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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 12 |
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PART ONE |
 1951 classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." |
Once just kiddie fodder,
sci-fi now goes mainstream
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In 1902, Frenchman George Melies made a short film called "Le Voyage dans La Lune," starring ballerinas from the Theatre du Chatelet, acrobats from the Folies Bergere and himself. It told the story of people riding inside a missile that was fired to the moon. Since it was "inspired" by the tales of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, it was probably the first science-fiction movie.
Even in its day, I'm sure
Melies' "Trip to the Moon" was considered nothing more
than a frivolous exhibition of what passed for "special
effects" in the infancy of the motion picture medium. For
more than half a century afterward, that's about where the science-fiction
movie stood in the order of things cinematic.
With perhaps the grand exception of Germany's Fritz Lang, who
made two great, awe-inspiring sci-fi films in the 1920s--"Metropolis"
and "Frau im Mond" ("Girl in the Moon")--and
William Cameron Menzies, whose 1936 "Things To Come,"
was an adult film, posing challenging ideas for its audience,
sci-fi movies were mostly limited to kiddie fare until the 1950s.
That's not to say some of that kiddie fare wasn't grand entertainment. I was barely in my teens when I first saw "Rocketship" and "Mars Attacks the World," which were feature film versions of two 1930s serials--Universal's "Flash Gordon" (1936) and "Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars" (1938). They struck me as lavish beyond belief, even if the rocket ships sounded like electric shavers, "flew" on wires even a kid could see and sputtered out tailpipe smoke like my dad's 1940 Chevy when the muffler went bad.
What's more, those serials had the ravishing Jean Rogers as Dale Arden, hapless girl friend of Earthman Flash Gordon. When she pressed herself against a pillar, gasping in terror as the gross king of the hawkmen advanced on her, I imagined all kinds of delirious things going on under the nearly transparent gown she was almost wearng. It was like a 1930s pulp magazine cover come to life.
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the fantasy of many schoolboys as Dale Arden. |
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And, sure enough, always lurking in the background was the evil master of the planet Mongo--Ming the Merciless, a Fu Manchu-looking interplanetary Asian menace. Most pulp artists loved drawing evil "orientals" cackling fiendishly as they tormented beautiful white girls. Charles Middleton, who played Ming and wasn't the least bit Asian, could cackle with the best of them.
In the 1930s, when the very best American movie serials were made, the sci-fi ones were the ultimate examples of the cliffhanger. Universal made three "Flash Gordon" serials and one "Buck Rogers" serial, all starring Larry "Buster" Crabbe, the former Olympic swimming star who became a hero of movie serials. The only rival to the expensive looking Universal serials was a 1936 number from Republic: "Undersea Kingdom" starring Ray "Crash" Corrigan as an intrepid adventurer who led an expedition by deep-diving Navy sub into a secret civilization beneath the sea floor. This Atlantis-type kingdom was ruled by a tyrant who used both horse-mounted cavalry and a super-tank called The Juggernaut, which was crewed by robots. His goal: To attack the "upper world" with his rocket bombs.
These sci-fi serials featured the sort of heroes and villains who peopled the pulp magazines and newspaper comic strips of the 1920s and 1930s. They were high on adventure, action and sex. What made them different from the western and mystery pulps were the rocketships, rayguns and outer space monsters.
Serious science fiction of the kind found in some novels of the late 19th and early 20th century was seldom seen on the movie screen. Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was filmed by Stuart Paton in 1916. Though it had some very impressive underwater sequences, it was mostly laughable, as was the 1924 Soviet film "Aelita," which gave audiences a Cubistic look at the planet Mars.
Many other films with basic
science-fiction premises--such as "Frankenstein" and
"The Invisible Man"--were marketed as "horror
films" with little emphasis on the core sci-fi ideas in
both: That scientific experiments can go badly--in fact, very,
very badly.
One of the best sci-fi premises of the 1930s--that radiation
can kill--was misused in Universal's 1936 horror film "The
Invisible Ray," starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
The little-known 1933 film "Deluge," which featured
a tidal wave so large that it swamps New York City, made no ripples
as a sci-fi film. (The Manhattan-under-water sequence was re-used
in the final chapter of "Undersea Kingdom.")
Before that, only Lang's "Metropolis," which gave us a madman's future view of a mechanized society where working-class humans were slaves to machines, seemed what we today would call pure sci-fi. The sequence in which the "robot Maria" is created to replace the real heroine, Maria, is still a magnificent moment in movie history. The 1927 film, based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, also had the most important ingredient of modern sci-fi: It resonated with speculative ideas. Made at a time when Soviet Communism was frightening much of the free world, it was a frightening view of an Orwellian future.
Likewise, the 1936 "Things To Come" predicted a society torn apart by constant warring with ever-more sophisticated killing machines. It ended with the world divided into two camps--one led by the stalwart, science-worshipping Raymond Massey, the other led by the warlord Ralph Richardson--while all of mankind waited for the results of the first outer space expedition. Filmed as Europe braced for the Nazi invasions that began two years later, "Things to Come" throbbed with meaningful ideas.
One would have thought Orson Welles' famous 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, wihch fooled millions into believing a real invasion was in progress, might have inspired a wave of sci-fi films. All it inspired was Universal's decision to cut one of its Flash Gordon serials into a quickie feature called "Mars Attacks the World."
What was wrong with the sci-fi genre then is now simple to understand. First, there had not yet been a generation raised on lots of sci-fi books, movies or radio programs. As a result, most adults considered it kiddie fare. Second, the challenges of filming something like Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars" or Karel Capek's "R.U.R" were too great for the Hollywood effects labs, considering the films would not be given "A" picture budgets. Third, Hollywood was still crippled by the economic shortfalls of the 1930s Depression. Finally, the winds of war were blowing all over the world--and the markets for movies were about to be shattered.
Ultimately, it was World War II and the maturing of those youngsters raised on Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Superman that brought sci-fi out of the darkness and into the light of flashing marquees.
The most staggering event of World War II had to be the exploding of two atomic bombs on Japan by U.S. forces, ushering in "the atomic age." Just before Nazi Germany surrendered, Hitler's scientists had launched the V-series of rocket bombs, the first long-distance missiles. Jet-propelled aircraft were actually flown in the final days of the war--and radar had been deployed. These all seemed like science-fiction just a few years earlier.
Then, right after the war, wire service reports were filled with sightings of strange saucer-shaped objects in the skies. The "UFO" era had begun. Meanwhile, back at the old homesteads of America, little boys like Ray Bradbury had reached the stage where they started writing stories to match the visions of their childhoods. Suddenly, science fiction was a marketable commodity for major magazines.
With a sudden burst of very offbeat films in 1950-51, the new era of sci-fi movies was born. Mostly made on low budgets, these films tapped into almost all the new paths of science fiction being charted by books, magazines, comics and radio shows like "Dimension X" and "2000-Plus." Because they were so different from anything seen before, they generated loads of publicity, which fed the flames of a new trend.
First and foremost among them was producer George Pal's 1950 "Destination Moon," which pursued a quasi-documentary approach to telling the story of the first manned flight to the moon. Pal incorporated the thoughts and designs of some of the top people working in rocketry at the time, was filmed in color and had a screenplay co-authored by Robert Heinlein, one of the leading science-fiction writers of his era.
What's more, "Destination Moon" benefitted from Pal's special interest in miniatures--he was best-known at the time for his stop motion "Puppetoons"--which allowed the film to show us a realistic spacecraft landing on the moon with its crew of three and (absurdly) one stowaway. Though the film came from a "poverty row" distributor, Eagle-Lion, it had dazzling special effects and was widely featured in all kinds of media.
Close on its heels was "Rocketship X-M" (1950), from Lippert Pictures, another "poverty row" outfit. This one featured Lloyd Bridges as one of the crew members of a moon-landing rocketship that veered off course and landed instead on Mars! It was goofy science, of course, but at least it gave the audience the chance to see radiation-scarred Martians and deliver its stern message: Keep up those atomic bombs and you'll wind up a dead planet like Mars.
Aging ex-German filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer's "The Man From Planet X" (1951), was another bottom feeder, budget-wise, featuring a spacecraft that lands in a remote part of Scotland, bearing a weird looking alien in a spacesuit. It was the first alien-invader movie of its day. Also in the pipeline that year (1951) was Lippert's "Unknown World," which found scientists burrowing to the center of the Earth in a tank-like machine called the Cyclotram.
Four other 1951 films made it clear that a major sea change had come to Hollywood. Space jockey heroes like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were out and grim, stalwart scientists were in. Their leading ladies weren't shapely Dale Ardens or Wilma Deerings in diaphanous frocks, but rather smart, intelligent female scientists, working side by side with their men. And, lo and behold, some very well-respected Hollywood filmmakers were now making sci-fi films.
Best of the lot was "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), made by Robert Wise, who would go on to win Oscars for "West Side Story" and "The Sound of Music." His film posed a stern warning for post-atomic age Earthmen: Stop warring with each other or face your collective doom. In the documentary-style black and white film, a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., bearing a messenger named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) from an advanced alien society and his "enforcer," a giant robot called Gort. If Earth doesn't abandon its warring ways, Klaatu explains, Gort will incinerate the planet. When the visor on Gort's helmet slowly rises, and a pulsing light threatens to become a death ray, Earthmen trembled.
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the sci-fi classic "When Worlds Collide," based on a 1930s novel. |
Also that year George Pal returned with a bigger budget and a major studio, Paramount, to give us the film version of Edwin Balmer's and Philip Wylie's amazing sci-fi novel from the 1930s, "When Worlds Collide." It was the first great epic space disaster movie. Two new planets were approaching from outside the solar system, heading on a collision course with Earth. Mankind had no hope of survival unless scientists could build a giant spaceship that could carry humans to the second of the planets, which would miss Earth. The special effects were eye-boggling for their time.
Also that year, one of Hollywood's top producers, Howard Hawks, brought us "The Thing From Another World," the story of a flying saucer that crash lands in the Arctic, near an American scientific research station. Soon the only survivor of that crash, a giant blood-drinking "vegetable man," begins picking off the scientists, one by one. This RKO film was loosely based on a much earlier classic sci-fi novelette, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" Directed with terrifying suspense by Christian Nyby, "The Thing" was the precursor of all the "monster trying to get in" sci-fi movies to come.
Least known of the 1950-51 sci-fi films probably was Arch Obeler's "Five" (1951), a low budget tale of the last five people on Earth after a nuclear holocaust. Obeler was one of radio's great sci-fi writers and the creator of the "Lights Out" program. This semonette against nuclear war was a serious film--and so low-budget that Obeler used his own Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home as the habitat for Earth's last humans. (Obeler would make a much bigger mark one year later when he started the 3-D trend with his "Bwana Devil.")
This burst of films not only made America aware that sci-fi had arrived as a new movie genre, but it also made it clear that this wasn't the old sci-fi in a new outfit. These mostly were films built around ideas, even if they often degenerated into formula plots. This was the crucial element that eventually would make sci-fi films adult fare and not just for Saturday matinee crowds.
NEXT ISSUE: SCI-FI GROWS UP.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The photo of Gort is courtesy 20th Century-Fox. The photos of
Dale Arden and Ming are courtesy Universal Pictures. "When
Worlds Collide" ad courtesy of Paramount Pictures and George
Pal Productions.
Ron
Miller will offer "A Century of Great Sci-Fi Films"
as a four-week adult education course at Whatcom Community College
in Bellingham, Washington, starting Monday, April 19. For information
or to register for the class, call 360-647-3277.
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