Sci-Fi Films of the 1930s

Just Imagine

1930 Fox Film Corporation

− unfunny future comedy/musical

talkie

Date 1980

The studio put a lot of money and effort into various aspects of this film. Unfortunately, story line and targeting of audience were not among them. While the leading sequences are worth seeing, the rest is a stupid confusion. Nonetheless, it influenced many subsequent sci-fi and fantasy efforts.

What is it? comedy? musical? dance-extravaganza? sci-fi? Why not a big movie with everything altogether! Surely that would please everybody!

Straightaway after the explanation that it’s the future and things have changed, comes the introduction to the romantic problem, and then the comic sidekick… shortly followed by a further sidekick. The Vaudevillian jokes come fast and furious, interrupted only by song, dance and romance.

The comic relief would lift out cleanly — it looks like an addition. Likewise, of course, the musical numbers. The remains would be the plot and the sci-fi, and it would be very short.

Is it a science fiction film? It’s surely a future-fiction film.

Everybody has numbers rather than names. They apply for marriage and are assigned partners (based on the “distinction” they have achieved). But this isn’t science. They take pills rather than eating or drinking. They fly cute little planes rather than driving cars. They order new babies from a machine, which delivers them giggling. That is at least technology. (Evidently, the ideas of numbers replacing people’s names and people eating pills instead of meals are much older than I thought. Where do these originate?)

Most of the population seems quite content with all this new stuff. The malcontents include those who don’t get the mates they want, and the guy from the past, who longs for the old days.

For science fiction, we’ve got: technological innovations (flying cars, two-way TV communications, pills instead of food, space-plane), the well-used sci-fi themes of raising the dead, space travel to another planet, and space aliens. These are very thinly applied, but qualify the film marginally as science fiction.

Premise: scientists wake a guy up who died in 1930, in a very elaborate set. It is called an experiment, with no further explanation. In contrast to Frankenstein, no moral consequences are explored — only comedic ones. The guy merely proceeds to upstage the other comic relief for the remainder of the film. Think Sleeper.

This film pre-dates the famous film Frankenstein — in fact, parts of the set in the raising-from-the-dead sequence were re-used in that film.

The romantic plot is: a guy and girl are in love, but the marriage tribunal assigns her instead to another guy with more “distinction”. (There is no mention of the girl’s “worth and accomplishments” — maybe it’s enough she’s cute as a bug.) So the guy flies to Mars to get more distinction.

The sets and architectural miniatures are art-deco taken to a sort of limit. This isn’t bad, if you care for it.

The women concern themselves mostly with romance and the latest evening gowns.

One of the scientists appears to be of Asian origin. The rest of the cast is white.

They choose the hero because he looks like a guy who wants to end it all. The hero, his funny side-kick, and his even funnier comic relief all hop in the scientist’s rocket-plane to fly to Mars. It uses the scientists’ greatest invention, a “gravity neutralizer”. This rocket-plane will be familiar: both the full-sized and miniature models were re-used in the Flash Gordon serial. (The style of that serial owes a lot to this movie.)

On the way to Mars, gravity and aerodynamic heating get passing mention. The only event that transpires on the quick trip to Mars is the discovery of the comic relief as a stowaway. On arrival, despite the warning: “We don’t know if man can live on Mars”, they just open the door and walk out.

Mars has blond dancing girls in short skirts, who live in a crystal environment much like the 1939 Oz. Oh, dear… guys also wear short skirts. Much dance and song ensues.

At least the Martians speak an unfamiliar language.

Each Martian is born a twin, one good, one bad. Legal proof they aren’t human consists of their immunity to being slugged in the face, and their passing into unconsciousness on having their earlobes squeezed. Kind of funny… not very.

Wikipedia says: due to the flop of this film, Hollywood didn’t back another full-length space science film until the 1950s.

Frankenstein

1931 Universal Pictures Corp

++ scientist brings the dead to life

talkie

Frankenstein had been a very popular story since the book’s publication, and had been done on stage and film before. This is the earliest surviving full-length screen adaptation however, and it’s the one that all the sequels, spin-offs, re-makes, spoofs, and rip-offs refer to. And it’s hard to beat.

Mary Shelly’s book was partly a response to widely publicized advances in the new science of electricity, specifically the “animal electricity” described by Galvani, wherein the legs of dissected frogs reacted to an electric current. Some respectable people thought science was on the verge of discovering a “secret of life”. The book was a cautionary tale about the use of such secrets. It is therefore essentially science fiction.

The doctor tells his old professor that he was wrong about the “ultraviolet ray” being the “highest color of the spectrum”. Besides lots of sparky electronics, that’s about as far as the science goes.

In the opening credits for the film, a big question mark replaces Karloff’s name. But at the end of the film is another list of credits (under “A good cast is worth repeating”), but this time with his name.

The characters are well played, in the style of the time. The sets are plenty creepy, and of course Karloff’s stiff, lurching monster is absolutely the last word.

The monster, played with such sensitivity, cruelly robbed of the mercy of death, confused and afraid, is both horrible and tragic. He’s an archetype of monsters.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1931 Paramount

+ scientist splits soul good / evil

talkie

In this adaptation, Jekyll is, in addition to brilliant and filthy rich, heavy on Bach. He speaks perfect Transatlantic.

The father of his betrothed forces Jekyll into temptation, by insisting on a delay of the marriage. It’s enough to push a virile young scientist into rash, even immoral, even hideous behavior.

The transformation transpires in a fascinating way, as he watches his reflection in the mirrors. Make-up appears on his face before the camera. The story is that they employed photographic filters, to at first hide the make-up, and gradually make it visible. His dental work and friseur all go to naught: he gets a big mouth full of big teeth, pointy ears, a pointy head, big nostrils, and finally, a new hair-do.

The transformation greatly improves his mood: he becomes like a happy ape. One of the best scenes has him standing in the rain, enjoying it falling on his face.

The Hyde character is, physically, even uglier than usual, and he’s very sensitive about it, being jealous of his “gentleman” self, who is pretty.

The film uses several entertaining scene-change and lighting effects. A view through a round aperture tells us when we are seeing through someone’s eyes.

See also the adaptations of 1929 and 1941. A comic adaptation appeared in 1963. (If you see Jerry Lewis before seeing this film, it will ruin it for you.) A Russian adaptation appeared in 1985.

Island of Lost Souls

1932 Paramount

+ scientist mucks with evolution or whatever

talkie

Moreau is by far the most captivating character, working with a full palette of mad emotion, sparkling. (Well, it’s easy to play the evil guy.) The Panther Woman is great, and of course the Speaker of the Law. All the other “normal” people are stock characters.

I have a bone to pick with the story, as science fiction, which I think should reflect something of the science of the time. But the screenwriters did not bother to educate themselves about the basics of the theory that underlies all our understanding of the development of life:

None of these passages is from the novel.

So it’s clear that the screenwriters completely miss the central concept of natural selection. You can’t give or take the selection — it isn’t a magical ingredient that you can apply to a creature, it’s a necessarily slow process of interaction of a population with its environment. And no: “tending toward the human form” is antithetical to the theory.

It is an utter misunderstanding of the simplest, most important principle in biology. No wonder so many Americans are so viciously confused about basic science, that most of the rest of the world takes as obvious.

It should be science-fiction, but this story is anti-science fiction. It loses a point from me for that alone.

Aside from the mangling of the science, the film is very well made. I was impressed by the sensitivity of the treatment of both the monstrosities and the evil scientist.

The novel has seen at least five other adaptations under various titles: Die Insel der Verschollenen (1921), Terror is a Man (1959), The Twilight People (1972), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977, 1996). This is the best of them.

The interaction between Moreau and the Sayer of the Law is intriguing:

The Invisible Man

1933 Universal Pictures

+ scientist gets invisible and evil

talkie

The premise is that a chemist has discovered a way to become invisible. It works, but of course it changes him in other unforeseen ways.

This film is well made: the camera work and acting are quite good, the dialog is sometimes delightful. It’s quite watchable overall. Several of the bit part actors later became stars in their own right, but Raines himself appears only in the final scene.

The special effects, limited as they are, were completely novel at the time.

There have been at least a dozen film adaptations and variants on this story. This is really the best.

Full-length movies with “Invisible Man” in the title appeared in 1992, 2017 and 2020, besides sequels and variants, and tellings of the story in other languages, and short films and TV episodes. Full-length movies called The Invisible Woman appeared in 1940, 1969, 2009, 2013, 2020, besides numerous short films and TV episodes.

King Kong

1933 Radio Pictures

++ dinosaurs-n-giant ape

talkie

So many thorough reviews and discussions of this film have appeared, and most everybody has seen at least some of it, that there’s no point in my describing it here again. Here’s my take on how it fits in this list.

The story is not great science fiction. It’s plainly a variant of the Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about isolated regions where ancient creatures survive — plus: hey, how about a giant gorilla?

But it’s really well-made, a fun, exciting movie, and the special effects were groundbreaking and a huge effect on later filmmakers. The great stop-action animation artist Ray Harryhausen, who animated so many films in the ’50s and ’60s, credited this film with launching him on his career.

Gold
L’Or

1934 Universum-Film AG (UFA)

OK scientists make gold; crime ensues

talkie

German, French

Premise: scientists have discovered a way to transmute lead into gold. Naturally, the darkest impulses of Man are aroused.

The script introduces the intrigue straightaway, before its science-fiction object is explained.

Some performances seem very natural. It isn’t consistent, but the direction is very fine overall. The cinematography is good, and often very sophisticated.

Unfortunately, the film is very long, and plods for long stretches. Worse, besides the science fiction, it has multiple intrigues, multiple romance angles, sabotage and revenge, and some of the sub-plots go nowhere. The script needed more work, and the film needed editing.

Separate German and French versions were filmed simultaneously, Brigitte Helm being the only main actor keeping the same role in each.

The science fiction theme is just the transmutation of lead into gold by atom-smashing (“Atomzertrümmerung”) using electricity — “5 million volts” of it (not more!). Holk stresses that their lab is not “a kind of gold factory”, but just doing a “purely scientific experiment”.

(Some reviews of this film claim the film introduces an “atomic reactor” or deals with “radioactivity”. While radioactivity was a much-discussed phenomenon at the time, the dialog does not mention it. Theories about the atomic nucleus were just being developed, but the concept of a nuclear reactor had not yet been born. The script at least mentions something that was then cutting-edge science, using popular vocabulary.)

The sci-fi sets include huge electrical machines, lots of fancy sparks, and film effects for rays.

The flying boat that meets the ship is a Dornier Do. J ‘Wal’, I think.

Some of the sci-fi footage was appropriated for the 1958 U.S. film The Magnetic Monster.

Гибель сенсации
(Робот Джима Рипль)
[Loss of Sensation,
or
Jim Ripple’s Robot]

1935 Межрабпомфильм

++ robots, at what price?

talkie

Russian

Inspired by Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. Some say it is more like Volodimir Vladko’s book Iron Riot (an expansion of the 1929 novel Robots are coming).

The Čapek play does not resemble the film adaptation in major ways: first, the “robots” of the play were not mechanical, but rather, artificial biological people, while in the film they are machinery. Also, the politics of the film are decidedly Soviet, while Čapek’s play is not. This is to be expected, but the details are nonetheless worth mentioning.

Robots: are like heavy hydraulic machines. Two versions: he presents “Micron” to the workers, and the much larger “Ripple’s Universal Robot” (each bearing a plaque “RUR”) to the military and industrialists. The RURs respond to Ripple’s saxophone, but also have a remote “controller” device. They’re pretty scary, and sound like tanks on the move.

It’s entertaining as a perspective of the USA from the Soviet Union: the action takes place in an industrialized, English-speaking country. It has to be the USA: Although details such as military uniforms and emblems only vaguely resemble contemporary US ones, all the names are English, money is dollars, upper classes dance in swanky clubs to big band music. However, both the workers and the industrialists talk in terms of “proletariat” and “capitalists”, terminology which rarely got beyond college students in the USA.

Jim writes on blackboard:

Jim: “We need to stop providing them things at all.”
Claire: “Who, Jim? Capitalists or workers?”
Jim: “Both of them”

Jim proposes a new economic system, based on machines doing the work. He thinks is machines do all the work, destroying capitalism without any revolution — but he provides no explanation of why that would work.

Jim: “Maybe Bolshevism is good enough for wild Russia, but it is not good with our culture”.

Jim makes a robot worker, “Micron”, a half-size humanoid machine that responds to whistles as commands. He presents it to the workers, but the workers, especially his own brother, think it’s crazy, and say the capitalists will just use the machines against the workers.

So Jim presents the RUR (which responds to a Saxophone!) to the military industrialists. The industrialists have their doubts, but the military doesn’t. A military leader proposes the robots as a solution to the “proletariat problem” — the threat of revolution.

They discuss how to build the RUR for a big new war, without alarming the workers. A capitalist proposes to use black people, who he says “aren’t interested in secrets”.

The white workers talk to the “blacks”, played by actors of various races. An Indian guy becomes involved in making a “controller” for the RURs.

Jim gets drunk, and, realizing nobody is his friend, whispers to the RURs to protect him when they come to get him. Then he pulls the saxophone out, and conducts them in a wild dance!

A general sabotages Jim’s attempt to show the workers that the robots are friendly. Workers go on strike, and the military sends waves of RURs to attack them. Jim chases them ineffectively with his broken saxophone. The robots under control of soldiers cause havoc, but then the workers have made a controller that messes with the RURs, and so take them from the control of the soldiers.

Then the workers send the RURs back against the capitalists and generals, and they are gloriously victorious!

Космического рейса
[Cosmic Journey]
aka. Cosmic Voyage
aka. “Space Flight”

1936 Mosfilm

++ rocket flight to the Moon

silent

This Soviet silent film is a must-see for sci-fi film buffs — a long-lost, extremely ambitious early work, with strong scientific foundations and gorgeous artwork. It shows lots of detail on a wide range of scales, heroic architecture, and monumental hairstyling.

The film was commissioned by the Soviet “Young Pioneers”, which accounts for the prominence of young people, explicitly members of the group in the story, as well as a lot of silly humor — which it wears well.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a consultant for the film, and made 30 drawings of the rocket ships, but died before the film was finished.

Date: 1946

Rocket ships take off from a huge terminal, something like a titanic dirigible hanger, appointed like a fancy hotel. It has auto, bicycle and monorail access. Its sign reads “Всесоюзный институт межпланетных сообщений В.И.М.С.” (All-Union Institute of Interplanetary Communication) К. Э. Циалковского. (K. E. Tsiolkovsky). Why they would have such a big infrastructure for an enterprise that had not yet begun (they haven’t gone to the Moon yet) is a question we’re probably not meant to ask.

The large winged rocket ships brandish the names Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov. They zoom up a huge inclined railway (a meticulously detailed miniature), which launches them at an angle into the sky. Once in space, the nose of the craft flies off, something like staging. They have a big, elaborate control room, with something like a boat steering wheel for guidance.

Passengers don rubber suits, and go into chambers that fill with fluid to protect them from the shock of blast-off and landing.

The crew consists of an older professor with a big white beard (that’s a first!), his graduate student, a young female professor, and an intrepid boy.

In a weightless condition, the crew gleefully fly about the cabin (which is padded all around for that purpose). They spend a lot of time at this activity.

In a few places, something like a TV screen appears.

The small craft lands quite violently on the Moon, on its fins.

On the Moon, they don space suits with four ungainly tubes issuing from the helmet, and heavy boots. Air locks provide lunar egress. They kick the boots off, allowing them to leap about in the Moon’s weak gravity. But where’s the Earth? Seems they have set down on the far side, from which the Earth isn’t visible.

The lunar surface is deeply crevassed and treacherously crumbly.

Stop-action animation shows astronauts leaping across a very severe lunar surface. These lunar scenes are in places very strange and even funny, but they treat the Moon’s low gravity seriously.

To send a signal to Earth, they hop to the other side of the Moon, (where they see the Earth!) and scatter “flares”, which spell out “USSR”, for Earth telescopes to see. Then they find the remnants of the lunar atmosphere, in the form of frozen oxygen, thus saving the mission!

The miniatures scenes, and the camera work used in them, are superb. I don’t know of anything that rivals them for realism, and a sense of awe. Very few films using stop-frame technology rival this one, in this decade, or three decades later. The stop-frame scenes are just spectacular.

The scope and technology of this film are comparable with that of King Kong or Things to Come, for example.

Soviet censors pulled the film from distribution shortly after its release, so it was almost never seen in the West, and had little direct impact on other films.

Here are the intertitles of the film (with imperfect translation).

Things to Come

1936 London Film

+ future visions: air war, space flight

talkie

This is a big film. The cast, the plot, the scenery, the camera angles, and the dialog are all big and complex. It takes very long shots at visions of various aspects of the future, and tries to ask the right questions.

It begins 1940, in “Everytown” (somewhere in England). War is breaking out.

We’re introduced straight away to the participants in the main ethical dialog. Cabal names Passworthy “Pippa”; Passworthy says Cabal is not “eupeptic”. This defines their relationship.

(Cabal) “If we don’t end war, War will end us!”
(Passworthy) “What can you do?”
(Cabal) “Yeess. What can you do?”

Bad guys have fixed wing aircraft, good guys have biplanes. Cool, sleek war tanks (perhaps of the bad guys), are interspersed between WWI tank photos.

A bad guy pilot ridiculously survives a vertical crash, to philosophize about the ethics of gassing civilians.

By 1955, it’s total war, by 1960 civilization has collapsed; people walk about in rags. In 1965, the “wandering sickness” breaks out. Decisive citizens just shoot the diseased. In 1970, things become a little better, and citizens praise “the Chief” for saving the community by shooting the sick. He wants to build an air force, and thereby, to finally end the battle with the “hill people”. The Chief and his main babe are the best part here.

Then Cabal shows up in a very cool one-man aircraft, with an utterly unnecessarily bulbous helmet. He grimly announces he and his “Wings over the World” are taking over. They are a group of engineers who have created a better society, based on dropping sleeping gas (the “Gas of Peace”) on people from huge aircraft.

Lots of heroic blather and big industrial digging equipment herald in the new age.

2036. Society lives underground in industrial surroundings dotted tastefully with decorative shrubbery. (It’s explained later that people formerly lived on the surface only because they didn’t know how to light their houses otherwise.) The scenes are disturbingly anticipative of modern shopping malls. The silly futuristic outfits do not compliment Cabal’s slender legs.

Transparent, flat screen TVs are the one accurate technological vision. Cabal drives a cute little helicopter.

A gargantuan “Space Gun” is to blast people into space, to go around the Moon.

A rabble objects to the gun. Its leader propounds theatrically:

Cabal says:

A cute couple, who happen to be the kids of Cabal and Passworthy, are chosen as passengers. They are strapped into bungee-chairs, and advised: “contract all your muscles when the concussion comes”.

Parables: what to add to this? Most of Cabal’s dialog is sermonizing and moralizing. I’ll offer the closing lines as a summary:

The Devil-Doll

1936 MGM

− people shrunk for revenge

talkie

The mad scientist and his wife plan to reduce people to 1/6 size, to conserve the world’s resources. The mad wife scientist is decidedly mad.

The film has nice special effects of reduced dogs, and later, people. As explanation, we’re given something about atoms being composed of electrons.

But there’s some problem with the brains of the reduced people — they are completely controlled by his mind… with no explanation whatever. Then he reduces a woman. And then he croaks.

Thereafter, the plot becomes a protracted story of deceit and revenge, primarily by Barrymore fooling everyone with his disguise as an aged woman. (It’s somewhat amusing to see Barrymore in drag through much of the film, but, for me, his warm countenance doesn’t fit with the mad murderer character.)

There is one long scene of a shrunk woman making her way around a normal-sized house, navigating huge furniture, to commit dastardly deeds. However, just why and how that is happening is never clarified.

The shrinking of people has little to do with the main story, except as a very complicated means of revenge.

The story is pretty convoluted. Its emotional aspect makes no sense whatever. Morally, it shows a guy killing multiple people, including innocent ones, and then somehow coming out OK (maybe just because he’s Barrymore).

This is the earliest shrinking sci-fi film I know of.

Non-Stop New York

1937 Gaumont British Production

OK engineering fiction: transatlantic airline

talkie

Date: 1938 New Year’s Eve

This is a silly drama; the future airliner was just an added point of interest. Nonetheless, that airliner was essentially science fiction when the movie was made.

It is remarkable that the film is sympathetic to desperately poor people (specifically, the protagonist and the man accused of murder). Most of the characters are very rich, however. (Otherwise, why would anyone be interested in the story?)

Almost all the actors are British, and the ones that are meant to be Americans don’t sound at all like Americans. In fact, the main bad guy (played by Sullivan) is supposed to be a New Yorker, but his accent is so bad, he switches to pretending he’s a Paraguayan, with an accent that sounds more Eastern European. Minor detail.

I’m more curious about the depiction of the plane.

Vehicle: a flying boat Lisbon Clipper. It is just a model, of course. There are only a few scenes of the whole model. The boarding scenes show a few details at full scale. (Different movie posters show variously four or five engines.)

It has a single vertical stabilizer. The wing is mounted well above the fuselage by a central pylon, with two support struts that angle down into the fuselage. Six big prop engines are mounted into the wings.

There seem to be two or three floors. The top floor has smaller rounded windows, 13 or 14 of them. (It looks like this is where passenger cabins are meant to be.) Large rectangular windows at the middle of the plane seem to correspond to windows in the common dining room. There are four of these before the struts, almost to the nose, two behind the struts, then a door, then five more. There is another row of smaller windows below the large windows, 12–13 of them.

The dining room has a wide aisle with tables on each side, with two rows of seats on each side. At least two corridors are shown: besides the dining room, the one in the cabin section shows a spiral staircase going up. As they board (at the middle level), we see staircases both up and down: those going up are explained as heading to the cockpit.

A trumpet calls passengers to dinner.

Passengers step outside for a stroll. (I can’t tell where on the aircraft this is supposed to take place.) There are movies about zeppelins that show such egresses, but even they would travel at 120 k.p.h. — much too fast to stand in safety. A heavier-than-air plane would travel at more than 150 k.p.h, in which even standing would be extremely difficult and dangerous. This is the only scene I noticed that is in fact physically impossible.

Nobody ever straps in. There is never a problem with turbulence. Only in the cliffhanger scene, when the plane is about to crash, are passengers thrown about.

There had been since 1931 zeppelin flights from Europe to New York, and heavier-than-air aircraft had delivered mail across the Atlantic, but at the time there was no such thing as a non-stop flight by heavier-than-air aircraft from Great Britain to New York. The popular magazines had discussed the possibility excitedly.

A real non-stop service between New York and Marseilles started in 1939, and shortly after one between New York and Southampton.

I was intrigued enough to look up contemporary flying boats, to see what the model shown in the film was based on.

The Dornier Wal was in common use at the time, but was much smaller than that shown. The Dornier Do X had six engines, but its design is quite different. The Sikorsky S-42 also had its wing mounted on a pylon, but it was also much smaller, and of otherwise different design. There was also the Short Empire, which started flying in 1936, but was much too small to function like the plane shown. The Boeing 314 Clipper, which was first produced the year after this film, is almost as big as the one depicted, but its design was again quite different.

My conclusion is that the plane modelled here is an idealized, scaled-up impression of various contemporary planes, and of popularizations of planes then on the drawing board.

This film, silly as it is, shows something that was being predicted, and which did eventually come to be. Just not quite as silly.

Weltraumschiff I startet
eine technische Fantasie

1937 Bavaria-Filmkunst

+ short depicting space rocket

talkie

German

This short film is half educational, and half real quick action-adventure. The science is right; some space scenes are as good as it got until the late ’60s.

A lecture and a conversation with the Commodore discuss many of the basic issues of space travel: where space begins, the difference between flying and space travel, distance to the Moon, the speed required to get to the Moon.

In an interview, a professor rules out travel via cannon shot, for the right reasons; surviving the acceleration and atmospheric heating. He discusses basic rocket principles and show some historic films of the time, including some crashes, and compares solid fuel vs. liquid fuel.

Vehicle: Raumschiff 1 is 30 m long, metal, teardrop-shaped, with short stubby wings; it comes out of hangar like a zeppelin but on wheel pods.

The front door of the massive hanger rolls down peculiarly. A nice video of the ship from above, supposedly taken from aircraft, is pretty convincing. Aside from a televised(!) interview with the Commodore, there are no scenes of the ship’s interior.

This is the best depiction of launch into space until the space age. It held up well against most of its successors up to the late 20th century.

The ship accelerates horizontally and then up a ramp (a concession to popular ideas, and the difficulty in imagining such a large object accelerating straight up.) The ship’s exhaust looks pretty violent, and the landscape recedes convincingly, continuously, until the sphericity of the Earth is apparent.

The film shows sunrise over the globe of the Earth. That was a first.

Oh, wow… telescopes at Berlin Babelsberg are mentioned… some are the AIP scopes. My old stomping grounds! It talks about Palomar scope too, as well as a very weird imaginary one on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

It depicts the Moon very well (from space only), with effects that look very much like Apollo pictures. (Well, they just use good telescopic photos, but this turns out to be far better than trying to fake it.)

And the Earth sets over the Moon. This, pre-dating Apollo photos by most of 30 years.

The ship startlingly buzzes the Moon and recovers at the last instant, like a biplane (a concession to 1930s dramatic expectations, no doubt.)

A billboard proclaims:

Bílá nemoc
(The White Disease)
aka. Skeleton on Horseback

1937 Moldaviafilm
Made in A-B, film factories in Prague in Barrandov

+ doctor vs plague and war

talkie

Czech

The film begins with a speech by a nationalist leader, a call for war. That is followed by a hospital scene, where a doctor explains a new disease. A nationalist is in cahoots with the elite in making “war gas”.

Multiple scenes show interactions between professionals with different world-views, the philanthropist and the social climber, and the power-mad dictator.

The photography is top-notch, and often very inventive. The overall look is gorgeous, clean lines and shading.

This is an anti-war film — not a happy topic, made by people who could see war coming. The tension never lets up, and for that, it’s hard to watch in places.

The aim is clearly the Nazi regime that was about to overrun Czechoslovakia and the rest of Europe, although the marshal is a pastiche of various dictators in power at the time. The marshal talks about a “higher will” guiding him — that puts him squarely in fascist territory.

It is medical science fiction, not heavy on the science. One doctor learns how to cure the deadly plague: some chemical names are tossed around, and nothing more.

The story has a message of hope, which we know to have been a disappointment. Things were much worse than they could imagine.

As the Earth Turns

1938 Richard H. Lyford
restored version released 2018 by
8th Sense Productions, LLC

OK mad scientist + ray weapon for peace

silent

Note: there is a 1934 film by the same name.

Note: The screenplay an adaptation of the 1915 novel “The Man who Rocked the Earth” by Arthur Trains and Robert Williams Wood (although no explicit credit is given in the film).

Date/Time “EUROPE, In The Near Future”

The film opens with WWI battle clips. Its theme is anti-war.

Vehicles: The antihero flies a very funny little plane model, bearing a plaque that reads Space Ship (PAX-II). The hero appropriates an aircraft (for no good reason) It is a Lockheed Model 10 Electra. Then a Boeing B-17 appears. (Of course, working in Seattle, he would have easy access to such planes.)

As was common in film plane crashes of the time, after making a nose-dive crashe into the ground, the passengers just get out and dust themselves off.

Weapons: The space ship and a secret hide-out both emit a crude ray (just a scratch in the film).

The mad scientist uses the ray to blow up mountain ranges and cause earthquakes and slow down the Earth’s spin, as well as to knock a plane out of the sky. (It’s the only ray you’ll ever need!)

Compared to contemporary film, the facial expressions are surprisingly natural — perhaps because they were wearing less professional make-up, or maybe because they weren’t professional actors. (Exception that proves the rule: Lyford himself wears make-up typical of a 1920s mad scientist.)

It uses more manual sweeping of the camera than was common at the time. There is an excess of interesting camera shots, odd angles, zooming out. Well, it was a learning experience — but sometimes the shots are effective.

A young woman has a major part (as a plucky young reporter)! She is prone to fainting and being abducted, though.

Lyford was just twenty years old when he made this. He lived and worked in Seattle, and later went to work with Disney. The filming was done in and around Seattle.

As to the date of the original film’s release — the restorers put on it 1937, but this may be the year it was filmed. Other sources say 1938. Since it wasn’t officially released, it’s hard to ssy.

The film was discovered by Lyford’s family in his former home. It may have been shown in his basement theater, but there is no evidence that he distributed it to the general public. Any influence it had at the time was probably confined to Lyford’s experience in making it. Its quality is poor in many ways, but not a lot poorer than the serial films that were popular at the time. It is worth viewing, as it shows the ideas of a young filmmaker of the time.