shape, but with very long fins of boxlike construction, rectangular holes open at front and back. The film presents a nice cutaway model of the rocket, showing two levels of crew compartments in the nose, and canisters and machinery below.

Helius has already sent an unmanned register rocket H23 to the Moon, to produce a magnesium explosion visible from Earth. The H23 looks rather more like conventional rockets, except again with fins of boxlike construction.

The intertitles provide some numerical details as well as a trajectory of the flight to the Moon: 11,200 kph as an escape velocity. They point out that there is an “opposite side” to the Moon. They also mention a theory that, on that side, there is an atmosphere.

It seems they are not the first to attempt the Moon. A memorial appears, showing the names of people have tried before, and died.

The young scamp is reading a pulp fiction novel. What is barely legible:

MINGO
der
Nick Carter
der Luft
Saturn-Piraten

(Nick Carter was a detective character in pulp fiction serials. But web searches turn up no mention of Mingo.) Later, on board the rocket, he pulls out his stash of novels. They read:

Mondvampire
Das Geheimnis der unreadable Mondstrahlen
Im Kampf mit Mondkalbern
Mingos Heimkehr zur Erde

And when they arrive at the Moon, the boy exclaims “this is the way Mingo would go!”
(A book notes this literature: Der deutsche Zukunftsroman 1918-1945: Gattungstypologie und socialgeschichtliche Verortung, von Dina Brandt)

The rocket rolls out of the hangar standing upright on rails.

Aerial photos of the rocket hangar are surprisingly realistic, showing aircraft wing and shadows moving over it.

“Because the spaceship is too light to stand freely, it is submerged in a water basin in which it stands upright.”
(Why? It was standing upright until it got to the basin.)

There is a count-down to launch, and the rocket sling-shots into space!

The crew consists of: the young visionary, the feeble old professor, his pet mouse, the pretty assistant, the other assistant (her betrothed), and a scoundrel… and a young stowaway.

They experience respiratory distress and writhe a lot from the acceleration. They “dump middle rocket” partway up, which appears to be the box-shaped fins. By the time they get to escape velocity, everybody has passed out.

Scientific depictions:
They look back to see Earth from space, as almost an after-thought.
Weightlessness, difficulties of and techniques for dealing with fluids.
A scene shows Earth setting over the Moon, as they fly to the dark side.

They have to test the air to see if they can breathe it, which they do by lighting matches, which burn. No further space suits are required.

The Woman in the Moon is of course Friede.

The Mysterious Island

1929 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

+ undersea adventure

partly with soundtrack, partly with intertitles

The relation of the screenplay to Verne’s book appears to be one of an explanation for the later stories L’Île mystérieuse: "Le capitaine Nemo était un indien, le prince Dakkar…" Since this film begins with a prince Dakkar building submarines, it must have been intended as background for the Verne stories.

This represents an interesting time in filmmaking: it’s a “part-talkie”, some short scenes having a soundtrack, but it also has intertitles.

As with many films of this era, even important ones, the film was thought to have been lost, but enthusiasts and archivists have reassembled enough of it to make a whole movie.

The prince launches two submarines. Giant octopuses appear, as do underwater humanoids. Also, workers wear very elaborate diving suits, somehow representing how a diving suit of the 19th century might have looked. And a woman goes out in one (unlike in Verne’s writing)!