Sci-Fi Films of the 1960s

La nave de los monstruos
[The Ship of the Monsters]

1960 Estudios y Laboratorios, CHURUBUSCO-AZTECA

− singing vaquero vs. space aliens

B&W

Spanish

It is primarily a musical sex comedy, featuring scantily clad Venusian women and a whistling, singing mustachioed vaquero Laureano, who tells amusing lies in the bar in Chihuahua.

The monsters of the galaxy: UK UTIRR TAGUAL TOR ZOK.

Vehicle: various rocket-shaped models represent the silvery rocket ship “interplanetary craft”, as if they couldn’t decide which one they liked best. The film shows it landing on modeled planets or on natural landscape, flying in space, orbiting planets. A mother ship or something, with a toroidal part.

Places: Venus, “Antarsis 1340sub3” planetoid of the 4th order, Mexico (Earth).

Robot: A sassy tin robot was left with all the knowledge of the men of its planet (who died in atomic war) in its electronic brain. It can transport itself and others in a blink of an eye.

Gadgets: Inside the craft are lots of large spinning machines… function unexplained. At least, they seem to be designed for the movie, rather than stock electronic equipment. A freezing ray puts creatures in blocks of ice. Another suspended-animation ray allows the Venusians to stop a conversation while they look up information. A space suit, weightlessness, and evidently magnetic boots for walking on the surface of the spaceship. The Venusians carry a big box that’s effectively a TV connected to the robot, which they consult for information.

The robot provides a nice video summary of Mexico and Mexicans.

The Venusians first try to talk to Laureano in French and English.

One of the women inexplicably becomes a vampire, bat and all; another falls in love with the charming vaquero.

Bad as it is, the production values are better than contemporary U.S. space-comedies, such as those of Abbott & Costello and Crosby & Hope and Lewis & Martin, in which the science fiction is no more than a backdrop or excuse for comedy. In this movie, the science fiction is a large part of the comedy.

Der Schweigende Stern
Milcząca Gwiazda
(The Silent Star)
a.k.a. The First Spaceship on Venus
a.k.a. Planet of the Dead
a.k.a. Spaceship Venus Does Not Reply

1960 DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme, Iluzjon film studio

OK pretty space exploration film

color

Polish

I saw this the first time in 2002. It triggered the fit that resulted in these web pages.

Premise: People find an artefact, a “spool”, “not made by human hands”. By some complicated reasoning, they determine it is from Venus. After a great deal of discussion, they decided to send an international team to Venus. (They never clearly state the purpose of the trip.)

Date: 1985

Vehicle: a beautiful silver rocket Cosmostrator with long pointy engines on the end of long fins, producing a cathedral-like effect. An outdoor model standing in sunlight lends a realism to the lift-off. (Oh, the good guys arrive in a MiG-15!)

Robot: “Omega”, a rickety remote-control box with wheels that was apparently for comic relief. It’s good at chess, but nothing else.

Computers: large panels with many colorful controls, and big viewscreens with oscilloscope display, banks of blinking lights.

There is a Moon base Luna 3, with typical contemporary renditions of the lunar surface, and a nice Earth globe devoid of clouds.

The multi-ethnic crew, amazing to me, come from Poland, Russia, Japan, China, India, France, America, and Africa! The crew treats its one woman as an equal, although the dialog makes allusions to a previous romance with one of the men.

There are lots of fairly elaborate scenes, some shot in beautiful locations. For style, this competes well with any Western space films of the time.

The rocket lift-off isn’t bad, as these things go.

Their encounter with weightlessness seems to shock the astronauts, until … what happens? They turn the gravity on?

The usual meteorite storm causes damage. An astronaut has to do an egress to repair it — but he uses a light framework vehicle to move around. This is itself something different from any contemporary film.

The crew find all manner of strange things on the surface of Venus and beneath. Some of it is very lovely and inventive.

Some special effects I don’t recall seeing anywhere else: the eerie rushing Venusian atmosphere. I was impressed by some particularly well executed integration of action scenes with miniatures. It’s really among the best of the time.

It’s very colorful, and is a great period-piece: the interior decoration and outfits are those of a beautiful future, seen from 1960.

The script is deliciously confused, and burdened with philosophizing and anti-war and socialist messaging — so much, I’m docking it a point.

The direction is essentially non-existent: the actors are often manifestly perplexed by their lines; sometimes they have no idea whom they should address.

The film makers were drawing from the best scientific information of the time. The trip to Venus takes weeks. They correctly mention that the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide — accordingly, they wear space suits on its surface. (One must remember that the Venera spacecraft that told us how awful the surface of Venus is, was years away.) On the other hand, they play heavily with the science, in a great deal of technobabble.

Still, they were attempting a solid sci-fi here. It remains great to look at — and an if-only.

I read that Lem disapproved of the production — he thought it was “trashy” (he thought the special effects weren’t scary enough), and tried to get them to remove his name from it.

Note: the U.S. release through Crown International Pictures is some 14 minutes shorter than the East German release. Also, stock film music replaced the original music score.

12 to the Moon

1960 Columbia Pictures Corporation

− jumbled but elaborate man-in-space

B&W

An announcer “speaking for the International Space Order” goes on to brag about how many people are watching his announcement… which eventually turns out to be about the international effort to reach the Moon and proclaim it international territory.

Stock film footage of launches of various USAF Atlas missiles, then an Atlas-Agena rocket, represent the launch of ship “Lunar Eagle 1”. In space and on the Moon, it appears as a completely different cartoon rocket; background stars clearly move through it. A room full of controllers on Earth is probably also stock footage.

The ship launches with liquid fuel, but switches to atomic power outside Earth’s atmosphere.

This movie takes a good stab at the idea of international crews. They’re from Japan, Russia, Columbia, Germany, England, Israel, Turkey, Sweden, and Nigeria. It’s lead by an Olympian American of course. Of the twelve, three are women. One is explicitly an aid, but the others have their own functions. Rounding out the crew is a dog, two cats, two monkeys, and parakeets. The involvement of the cats is unclear and inconclusive.

Dr. Heinrich is, from the start, markedly unhealthy, on account of his being old. Sure enough, he gets heart problems en route.

There’s a brief shower scene: but it’s an ultrasound shower! The film doesn’t show much skin on the girls, but then the scarcely-clad Olympian captain interrupts them. He makes up in skin and muscles, at least!

The Russian relentlessly plugs Russia. One crew member is the son of a Nazi — which makes for tension and drama with the Israeli.

Their space suits are 1950s pressure suits, with fighter pilot helmets. During launch, they recline in aluminum lawn chairs. During maneuvers, everybody stands holding a pole, providing an opportunity for Hideko to fall into the arms of a cute crew member.

They have magnetic meteorite deflectors. An “invisible electromagnetic ray screen” provides a protective shield over their faces (and obviates the need for visors, which would obscure camera shots).

As to what they’re doing on the Moon, besides looking for creepy Moon-life and other creepy Moon things: they are “photographing various parts of our Galaxy, from which we hope to gain a new perspective.”

The captain decides to get out of his chair while they’re still launching. He’s nearly hurt by this poor choice, but he recovers OK. The issue of weightlessness does not arise.

They are beset by a dizzying array of dangers, just halfway through the movie these include:

• an unusual magnetic field
• a “meteor” cluster
• a meteoric dust cloud — which they get through by means of a force field
• then another meteor swarm.
• On the Moon, there are more meteors, which sparkle through the sky like fireworks, and continue to burn on the ground also like fireworks. The adventurer’s magnetic shields protect them — the problem is, the meteoric explosion knock up big rocks — which slowly float to the ground.
• Plants (or something) that explode.
• Moon creatures prone to abduction and long-winded threats.
• Some liquid comes out of a rock, and a guy runs over and puts his hands right into it, burning them badly. He accurately assesses that this was stupid.
• Extremely quick quicksand pulls Rochester down despite his comrades trying to pull him back up. A second guy nearly goes in, but they attach a winch to him and pull him out. They later attribute his sinking to heavy lead in his boots.

The classic Moon scene shows black sky with stars, and gloomy surroundings, with high cliffs in the distance.

As they disembark, the captain admonishes them to “develop an additional reflex action.” (I wondered if the development of reflex actions on the fly was part of their training.)

On the Moon, the sound track starts out quiet, like a vacuum should be. There’s steam rising out of vents everywhere, and out the end of the rocket. They walk real slow at first, with long steps sort of suggesting low gravity (presumably).

First thing they do is look for air and life. Caves are always a good place to look, so the Turk and the Swede go in a cave, where they promptly locate strange life forms. Then their equipment indicates air, and so they pull their helmets off, and then embrace and kiss. Well who wouldn’t?

As they explore further for more private surroundings, a wispy being freezes the opening closed. These two don’t appear again — just as well, because the plot is already getting way too complicated.

Gold, they find in a pile, and throw aside — but a glowing stone is “like liquid fire”, “beautiful, but evil!” “Careful you fools careful don’t damage it!”

The Nigerian looks at the sky and declares “I feel something”.

Strange symbols appear on a ticker-tape display, which Hideko can read (because Japanese is like symbols, you know). These are sent by Moon people (she reads “the Great Coordinator of the Moon”). It tells them to go home, and that they read their minds by thought waves, live in a great sealed city below. They say the Earthlings are contamination. And they are studying the two lovers who got lost in the cave, and are studying their emotions. And also the cats — please leave the cats.

Meh, “could have been an Earth power, trying to scare us off.”

Just as we’re pondering that, Dr. Heinrich gets a heart attack.

So they drop the cats and skedaddle, naturally. (The cats disappear in an ominous shadow…we don’t really know what happens to them.)

All this was altogether too slow, so at this point, the movie takes a strong turn for “hey, how about this!”.

They get more meteors, then the glowing Moon rock ignites — but that’s just filler.

And it continues to its dizzy end. Something like this:

Just to give the crew something to do on the way back home, the Moon-men get mad at the Earth and shoot a freeze-ray at it. The googoo-gorgeous captain is at wit’s end (unconventionally for this caliber of story) but the scientists convince him there’s a way: to save the Earth — all they need to do is fashion an atom bomb and pilot it into a volcano! And why not… there’s a Nazi conspirator among them who wants to use the bomb for other purposes. I mean, why the hell not? So the Israeli and the son of the Nazi snuff it dramatically while dropping the bomb, forgiveness coming in the nick of time. The desperate measure is successful, but then the ship gets caught in the freeze ray — which the film depicts as snow sprinkled on the top of the rocket (in space).

Then the Moon-men symbolically say they’re sorry, and everything’s OK again.

So any plot it had falls all apart. Maybe 12 was way too many characters to make up dialog and stories for.

This movie shows a transition in thinking though — the Moon scenes are straight from pre-60s science fiction (and some of the more elaborate ones, at that), but the international crew, and the relatively serious treatment of women’s roles is ahead of its time.

The Nigerian sports an earring! And he gets some of the better lines, and he’s not nearly the worst actor!

The Time Machine

1960 MGM, Galaxy Films

OK pretty adaptation of Wells’ story

color

Date: 1900 is where the action starts; goes on to the year 802,701.

Premise: a machine that moves through time, rather than through space. The only explanation concerns how the controls work. So the only science is the idea of time travel, together with speculation of what the world might be like in a distant future.

Vehicle: the time machine itself, a pretty contraption, meant to resemble the brass instruments of the 1800s.

Creatures: “Morlocks” blue skinned blond cave men with glowy eyes. and ugly teeth who only growl, and are lousy fighters, pretty blonde child-like “Eloi”, some of whom look and act a lot like nubile Hollywood starlets, are the prey of the Morlocks.

Gadgets: besides the time machine itself, there are talking rings. The one that claims “my name is of no consequence” is really the voice of Paul Frees.

In this production, the time traveler stops in 1917, 1944, 1966, to see new fashions and wars unknown to H. G. Wells. A misfortune thrusts him to the year 802,701, where things have gotten disturbing, but at least there are still pretty girls looking for a handsome guy from another time.

The book has seen many adaptations in different media; a remake of the film appeared in 2002.

Beyond the Time Barrier

1960 American International Pictures

− time-travel post-apocalypse dystopia

B&W

Date (primary action): 2024

Vehicle: Air Force modified Convair F-102 X-80

Air Force test jet goes into space. Coming back, something happens, and at the base, the pilot finds nobody around…it’s all abandoned and run-down. He looks around, and sees futurey-looking buildings (a “Citadel”).

Cut to scene where a guy with futurey goatee looks at him with a triangular view-screen. They shoot him with a ray, and capture him. They can’t talk to him — they’re deaf mutes. The girls are cute, wearing short skirts and high heels.

We hear many sound effects familiar from Forbidden Planet. Some special painted scenes aren’t bad.

But a couple of guys who can hear, have awful, stilted dialog. Everyone thinks he is a spy, except for the daughter of the ruler, who can read his mind and be pretty at the same time.

There are bald “mutants”, who talk about a plague. It’s a case of have’s vs. have-nots. The plague infected everybody, even the non-mutants, and they’re (almost all!) sterile.

Now there’s a group of people like him from the past who can talk… and they explain everything and more. And then they explain more.

A plague happened in 1971 due to a bombardment of “caustic radiation” from outer space. Because of atomic bomb tests, it got through.

They got a “relativity paradox”, “another dimension, a fifth dimension”. They “break the time lock”. Really more babble than can be comfortably swallowed.

But it’s also a game of who’s fooling who.

Overall, especially given its low budget and time constraints, this is better than most entries in its category, and not as completely silly as it might have been. What little science there is, does not ever translate to action, it merely explains why people are in the scene.

“Gentlemen, we’ve got a lot to think about!”

Village of the Damned

1960 MGM

+ aliens arrive as unexpected births

B&W

Premise: in a tiny British village, everybody suddenly goes unconscious. They wake up OK, but a few months later they discover that every woman who could bear a child is pregnant. The babies develop extremely quickly, and when they’re born, all have platinum blonde hair.

The kids turn out to be weird and dangerous, because really they’re aliens. The primary special effect is the kids’ eyes.

This story explores what might happen in such a situation. It’s a difficult story.

The kids are very creepy even when they’re little, and they get creepier.

A sequel to this movie, called Children of the Damned, came out in 1964. It gets very poor reviews, as does a 1995 re-make. This is the one you want.

The production values in this film are just excellent — call it crisp. Everything perfectly in its place, every expression exactly balanced. But don’t expect this film to put you to sleep in a happy mood.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

1961 Val Guest Productions

OK mega-disaster by nukes

B&W (final scenes tinted orange )

Date: present.

Premise (not mentioned until quarter way into the film): Russians and Americans have tested nuke weapons at the North and South poles simultaneously, thus… tilting the Earth on its axis, of course! Later they find out that this changed the Earth’s orbit by 11° too, and we’re moving toward the Sun!

The solution is to blow up more nukes.

The British Board of Film Censors passed the film for exhibition when no children under 16 is present — presumably because we get a few glimpses of the sides of Munro’s breasts.

Fully a third of the way through the film, they get an unexpected solar eclipse. They treat it like it was an atmospheric oddity.

The first special effect: a thick fog coming down the Thames. Mostly they used stock film of various disasters. The film suggests the moment just before they blow up the nukes by red tint.

Besides the scientific nonsense, the worst part of this film is the dialog. This passes for rapid-fire hard-hitting newspaperman small talk. But it’s overdone to the point of being unnatural and difficult to follow. There is a scene where they try it on a little lost girl. They don’t give her a second to answer. Such dialog could serve as seasoning — here it’s the main dish.

The main character is handsome and insufferably flip and full of himself, prone to angry self-righteous moralizing. His wooing the young lady is just repulsive. Well, we’re not meant to like this guy, and we don’t.

Some government cover-up happens, but it can’t go far with such hard-hitting macho reporters, ferreting out the truth!

Once the end of the world is announced, the wild and hip beatniks do what they must do, and riot to dixieland jazz! Don’t worry: our hero will dole out just deserts to those skinny kids!

There’s some nice photography. They were trying to do some things right. And at least they don’t neatly tie the thing up at the end. Partial points for each of these.

Taken as a period piece, it does show something of the times, how people saw themselves. The hard newspapermen are some sort of ideal, while the rioting peaceniks and beatniks are aberrations, as are also the nuke-crazy Yanks and Soviets.

The Phantom Planet

1961 Four Crown

− drama on a tiny asteroid, or ?

B&W

Date: 1980

Rockets all blast off from the USAF base on the Moon. Beyond some talk about a Mars project, the script does not explain just what they’re doing there.

Vehicles: USAF rocket ships: Dart-like with very ’50s paint jobs, at least have a realistic stock of equipment. Aliens all drive asteroids. The squeal/roar of monster’s ships is very similar to Darth Vader’s of Star Wars.

The aliens live on asteroid Rheton. They are people 6 inches tall. Chapman shrinks to their size, because of the atmosphere — the atoms have “narrower electronic orbits”. (The shrinking has no further bearing on the story.) They fail to explain why they speak English. They immediately suggest that Chapman should take a lady alien as his bride.

The main alien technology is gravity. They move their asteroid about with it, and use it as a weapon.

Monsters: “Solarites”, who are very ugly and unreasonable and have a chip on their soaring shoulders, but can appreciate a pretty girl.

There are plenty of asteroids and meteors. Deadly micro-meteorites that whiz and ricochet mar a space walk.

A busted air line kills the co-pilot on a space walk. His body then floats out into space (compare 2001, A Space Odyssey).

I’ll give this film one thing: the model they used for an asteroid isn’t spherical at all. Its shape is more chaotic, like that of the close-up images we now have of smaller real asteroids. People had speculated that there was no reason for smaller asteroids to be spherical, inasmuch as their gravitation is almost negligible… but nonetheless in other films they were usually round with some craters.

They also produced some nicely-detailed miniatures for the Moon base.

At first, Chapman likes Liara, the daughter of the boss, then he decides she’s a snob and goes for the mute girl Zetha (who finally gains the ability to speak by screaming at a Solarite.)

While the astronauts are a boys-only military club, there are female technical officers, one of whom isn’t Caucasian.

This film is borderline for my list. The bulk of its action is addled action-adventure and male romance fantasy. Interesting models and some peculiar sci-fi notions saved it.

Планета бурь
[Planet of Storms]

1962 Nauchno-Populyarnich (Soviet Union)

+ space adventure/drama

color

Russian

Soviet rocket ships voyage to Venus: Сириус, Вега, Капелла (Sirius, Vega, Capella, the last of which is immediately destroyed). Sirius goes on to land; Vega remains in orbit of the planet.

Robot “John” plays roles of electronic brain, super-strong big brother, and menacing monster. The question of whether John could replace cosmonauts is the subject of much discussion.

The film features meteorites, the excellent robot, an emotive female cosmonaut, man-eating plants, ferocious guys in dinosaur-like suits (also man-eating), and a floating car. I'm not sure about computers. It presents weightlessness being lots of fun. The younger guys have the most amazing bouffants. And there’s a hook…

It’s got everything!

The overall quality is better than Western sci-fi of the time. Besides the rockets and props, the atmosphere of Venus is particularly nicely rendered. It’s very colorful, and in many ways very beautiful.

When grabbed by the man-eating plant, the guy pulls out his knife, but promptly drops it! Bad move!

Cosmonauts shoot the bad guys with conventional hand guns.

Roger Corman bought and cut the film up to make Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), and then Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1966), both of much less value than the original.

The movie is available with subtitles; the book is available (in Russian).

Day of the Triffids

1962 Security Pictures Ltd.

OK space infestation apocalypse

color

Premise: An unprecedented shower of meteors, which sound like sci-fi movie sound effects, and look quite unlike meteors. Their glare blinds everybody in England, except those who were wearing blindfolds for medical reasons, or already blind. This disaster causes various crashes and other fatal accidents. But shortly the triffids are everywhere.

One meteor brings to Earth a fast-growing plant, which (amazingly conveniently for the plant) finds itself in a botanical garden. The plant moves (slowly), emits a clucking sound, stings people to death, reproduces by windblown spores, has no central nervous system, so shooting or dismemberment can’t kill it.

English-speaking protagonists travel from Britain, through France, and to Spain.

The biologist couple resolve their personal problems by resolving to study the triffids scientifically.

Человек-амфибия
[Amphibian Man]

1962 Lenfilm

OK medical science fiction

color

Russian

Place: it is set in a coastal town of an unspecified Spanish-speaking country. The men wear sombreros, but many look as if they came from a tourist market.

Premise: a rich genius doctor has given his son fish gills to save him, so he can breathe underwater or on land. That’s the sci-fi part. It’s a secret, and the young man knows little about life among normal people.

The amphibian man wears a sparkly suit with frog flippers and a fin on back, and a helmet with goggles. (The flippers and fin mysteriously disappear when he’s on land.) The locals think he’s a sea devil. He falls in love with a pretty girl, but a bad rich guy wants to marry her, and her poor dad needs the money. The rich guy gets the idea to enslave him, so he’ll dive for pearls for cheap.

The genius doctor has a secret lair with an elevator with an entry through a secret panel in a wall map, which leads to his sub-oceanic lair. He also has his own super-modern gun boat. The Amphibian man goes from the lair into the ocean via a gated underwater cave, in classic superhero fashion.

The voices of the principals are overdubbed, even in the original. (One hears this also in Western films… What was the thinking?)

The production values are pretty good, comparable to contemporary Western TV.

It’s a light fantasy romance, evidently for pre-teens. It was a big hit in the Soviet Union, at a time where they needed a fantasy romance.

Мечте навстречу (Mechtye Navstretsu)
“Toward Meeting a Dream”,
or “A Dream Come True”

1963 Odesskoi kinostudii khudozhestvennikh

++ aliens meet men-in-space story

color

Russian

The presentation of this story is very odd in the sci-fi genre. Narration explains many scenes, and introduces all characters. Florid, heroic song punctuates the film (not badly done, but strange — resembling Japanese manga themes). Call it a style.

Aliens: from “Centuria” are just people in fancy outfits. (What is it with aliens with the capes and skullcaps?)

Places: Centuria, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and Mars’ moon Phobos; scenes of suited cosmonauts walking on the Moon, Mars and Phobos.

Vehicles: The alien starship is of a design I have never seen elsewhere: a sphere circled at the base by thick pipes — very imaginative and pretty.

Many traditional looking rockets (like heavily-winged ICBMs): spaceship “океан” (“Ocean”) bound for Mars, another “метеор” (“Meteor”), cargo spaceship “RDU-12”. (As special effects, these are generally disappointing.) A cute little “emergency ship”, with the cabin of a fighter plane and two egg-shaped pods on either side — I don’t know what to compare this to. There are also nice clips of Soviet military planes.

There are no weapons, no robots, no computers, as such.

There are Soviet scenes of public efforts, heroism, and inspiring public speech, multiple scenes of titanic public environments, and a gigantic public news-televisor, to which the crowds turn for their pravda.

There is a heartbreakingly pretty radio-astronomer/cosmonaut (mostly seen operating a radio). Besides, there is a smidgen of comic relief, and plenty romantic episodes.

(In these notes, I usually avoid detail as to the story line, not to spoil it for possible viewers. But I had a hard time sumamrizing this one, due to a complicated plot, and poor translation of poor subtitles, so here is a brief sketch.)

People receive signals from an alien starship, which (somehow?) crashes on Mars, but first dispatches a pod to Earth, which splashes down in the ocean. People find that it contains the ship’s log-book.

International discussions ensue, concerning how to proceed. Dr. Laugnton plays the foreign voice of doubt, hesitation, and irrational fear. The brave Soviets forge on, but the questions he raised reappear…

The Soviets accelerate their plans to launch a spaceship to Mars by means of transporting more “energy” to a Moon base. The spaceship arrives at Mars, but is damaged, and requires more energy to leave, so the Moon base requisitions more energy. (It gets complicated here and I don’t understand it all.)

On Mars, cosmonauts appear in long outdoor scenes, struggling with a very harsh environment. (The outdoor scenes in Alien are strongly derivative from these.) Here, they discover the crashed alien starship, and one dead alien cosmonaut. But… there should be three aliens — where are the others? (A few of the Mars scenes even look remarkably like the real planet — a decade before anyone had seen pictures from the surface.)

A cargo spaceship from the Moon lands on Mars’ moon Phobos (itself having insufficient energy to land on Mars?) Here the cosmonauts walk and observe a brilliant red Mars rising, in a scene very similar to that in the earlier Небо зовет “The Sky Beckons”. (A small technical complaint: in the depiction of rising Mars over Phobos, it is fully illuminated, as viewed from Earth — whereas, viewed from Phobos, the illumination of Mars would usually be partial.)

On Phobos, they encounter… the missing alien cosmonauts! One still lives. They can take only two passengers from Phobos to Mars in the emergency craft, so one cosmonaut must stay on Phobos (permanently?). The film makes this even more dramatic by the crash of the craft, but they survive! The last scene shows a rocket ship apparently returning to Earth. (I don’t understand how, given that the emergency craft, which was supposed to deliver the “energy” to get them off Mars, exploded.)

Gorgeous settings and devices are the strength of this movie. Later sci-fi was certainly influenced. The acting is overall quite good. Overall, it is a very pretty thing to watch — and because it’s quite beautiful — not nearly as ridiculous as the story is to relate.

P.S. This film was another victim of Roger Corman’s re-editing spree, in which he with other bad producers, cut special effects scenes out, to make a really bad horror movie, Queen of Blood (1966).

The Nutty Professor

1963 Jerry Lewis Films

− comedy rendition of Jekyll and Hyde

color

I thought this was hilarious when I was five — saw it with the family at a drive-in, in a blue-and-white 1956 Chevy. I think it was formative for me.

The science-class explosions at the beginning of the movie would certainly have badly hurt or killed people. The dean does take the professor to task, but surely, firing was in order. And then a student beats the professor up. Was this regarded normal?

The university students are all in their late 20s or 30s at least. There is a black student, though. And there are orientals in the cast. Things were a-changin’ (incrementally).

Oh, here’s Richard Kiel (‘Jaws’ of James Bond fame)! Oh, and here’s Henry Gibson (of Laugh-In)!

The physical gags are very lame — too dumb for a young teenager. And some aren’t very nice: lots of gags about being almost blind, for instance. Some of it might have been cartoonishly funny… but something’s wrong — Maybe it’s timing.

As Kelp he’s very passive-aggressive, besides being pathetic and dangerous. As Buddy Love, he’s suave, for sure, but absurdly self-absorbed and very mean. Besides randomly threatening men, he’s so full of himself that the girl he hits on doesn’t want anything to do with him… and he dances with her with a cigarette in his mouth very uncomfortably close to her face. In his second incarnation, he’s all that, and drunk too.

Cigarettes play a big part in being cool, as is well known.

The main Jekyll and Hyde gag is the Love character transforming back to Kelp, in the form of a change of voice, as he is singing. The gag gets old, and then gets old again and again.

What you might get out of it: the cinematography, the costumes, the colors, the early ’60s atmosphere. The moral message is in block letters. And there is more science, or lip-service to it, in this than in other Jekyll and Hyde films.

Funny — it isn’t, particularly.

Now it is evident what went wrong with this. Lewis completely controlled everything in this film. His weaknesses protrude badly. I doubt that he gave his editor a chance. For example, the sappy, protracted final scene as Buddy Love left a very unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Re-done in 1995 with Eddy Murphy.

The best line is easy:

“Carbon dioxide has always been a gas!”

Ikarie XB 1
aka. “Voyage to the End of the Universe”

1963 Barrandov (Czechoslovakia)

+ interstellar travel

B&W

Czech

Date: 2163

Vehicles: Ikarie is an interstellar craft, “A small space town with 40 inhabitants”. Smaller space saucers launch from main vehicle. Ther is a giant space port.

A “Master Computer” is onboard.

Destination: the planets of Alpha Centauri, where “the existence of life is expected”. The crew muses over this goal throughout the movie, but its realization is disappointing.

They will return in 15 years. Due to time dilation, the travelers will have aged only 28 months. (They later rule out time dilation as the cause of a crew member’s illness, on account of its “mathematical abstraction”.)

Robot: “Old-fashioned” robot “Patrick” is mostly comic relief.

Weapons: ray-guns.

The film depicts weightlessness in a few scenes.

The script examines social aspects of long-term space travel. The crew has a fancy space ball, and dance a reserved jig to space jazz. They have to contend with space madness and space sickness.

The lavish sets and costumes strongly resemble those of the Star Trek pilot.

It’s pretty, but dreary overall.

An English-dubbed version was released in U.S. as Voyage to the End of the Universe. Czech DVDs with English subtitles are also available.

H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon

1964 Columbia

− not very charming adaptation

color

Year: the bulk in 1899, later: 1964.

Aliens: Moon inhabitants – Selenites, their Moon cows, and the brain Prime Lunar.

Weapons: ray guns used by the Selenites.

A paint, “Cavorite”, that shields gravity, makes travel to the Moon possible.

Spaceflight: shows weightlessness, but little else worthwhile. On the Moon, they discuss the vacuum, and so wear space suits — to talk, they have to touch helmets — but the suits don’t have gloves.

Kate comes aboard by accident, but proves useful by supplying food. She starts out as a technological woman, driving a jalopy. Her relationship with Bedford makes no sense: he lies to her and cheats her, and she goes back to him, no struggle at all.

The Selenites are ugly and scary, but it is unclear whether they’re good or bad. Cavor wants to learn from them and teach them. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: Bedford and Kate immediately start to kill them indiscriminately.

The film starts out charming, but it deteriorates badly as it goes along. It’s only saved from worthlessness by Harryhausen’s animations.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

1964 Paramount

− neat FX, wrong-headed moralizing

color

The trailer proclaims that the movie is “scientifically accurate”, “just one step ahead of reality”.

Vehicles: space probe to Mars. Landing craft looks a bit too much like a Gemini capsule — doesn’t last long. Alien mining ships look pretty unworldly, shaped somewhat like the body of the Martian ships of the 1953 War of the Worlds.

The film depicts weightlessness (by means of the monkey), and frictional heating on entering the atmosphere, as well as difficulty breathing Martian atmosphere. (At the time of the film, the measurements of its density varied greatly.)

They encounter a “meteoroid”, with the result that, for most of the movie, we miss West’s wonderful presence.

The script spends much of its time developing the relationship between the astronaut and the ex-slave. It is misguided, clumsy and embarrassing to watch.

The scenery is colorful, anyway, and the plot is busy, anyway. So it’s not completely unwatchable.

One remarkable special effect is that of the evil slaver ships darting about, death-raying the slaves. It’s pretty cool, actually, and unlike other sci-fi spaceships. Although it’s just painted celluloid, but I appreciated the attempt to depict the great speeds of an alien craft.

The Last Man on Earth

1964 Associated Producers Inc., Produzioni La Regina

OK zombie vampire pandemic

B&W

Italian / English

Date: Dec. 1965

Something happened three years before, and he “inherited the world”.

Here, the affected people are vampires: mirrors and garlic. “They can’t bear to see their image — it repels them.” He kills them with wooden stakes.

They move like zombies though, and they call him by name in his house.

The scenes from the past take up much of the movie, and they aren’t the best. They serve to explain the present-day scenes.

It isn’t a bad film, for the time, but the poor financing is obvious. The delivery of dialog is often very poor, even when it isn’t overdubbed. The filming took place in Italy, though the action is meant to be in California. This is unfortunately obvious in several scenes.

Price is the best part of the film. At first, it’s hard to get past the Vincent-Priceness, but beyond that, a great actor gives a great performance.

The film has fallen into the public domain.

There have been two later adaptations of the book, to date: The Omega Man, 1971; I am Legend, 2007. This one had a very small budget, and finally appeared after changing hands several times, but in some ways is closest to the book — Matheson was involved in the screenplay.

(Note: a 1924 film of the same name is a sex comedy.)

Doctor Strangelove
or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

1965 Hawk Films Ltd., Columbia Pictures Corp

++ nuclear obliteration and bodily hygiene

B&W

Gadgets: Soviet doomsday device, involves “Cobalt-Thorium G”

Vehicles: primarily U.S. B-52; KC-135

The film’s only sci-fi aspect is the doomsday device… which is itself only marginally unlikely. In that, it could be called future-engineering sci-fi. In any case, it’s social sci-fi.

It is the most excellent, blackest of humor.

The seed of the story is that a USAF Brig. General Ripper, commander of Burpelson Air Force Base, has gone insane, and orders his squadron of B-52s to drop their nuclear bombs on targets in Russia. Sounds bad — but it gets worse: the soviets have a doomsday device.

Ripper’s obsessions include “precious bodily fluids” and water fluoridation. He declares “women recognize his power”, but he “denies them his essence”.

There are some precious characters in this film, Peter Sellers playing three of them. Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chewing, machine-gun wielding, off-the-rails Ripper is — gripping and chilling. George C. Scott demonstrating how a good pilot could fly a B-52 is brilliant! Man, nobody could have done what Slim Pickins did for the B-52 pilot.

I have incorporated Keenan Wynn’s term “prevoisions” into my vocabulary.

Crack in the World

1965 Philip Yordan

− nuclear geology disaster

color

Premise: let’s nuke the interior of the Earth, to bring magma up “from the core”, for limitless energy!

But is it safe?

Gadgets: a “nuclear missile”, which goes down rather than up. (Why a missile was required to go down, is never explained.)

Vehicles: We get lots of helicopter rides, and a submarine ride, and we see lots of transportation disasters, before it’s over.

The scenery and special effects aren’t bad, as these things went. And the camerawork isn’t boring.

The script is awful, with a pretty icky (but conventional) love-triangle filling in for otherwise thin and confused premise.

It at least features some speaking parts for women and non-whites. The cuter of the two alpha males gets the (highly qualified) girl, of course.

The science part… well, failure to appreciate scale is rife in sci-fi, and orbital mechanics never really caught on. But here, they’re just ouch.

Mutiny in Outer Space

1965 Hugo Grimaldi production

− multiple dangers-in-space

B&W

Date: none explicit, but they mention “since the ’70s”

Vehicles:

• Moon rocket: a cute conical multi-stage rocket with several sets of little wings takes off from the Moon, with flames slowly burning out its tail. This is the same basic design often seen in movies of the era, a large booster stage, with a space-plane upper stage. In most scenes showing the rocket, the camera careens around, as though the cameraman had poor footing. What they intended to convey by this (… maybe excitement?) didn’t work for me.
• Space Station X-7, where most of the action takes place, is a miniature that manages to look very miniature. Inside, it has a biological lab and an infirmary.
We get to see the space station in the rocket’s windows, and vice-versa — for a brief realistic detail.
• Another rocket, configured very differently, launches from Earth. The film uses stock Titan missile footage to represent the launch.

Alien: a fungus from the Moon.

No computers or robots are evident.

They face multiple dangers of space:

• The space station narrowly avoids collision with large communications satellite — complain about “space junk”
• A flock of “meteors” mostly float slowly by, but one bonks into the station.
• A fungus from the Moon caves eats up one astronaut. Later, the fungus starts growing and moving like a proper monster, and takes the station over: it screams horribly when annoyed. Yes: screaming fungus.
• The commander is “headed for the deep” he gets “space rapture” due to prolonged exposure to reduced gravity.

They did their best with some facts about space, depicting stress on astronauts due to acceleration, and briefly, by having the actors move slowly, depicting weightlessness. Astronauts move from the rocket to the space station by space-walking.

The women are professionals doing important things, but they get screamy when they see a monster, and guys have to heroically rescue them. They wear practical (and attractive) jump-suits, different in style and color from the men’s.

Aside from the military-like talk, the dialog is very forced, with a lot of silly impertinent chit-chat. The men astronauts waste no time bringing up the topic of women. And the women do likewise… forming one of the main topics of conversation.

There’s the usual nonsense of keeping crew members ignorant about dangers in order not to alarm them.

The fight scenes are gratuitous and amateurishly choreographed. The acting is generally pretty patchy. Some of the minor parts were directed very poorly — but little could help with such a lame script.

Sci-fi-wise, this film would have been groundbreaking ten years earlier. But it shows nothing new, except a somewhat novel monster.

Maybe they tried to cram too much in: besides the Moon and space and a rocket and a space station, there were three separate space threats, together with multiple romances and various other obligatory elements. They couldn’t treat any one of the themes well.

“… just when we think we have space under control, some new barrier looms up. There are things out there we may never understand … or live with.”

The Satan Bug

1965 The Mirisch Corporation

OK bio-warfare detective suspense thriller

color

The science fiction is a super-virus for biological warfare, developed in an underground laboratory far in the deserts of southern California.

Bad guys steal it, and they are up to no good.

Some of the best actors of the time do a very professional job. The direction is very stiff, perhaps an effort to set a serious tone.

It’s very much a period-piece. Besides the lab, check out the Better Homes and Gardens!

Very rich colors, nice lab settings, great scenery. Everything is very lovely.

Space Probe-Taurus
aka First Woman in Space
aka Space Monster

1965 American International Pictures

− man-in-space + monsters

B&W

Date: Year 2000

Premise: It seems what they’re looking for is a planet people can live on.

Vehicles: Ships belong to the USA. Operations are completely military.

The film shows launches and an explosion of Atlas-1 and Redstone missiles, and footage of views of Earth from sounding rocket.

First ship: Faith-1 — The captain crawls back into his ship, calls headquarters to request destruction of spaceship, because “gasses penetrated suit”, and the ship may be “infectious”, “radiation beyond Roentgen scale”. The general shrugs and pushes the button to blow ’em up… and that’s the last we hear of that.

Main ship: Hope-1, is a nuclear-powered rocket with big fins. Little detail is evident in the miniature. Computers, space walks, space suits, jet packs, and airlocks all appear. The crew spends a lot of time fixing computers. The ship also has a “force field”, which the crew deploys several times. A submarine sonar pings constantly in the background.

There is a lot of discussion generally in this movie, including the usual future social topics: replacement by computers, necessity of men, and especially women, in space. The script repeatedly conflates “solar system” with “galaxy”.

They discuss the wisdom of having a woman on board at length. The commander states that he opposed her being there. The tough guy points out that she “fills out her space suit better than any of the rest of us”. The old guy points out the only man more competent weighs a lot more. The lady, of course, serves the compressed food. She goes on to prove her worth as a crew member — and — as a woman!

They find an alien craft that doesn’t respond to hails, and on investigation, find it all open, full of gizmos with weird writing. Then an ugly alien guy jumps them, so they shoot him dead. Then they blow the alien ship up — because it’s a menace or something. Afterwards, they discuss this — in terms of morality, science, and of social problems, and one guy suggests it might have been all for the best. They put the episode behind them — it has no further bearing on rest of the movie.

A swarm of meteor(ites!) dead ahead! They look like burning charcoal nuggets. The crew uses a force shield to deflect most of them, but this somehow causes the ship to speed out of control.

They find themselves nearing the “Triangulum galaxy” (“a couple of million miles from anywhere”).

They land in an ocean of a “moon” for repairs. (The spaceship seems to have no problem being deep underwater.) Later, they call the “moon” a “planet”.

Giant crabs investigate the ship. After a marvelously confused discussion of evolution, the crew conclude that they should search for humans on the surface. They break out the scuba suits, and the tough guy goes to see what the land looks like. A real ugly submarine humanoid alien follows him closely. The land looks just like: California. As he comes back, the alien jumps him: the tough guy doesn’t make it. We find out he was a good joe after all.

The first alien mask was apparently from The Wizard of Mars, and the second from War Gods of the Deep.

Sci-fi-wise, the film is behind its time. There are big plot flaws (as is typical of the genre), especially, the cobbling together of unrelated plots. The writing is very weak in technical and scientific aspects.

The psychological aspects are better done — even interesting at points, and the acting is superior to that of most other films of the genre.

Terrore nello spazio
aka. “Planet of the Vampires”

1965 Italian International Pictures, Castilla Cinematográfica Cooperativa, American International Pictures

OK space horror(s)

color

Italian (English in US and UK releases)

Date ?

Place: The crew travel to planet “Aura”, to find the source of signals, possibly produced by intelligent life.

Vehicles: Spaceships Argos and Galliott are blue and chevron-shaped. (I perceive some design similarities with the Enterprise of Star Trek.) They’re cool designs, but the impression of size is completely lost — they look like toys.

The spaceship interiors are big and roomy, with steel floors and thick pressure doors and lots of blinky panels and 1960s switches and buttons. No computers or robots are apparent.

The crew find a creepy deserted alien ship, with sexual suggestions outside, and glowing cones, and an alien skeleton, inside.

Aliens: They find two races of aliens on Aura. One is dead, with only skeletons remaining. These aliens are “three times the size of us … probably belonged to an ancient civilization.” We hear quite scary recorded voices of the dead alien crew. But these are not the aliens to be afraid of.

The other race, “Aurans”, native to the planet, is non-corporeal and scary. They live on a “vibratory plane different from yours”. Their sun has been dying. They have “summoned” the Earthlings in order to take their bodies. They manifest themselves as flying lights (luminous globes out the corner of my eye), or as walking dead.

Gadgets: The ships have an infrared laser to penetrate fog. They also have a “meteor rejector”, to avoid meteors making the ship “look like a piece of Swiss cheese”, which figures heavily in the plot. They are powered by “solar batteries”. The crew wear black rubber suits with high collars, and yellow trim, that look like motorcycle racing suits. (The tight yellow helmets are kinda cool, really.) The crew have wristwatch TV communicators.

Weapons: The crew carry a “field ray gun”: a sort of heat-ray weapon. The ship carries “plutonium detonators” for blowing stuff up.

The crew are all white, but there is an amusing story about the nationalities of the actors. Women are equal crew members who simply emote more, and look sexier in their suits.

The crew suffers great discomfort from acceleration effects. They immediately contract space sickness that makes them attack one another.

This film has some good aspects and a few moments, but it plumbs some depths… It certainly does have atmosphere — a very dark, misty one. Unfortunately, a long-winded and detailed explanation, provided by one of the (unconvincingly) walking dead, wastes all that atmosphere.

The script piles the technobabble on. (Time units are “fractions of megon”.)

The budget for this movie was legendarily low, and given that, its substance is remarkable; the color and camera work is great. Don’t expect splendid special effects — but there are a lot of them.

Have no fear of a Hollywood ending, though!

The influence of this movie on Alien is evident — especially in the scenes the discovery of the dead aliens.

Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution
[Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution]

1965 Athos Films

OK spy on computer-run planet (aka Paris)

B&W

French

This is a very odd idea. It’s a spy movie, evidently in a space sci-fi setting, using the environs of 1960s Paris. It has no special effects or props whatsoever.

Computer: “Alpha-60”, which controls everybody on the planet, in a Big Brother fashion, regularly altering the dictionary and issuing edicts about what things can be said and how.

The voice of Alpha-60 is great, and something you won’t hear elsewhere. (Get the French version!) However, its representation of a conscious machine by clattery old iron-core mainframes and manually-operated tape machines was a little difficult for my imagination.

The most fun part is the cool reporter (really a spy) in a trench coat and fedora, who shoots the bad guys and woos the ladies.

Check out what reporter Johnson takes pictures of. Look for the execution squad precision swim team. Look for how people shake their heads the wrong way to answer questions.

Not so great: the female characters are all cut from the same slinky cloth.

References to “galaxies” and “intergalactic space” indicate that he traveled through space, but then he says he’s from New York. Does that mean New York is on a different planet? The distinction between “the Outlands” and “galaxies” is unclear.

It gets points for style and peculiarity. Don’t expect a lot of sci-fi or deep social statement.

Spaceflight IC-1
an adventure in space

1965 Shepperton Studios

− generational spaceflight social issues

B&W

Date: 2015

Vehicles: IC 1 Interstellar Colony # 1 is heading for “Earth-2”, outside our solar system. It is a joint project of GB, Canada, and the United States.

The nose of the “rocket” rotates continuously, simulating the pull of gravity. “Judging by Earth standards, should be nearing the light barrier.”

Premise: The Earth is overcrowded, so people undertake flights of 25, and even 50 years.

The crew consists of eight men and women and their children. Two further men and two women are in suspended animation (as an “experiment”). They all eat algae, and express bitterness about it.

The space station is a usual wheel shape (but the round part consists of straight tubes sections glued together).

First, a narrator dressed up like a U.S. Army officer introduces everything, then follows up with lot of reading from Ecclesiastes. (This is typical of contemporary films about strange things, and simplified the writing of the script, but otherwise, it is a distraction from the story.)

This story is mostly about politics and social questions. It exhibits no great application of imagination, however. The crew are from a centralized society (World Government), that chose them for the flight. The crew presumably knew what they were getting into, and nonetheless, they object to their circumstances, and to being bossed around. In fact, that’s the main theme. They are sarcastic and snippy with one another from the beginning. One thing leads to another, which leads to mutiny.

Women play a large, if traditional, role in this movie. They are teachers of children, a doctor, and mostly, wives and mothers. Their primary issues concern reproduction.

A clown appears from nowhere to entertain the kids… a sort of holographic projection. It shows no sign of being entertaining. The script offers no explanation of this.

The sets consist of two model spacecraft and some radio and laboratory equipment.

One character is a “closed cycle man” who eats no food and never sleeps. He consists mostly of electronics. He is played by a guy in a stationary box, with his head covered by a glass bowl. He says he feels nothing (but he meets his lack of regret with irony).

The captain threatens to kill everybody unless he can remain captain. Somehow he makes this sound reasonable — although, at one point, the mission is of primary importance, while the next, command structure is paramount. Incredibly, this inconsistency goes unnoticed. Well, he and his wife haven’t managed to have kids, so maybe it’s understandable.

“Rule is All — we are bondsmen.”

Fahrenheit 451

1966 Anglo Enterprises, Vineyard Film Ltd.

− very lame attempt at Bradbury

color

Bradbury’s classic novel starts out very twisted and creepy, then twists more. It describes a world where a fireman’s job is not to put fires out, but to set them — on anything considered antisocial, including books and people who read them. In this world, a normal fireman loves fire, and despises the people he burns.

It’s only right to point out how completely the movie departs from the novel.

OK, so it wasn’t a high-budget flick. OK, so it’s the ’60s and maybe what looked like scary uniforms then, already looked dated, cute and silly by the ’70s, when I first saw the film. But really, they lost it here. It’s a flop.

The novel opens with an act of work-a-day violence involving people being burned alive. Perhaps this was too much for film of the time. But flopping a few dozen paperbacks on a grill and lighting them on fire does nothing to suggest the horror of the book.

In the novel, horrible things are normal; nobody remembers any other way. The movie misses this, and replaces it with a police-state motif, and I think, strains to portray instead of the “what’s wrong with this picture” world of Bradbury with a colorful, “hip” science fiction flick, with an anti-authoritarian message.

The biggest prop disappointment is the “mechanical hound”. The description in the novel is just terrifying, first in the reversal of the usually nice cuddly idea of a dog, with that of a huge, fast, furious, lethal mechanical spider, of some malevolent intelligence, whose function is assassination — at once, an instrument of social control and mass entertainment. The hound prop in the movie is small, slow, clumsy and almost cute.

Now, the novel is terrifying enough without the hounds — they’re just one more manifestation of a morally inverted society. It might have been possible to portray the society without them. By leaving this silly prop in the movie, they abandoned the terror and twist of the book altogether.

The movie is of use only to those looking for ’60s period pieces, or those studying in Truffaut’s failures, or questions like why he cast Julie Christie for two different parts in this one movie.

My recommendation: skip it and read the book.

Fantastic Voyage

1966 20th Century Fox

+ people shrunk for medicine

color

Premise: a lead scientist has learned to shrink matter indefinitely, but due to an assassination attempt has a blood clot that will kill him if he isn’t given an impossible operation immediately.

Top secret C.M.D.F. (Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces) facilities, underground, of course.

Vehicle: submarine Proteus, a Navy sub built for some other purpose.

Weapons: the sub has a surgical laser aboard.

Gadgets: the main gizmo is a device for shrinking matter by shrinking the individual atoms. (They don’t discuss the issue of the weight of the atoms.)

Note: the shrinking people premise had been done before: see The Devil Doll, Dr. Cyclops, and The Incredible Shrinking Man. In this one, the story is about shrinking down to the size of human cells, and then exploring a human body from within!

It’s a grand tour through the human body, although a fantastical one, with a Cold War subplot thrown in!

The special effects were the best of the time: underwater swimming scenes were largely done with actors suspended by wires. The sound effects, largely taken from an older movie, became fixtures in sci-fi films for many years.

Note: They hired Isaac Asimov to produce a novelization of the film, but he did not write the original story.

“A woman has no place on a mission like this.”

Seconds

1966 Joel Productions, John Frankenheimer Productions, Gibraltar Productions

+ medical rejuvenation and paranoia

B&W

Premise: the “Company” persuades an unhappy over-the-hill rich guy to dump everything for a new life as a young man. Will it turn out as well as they say? Oh, you know it won’t!

The science fiction here is that surgery could restore youth.

The “Company” is pretty creepy. Both employees and customers are so devoted to it and its promise, and it’s unclear why — but we find out that at least some participants have been deluded.

Several performances are stellar. Everybody’s favorite part is Hudson’s performance at a drinking party. Khigh Dhiegh is particularly delicious.

The bacchanalia is a little lame, like a middle-class caricature of how non-mainstream people might behave. I read that the released version is heavily edited, and probably that is what I saw — so maybe it’s not a fair assessment.

This film was one of a set made by Frankenhammer that might be called social or political fiction, including The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.

Evidently, continuity wasn’t of high importance — continuity problems riddle the film. (Listings are available on the Web.)

The photography in this film is at least different. Besides the use of strange sorts of lenses, Wong Howe is very aware of texture in every scene. Instead of lush color, think in terms of texture.

Kdo chce zabít Jessii?
[Who Wants to Kill Jessie?]

1966 Filmové Studio Barrandov

+ dreams-made-real comedy

B&W & speech balloons

Czech

A little sign in the opening panels says
Karel Saldek 1966
(or something like that. appears twice)
another little sign says TEL. 276144 (perhaps. but it appears twice)
another little sign says "beware of work"
another little sign: F11-60031

Date/Place: present (1966) / Prague

An engineer gets an idea to solve a factory problem from an illustrated adventure story, and becomes obsessed with the story. An attempt to ameliorate bad dreams instead brings them into reality. A story results.

gadgets:

• dream-visualizing machine
• chemicals for suppressing bad dreams / accidentally makes them real
• chemicals for putting realized dreams back into dreamers
• anti-gravity gloves

dreams:

• anti-gravity gloves
• super-sexy heroine, superman-esque hero, rootin’-tootin’ cowboy
• gadflies
• beer store

pokes fun at

• marital life
• industrial management
• prison life
• super-heros
• university classes
• academia

Speech-bubbles comprise a fair portion of the dialog. I had to check: the TV series Batman had appeared earlier the same year as this came out — surely the producers of this film had seen that. But unlike in the TV series, the speech bubbles here aren’t limited to illustrations of sound effects bam, bif, pow — the characters (sort of) communicate with them.

It’s a light-hearted excursion into a far-fetched sci-fi idea. Several of the characters are fun. (It’s a little crammed with fun characters.)

Quatermass and the Pit
(aka. Five Million Years to Earth)

1967 Hammer Films

OK horror vs science vs military/politics

color

Quatermass is pronounced with a long first ‘a’.

This is a film adaptation from the popular BBC TV serial of the same name.

Aliens: declared Martians, they’re quite sure — although the dialog puts forward no evidence of their origin.

Vehicle: 2-million year old spaceship, buried in mud. It contains dead aliens, communicates telepathically with people, has lots of other strange properties and hosts scary goings-on. The effect is pretty menacing. Quatermass declares that it has an intelligence. The shape is certainly otherworldly — nothing beyond doing in fiberglass, but still — it doesn’t quite resemble anything.

Gadgets: the scientists have a brain-reading doodad that lets them visualize what people are seeing.

The premise is complicated. Workers find prehistoric human skeletons, with extra big skulls. This works into the story, with a spew of nonsense about evolution.

One of the sub-themes involves legends of ghosts. It works into the plot fairly well, but the film feels crammed with such legends.

The alien ship proceeds to possess the population, turning them into murderous zombies.

It’s smart scientists vs. stupid/bad military and politicians.

The lady scientist is smart and good-looking, but she requires a lot of saving and manhandling. A black chap gets a few lines. There is a race-cleansing theme.

There are some pretty good special effects, for the time. A few scenes feature something resembling weightlessness (but it’s really telekinesis). There are moderately convincing special effects of buildings falling down.

(When Americans make disaster sci-fi, recognizable monuments blow up, and people scream. When English do the same, they show chestnut stands overturned, pubs being shaken to bits, the tube falling apart, and people losing their stiff upper lip.)

The acting is good. The script is coherent, although terribly jumbled.

It ends with some science babble, a quick, heroic victory against all odds. (We assume: it’s not obvious that they’ve removed the danger.) Basically, it’s set up for a sequel (which never came).

L’invention de Morel

1967 Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision (ORTF)

+ party frozen in time

color made-for-TV

French

Date/Place 1935 / Island of Villings

He’s a stowaway, a prisoner, a castaway on a deserted island. The island has a decrepit, ornate “Museum”, where he takes refuge. But then, a party of “guests” arrive. He hides himself, thinking they will give him away, and he observes.

Things get stranger and stranger. The guests aren’t what they seem at all.

This is a story of unrequited loves, and loneliness, and it is a science fiction story, about events somehow frozen in time.

The cinematography is beautiful, as is the acting.

The material was a little thin, which had bad results on the pacing. Several times, I had figured out what was going on long before the principal had.

Again, a book title appears by Jorge Borjes, who was a friend of Cesares.

An Italian adaptation appeared in 1974, L’invenzione di Morel.

Planet of the Apes

1968 APJAC Productions

+ space and time travel; alternative speciation

color

Date: 1972 (launch), 3978 (arrival)

Vehicle: 3-man orbital vehicle, near light-speed

It’s a sequence of improbabilities, probably impossible. It has to do with science beyond the premise, and it’s pretty good fun.

The boys take off for a routine space flight. They go near light speed, and there’s some malfunction, and they crash on an Earth-like planet. That’s the end of the space adventure aspect. But here, great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans) are in charge, and humans are mute and degraded. It’s basically a role-reversal.

The social message is that the apes, as brutal as they are to humans, have managed to live a long time in peace.

They had a lot of fun with the premise, throwing in little jokes into the action where they can. And it ends with the famous surprise.

This was the first of the franchise.

“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”

2001: A Space Odyssey

1968 MGM

++ man’s destiny steered; AI loses cool

color

Clarke is the big idea guy of sci-fi of the ’50s and ’60s; one of very few sci-fi authors who was a real scientist.

Nobody before or since has depicted space flight this faithfully.

For a movie showing no blood, or monsters, this is very eerie.

The computer, HAL 9000, is the most memorable character, and he’s real scary. Watching the movie again recently, he still gives me goosebumps.

Vehicles: various beautiful spaceships, including

• Pan Am space plane,
• space station,
• shuttle to the Moon,
• Moon-bus,
• Discovery One, a nuclear spaceship bound for planet Jupiter,
• space pods of the spaceship.

Aliens: This is tough. The aliens are represented by black “monoliths”, once on Earth, once on the Moon, and once orbiting Jupiter. The script offers no explanation as to what exactly the “monoliths” are… only that they have something to do with aliens, and they’re up to something big.

Gadgets: astronauts are shown carrying something like modern tablet computers.

This movie showcases several of Clarke’s signature ideas, including:

• human survival unprotected in a vacuum,
• beings so advanced, their actions are indistinguishable from magic,
• human beings upgraded to be something much bigger (the star-child at the end).

Other sci-fi: proto-humans, suspended animation.

This is really two stories in one. The first is about advanced alien visitation. The second is about artificial intelligence. The two are connected, for those paying close attention.

For all its beauty and surprise and grandeur, it’s frustrating to watch. It’s flawed by stilted dialog, but worse, by unexplained psychedelia near the end. (A single quick scene could have clarified it, but Kubrick evidently thought it would be better not to.)

This movie set an unattainable standard for space movies for decades to come, and is part of the explanation for the gap in space movies in the ’70s and ’80s.

Stylistically, it had a strong precedent, in the Canadian National Film Board 1960 production Universe. (Also, the cinematographer and the voice of HAL 9000 came from that film.)

A sequel called 2010: The Year We Make Contact appeared in 1984.

—Arthur C. Clarke

Je t’aime, je t’aime
[I love you, I love you]

1968 Parc Film, Fox Europa

OK time-travel to study one’s depression

color

French

Premise: a suicide survivor agrees to take part in a time-travel experiment, in its first trial on a human.

Gadget: the time machine is quite unlike those seen in other films. It’s just a gloppy formed-foam room, with a form-fit couch, and a bunch of very ‘60s electronic equipment wired to it on the outside. There are some limitations, and he has to take a drug before traveling. The script spares us bla-bla about how exactly the thing works (merci!)

Well, things don’t go as planned.

He ends up flipping through dozens of episodes in his life, especially work experiences and scenes with his long-time lover and a mistress. The resulting scatter of scenes is bemusing, but only a few of them have anything to do with time travel. Rather, what is important is the re-construction of the protagonist’s life.

Some funny and interesting lines appear here and there, and kept me watching.

The juxtaposition of scenes does seem random, but there’s a method to the madness: it maintains momentum. It’s well filmed.

I had trouble grasping his relationships, but that’s nothing special. As to the science fiction premise… The time travel aspect doesn’t play a part in many of the scenes of the past. I’m pretty sure that flashbacks would serve as well as a vehicle for telling the story. So I’ll say the story is weakly science fiction.

Марс
[Mars]

1968 Lennauchfil’m

Russian

+ several vignettes, part educational, part fantasy.

color

The film begins with re-enactments of the observations of the astronomers Shiaparelli and Lowell.

Then it discusses the vast popular literature and the movies about Mars: H. G. Wells, Aelita.

It makes much use of animations, stop-action, and other special effects, as well as film clips of real scientific research.

It uses animations to illustrate facts of Mars’ atmosphere and temperature.

The narration discusses extreme Earth organisms that might survive on Mars, the nature of canals of Mars, then goes on to contemporary Soviet and U.S. space probes to Mars, how they work, what they are meant to investigate.

It then presents beautiful, elaborate, fanciful and amusing scenes of possible human habitation of Mars. For instance, a dog-astronaut in a space suit, spaceships in orbit of Mars, and Martian colonies. (These last vignettes contain not only speculative science themes, but something bordering on the dramatic, so they fit my qualification as sci-fi.)

Barbarella

1968 Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica (Italy)
Marianne Productions (France)

− period-piece sex farce

color

It’s sci-fi of the adult comic book variety.

Not always intentionally funny, but usually not funny when intended. Contains some curious nudity, and manages to be sort of sexy (in spots) despite being terribly silly.

Gladiatorerna
[Gladiators]

1969 Sandrew Metronome International

OK televised ersatz war games

color: made for TV

English, Cantonese, French, German, Swedish

Premise: In the near future (of the 1960s), nations of the world have set up “Peace Games”, wherein young soldiers fight to the death for their country… and the public views the fighting as entertainment.

Computer: a “Machine” with an IBM Selectric typing element that makes funny bloopy noises rather than typing noises. It evaluates the players, etc., and evidently, controls the game.

A French student reports that he is there to tear down the system. And… somehow he’s part of the game, too.

Games are West-vs-East, with Red China on the other side. Lots of cultural revolution talk, reading of Mao’s little red book. The Americans immediately get tangled up in racism.

There’s a “System” — unclear if it’s different from the “Machine”, whose goal is evidently to preserve hostilities, to perpetuate the need for the machine.

Partly in documentary style, with interviews.

A narrator explains to us that this isn’t what it seems to be. Unclear who the narrator is: is it the Machine? Proposes a cost-per-death ratio as rationale for the Games.

The generals are superior and bored. The machine operators are jaded and bored. Evidently, they’re watching the soldiers — the players — on TV. We are also to understand that a public is also watching on TV. But we never see action playing out on a TV.

The action is pretty disjointed. The details of the plot are often surprising, even confusing, but overall it comes to a predictable end.

Moon Zero Two

1969 Hammer

− Moon and space western

color

Billed as “the first Moon ‘western’”

It’s very much a period piece, with very late-60s Broadway-musical music.

Date: 2021

Vehicles: Moon ferries (Moon Zero Two) modeled after NASA lunar landers, a Moon-train, some Moon-buggies.

Weapons: just futuristic firearms. This is good — who needs lasers? They go “bang”, though — in a vacuum? Back up and check — no! The theme music goes “bang”! (In fact, conventional firearms would be much more deadly on the Moon than on the Earth.)

Computers: come in suitcases, with a numeric keypad and lights. They were thinking ahead (but not much ahead).

The action takes place on various Lunar cities, and in near-Earth space. Multiple space-walks are done fairly well.

Much of the humor consists of complaints about how the Moon isn’t the Earth: a running gag is that food and drink tastes awful. The gag wasn’t very funny the first time, but they kept running with it.

Entertainment consists of a chorus line doing calisthenic dance in themed outfits. One lady has a hair-do from the later UFO.

Fancy sets — not great, but not bad. The lighting is unimaginative: inside habitats, it’s uniformly bright. Inside spacecraft, lighting is always dim. Maybe they thought uniform was the lighting of the future.

A freighter arrives, so the bar puts up cactuses and barn props, and hide the valuables… but the freighter crew is quite tame, and very English. A bar-room brawl ensues. The protagonist turns the artificial gravity off, and everything slows down, the music gets comical, and the action becomes not very funny.

Like they had a vague idea to give it an ‘edge’, but had no idea how to pull ‘edge’ off. So they thought they could make it funny instead.

There are multiple main themes. They are at best tangential to one another, intersecting with the protagonist.

They really try to get the physics right, and they get points for that. A few goof-ups:

The first is the “artificial gravity“… which is mostly to accommodate Earth activity on the Moon.

They find a person skeletonized in a space suit on the lunar surface. Of course, skeletonization is a biological process, which would not happen in a vacuum. But then, the skull has a joint across the forehead, to facilitate displaying its interior to a classroom.

They discuss the economics of mining in space and mining on the Moon. The details are largely right.

The direction is weak throughout: a penultimate standoff scene, that looks like a first take, badly needed more takes.

The pace is awfully slow. This is an editing problem.

A very light script kills the movie. It plods and small-talks, failing to be cute, explains way too much, always falls short of naturalness, and fails to transport or amuse.

It’s not exciting enough to be an action/adventure, not funny enough to be a comedy.

It is decidedly a space sci-fi. It’s borderline for this list, but they get points for keeping some science in the sci-fi.

The soft-spoken adventurer captain remarks, uncharacteristically: