Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 4
The censor did, however, refuse to allow what was probably the bleakest moment of Kneale and Cartier’s original. An ordinary English family – passive father, talkative mother and a boy with new flippers – are picnicking by the sea near to the plant. The guards appear and the father tries uselessly to stand between them and his family. They are gunned down in cold blood (heard, not seen) and their pathetic little car is towed into the plant, a dead hand hanging limply from its window. Later with Quatermass we discover the smashed wreckage of their picnic and a bloody flipper.
The sequence was particularly shocking precisely because it was like something from another, more realist drama. It evoked almost unmistakably the racial persecution in Nazi Germany, which is not so surprising since director Rudolph Cartier fled Nazi persecution and lost his mother and other members of his family to the holocaust. But only Kneale would have dared to include it here and through it we can see the kernel of his vision for Quatermass 2, and also why, even with this cut, it pre-figures a film like District 9. For while Kneale constantly looked for the strange and the original, he was only ever interested in fantasy that connected – often, as here, to a bone-crunching reality. At its most powerful, Quatermass 2 is showing us, with no holds barred, what it is like to be treated as an inferior species.
Hammer must have shot at least some of the sequence – for in the film the car is visible, though not the hand – but, thanks to the censor, I am yet to discover any print which contains it. However, at precisely this point in the film there is another sequence (not from the serial but surely Kneale’s) with a more sinister echo of the same theme, one that might well not be possible today. Quatermass and some ordinary civilians, including a cheerful well-dressed woman, are making an official visit to the plant. They are escorted by a pleasant smiling PR man (played by John Van Eyssen) into a kind of sealed space and far below them men don gas masks. The door starts to close, but Quatermass alone forces his way out and escapes. No further reference is made to this, but the conclusion is inescapable. The visiting party has been led to the gas chamber.
NOTES:
1: Just one year after Bram Stoker published another story of Victorian society invaded, ‘Dracula’. Of course we can point to earlier extra-terrestrials and earlier vampires, but it is intriguing that both of these key fantasy themes were essentially originated within months of each other.
I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE
(Director: Gene Fowler Jr; starring: Tom Tryon, Gloria Talbott, Peter Baldwin, Robert Ivers - 1958)
Steven Utley
I Married a Monster From Outer Space (Paramount, 1958) encapsulates its pure 1930s-scientifiction-pulp absurdity of a plot in a title that has always been a contender for top honors in Worst Movie Title competitions. (The perennial winner, however, is I Eat Your Skin.) And exactly how absurd (you ask) is 1930s-scientifiction-pulp? Well, imagine that you are marooned on the fourth planet out from (say) Tau Ceti, desperate to obey the call to reproduce your species, but hampered by the lack of a suitable partner: how willing – be honest now, and imagine also that you are neither a disgusting pervert nor already desperate to obey the call to reproduce your species but hampered by the lack of a suitable partner – how eager would you be to make do, as in make whoopee, with a member of the dominant life-form there, which, for all anybody knows, might be a sentient cantaloupe, or a kind of armored maggot as big as a refrigerator?
So, why (you ask further), with its unappetizing title and its impossible monster+Earthwoman=baby premise, is I Married a Monster From Outer Space just my all-time favourite grade-B science-fiction movie?
Let me begin by explaining that I was a military brat, born and bred. In 1958, my father, a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force, was sent to Okinawa; because my mother, my siblings, and I had to wait Stateside for a year before we could go overseas, we moved from Memphis to a small town in western Kentucky. I probably expected to enjoy that year in a region that was home to my beloved grandparents and other relatives, including cousins my age – instant playmates. It turned out to be hell. Beset by peers who were not cousins of mine and therefore under no obligation to get along with me – who, by and large, did not cotton to outsiders and in any case didn’t know what to make of somebody who liked to read about prehistoric animals, the Civil War, and Custer’s Last Stand – I sought surcease in such arts as were available to me. My weekly allowance covered the cost of a comic book or two and admission to the town’s decaying movie house. Thus, I was able to sharpen my imagination on Classics Illustrated, The Flash, Blackhawk, or (best of all) the dinosaur-infested Turok, Son of Stone, preparatory to soaking up a Saturday matinee.
Science-fiction and fantasy were my favorite fare, and so grateful was I for First Man Into Space, Queen of Outer Space, The Blob, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Return of Dracula, and It! The Terror From Beyond Space that critical judgements were almost beside the point. But I Married a Monster From Outer Space did not simply hold my attention for an afternoon, it resonated for me, and resonates still. IMaMFOS (as we’ll call it) is inextricably bound up in my memories and my emotions with the perfectly swell 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro – starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, Eugene Pallette, and J. Edward Bromberg – which 20th Century Fox re-released in the late 1950s to capitalize on the success of Walt Disney’s new TV version. If my memory does not play me false and I did in fact see the two films on the same bill one day in 1958 or ‘59, I must count that among the happiest occasions of my childhood and all the more so for being embedded in a twelvemonth’s worth of unhappy occasions. IMaMFOS and The Mark of Zorro are about formidable outsiders who, disguised as an insurance salesman and a Spanish dandy, respectively, impose their wills on insular communities. Little wonder that I should have warmed to them!
Quite apart from the emotional boost IMaMFOS gave my needful young self, the film actually works in its own right. The monster of the title is one of a number of approximately male survivors of a cosmic catastrophe that destroyed their home world and wiped out their approximately female mates. Desperate to perpetuate their kind, the aliens search the cosmos for other life, reach Earth, and dispatch a landing party. Having concealed their spacecraft in a thicket on the outskirts of a small suburban community, the scouts capture various eligible young men, appropriate their forms and memories, and start marrying their sweethearts. As events unfold, it is darkly hinted that these connubial methane-breathers are tinkering with their own genetic material (this in 1958, long before the word “bioengineering” gained currency) so that their unsuspecting human brides can incubate nonhuman babies (this, too, long before the concept of foster-wombs entered public consciousness).
The aliens aren’t the only ones who are anxious to have children. Marge Farrell (Gloria Talbot), wife to the pseudo-Bill (Tom Tryon, later a best-selling author), wants children, too, and can’t understand why she isn’t having any. Moreover, Bill seems so remote, so cold – so changed from the man she fell in love with.
The screenplay, by Louis Vittes, is smarter than its hoary premise (the alien un-men have their individual quirks; one even manifests a slightly off-colour sense of humour) and gets tremendous help from director Gene Fowler, Jr. Fowler had worked with Fritz Lang, and it shows: the film is all dark, brooding, paranoid menace – except for moments of visceral creepiness, as when a lightning flash startles the pseudo-Bill and reveals the alien horror behind the human mask. Or: Marge follows her husband into the thicket at night, sees the alien emerge from him, then sees a beetle walk across the empty humanoid shell’s unblinking eyeball.
When Marge convinces the real men left in town to attack the hidden spacecraft, they are quickly put to rout by beings that brush trees out of the way, shrug off shotgun blasts, and shoot back with disintegration rays. We are supposed to be relieved when they are finally killed and dissolved to ghastly porridge. After all, the aliens are ugly (really the most alien-looking aliens to be s
een in any film of the period), they have shown themselves to be pretty ruthless, and they have been messing around with our womenfolk. Yet, one cannot help feeling sympathy for their plight.
And we are also supposed to be relieved when Marge is reunited with the real Bill – or, rather, united with him, since he was captured by the invaders before the nuptials. Throughout, Marge has seemed to be a traditional young woman with traditional notions about love, marriage, and, presumably, sex. Given those values, which the real Bill surely shares to some extent, and given that, whenever we may be watching IMaMFOS, all of what we watch has taken place, is taking place, will forever take place in 1958, what I find myself wondering, here in the 21st Century, is how Bill is going to react to the news that his sweetheart has already Given Herself, and to a space monster, too. What is Marge going to say to him after the end-credits? ‘I swear I thought it was you’?
THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD
(Director: Nathan Juran; starring: Kerwin Mathews, Kathryn Grant, Richard Eyer, Torin Thatcher - 1958)
John Connolly
The Western is dead. Oh, I know that there are occasional efforts to resurrect it, and honorable entries to the genre still crop up occasionally – Apoloosa, Open Range, and the like, while one could argue that the entire oeuvre of Cormac McCarthy, both literary and cinematic, is essentially Western in nature – but that’s like opining that a corpse still lives because its fingernails and hair appear to be growing, and the gases inside it make funny noises. No, the Western is gone. It’s an element of the past now, not the present.
Perhaps its demise is due, in part, to the relative lack of exposure that it now receives, and the abundance of choice available to television viewers. When I was growing up, there were Western serials on television every Saturday morning (The Virginian, Champion the Wonder Horse, Casey Jones), and Western movies on BBC2 every Saturday afternoon. Later, there was Bonanza, or The High Chaparral, or Alias Smith and Jones. At weekends, therefore, one either watched Westerns, wrestling, or racing from Haydock Park. If one were to judge America by the television of the day, everyone still rode horses and the internal combustion engine was merely a pipe dream. As viewers, we couldn’t escape westerns. Now, my stepchildren can watch any one of about 300 channels, and they will watch just about any of them, even the worst of them, as long as they don’t have to watch a Western. They weren’t exposed to Westerns when they were younger, and they have no intention of exposing themselves to Westerns now.
And what has this got to do with fantasy, which, as a genre, continues to thrive? Well, the Western couldn’t change. It dated. It was hermetically sealed, a product of a particular period in both the historical and visual senses. The quest motif, which was so much a part of its appeal, was not its sole preserve. Neither was the inevitable confrontation between good and evil with which all Westerns ended, or the genre’s capacity to deal with questions of loyalty and male friendship. Even horses could be found elsewhere. All that the Western could offer as unique selling points were six-guns and unusual hats. Instead of thriving, it was co-opted into other genres, fantasy among them. Battle Beyond the Stars is The Magnificent Seven in space. Avatar, as South Park so viciously pointed out, is Dances With Smurfs, although it also nods to every western in which the savages were depicted as possessing a degree of nobility and humanity, usually signaled by having them played by a white actor in make-up – Jeff Chandler, Burt Lancaster – or, in the case of Charles Bronson, by a Lithuanian bloke who could pass for anything.
But fantasy changes. It adapts. It is always looking forward, even when, in the case of The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, it appears to be looking back. In fact, the very notion of fantasy is so broad that its capacity for reinvention is virtually limitless, and because each generation rediscovers it and reinterprets it, it seems likely to be with us for as long as there are people around to enjoy it. Similarly, computer-generated imagery has enabled filmmakers to create entire worlds, so that there now appear to be no boundaries beyond those of the imagination itself.
Which is great, obviously.
And yet, and yet…
The Plaza in Dublin is now no more. For a time, after its demise as a picture house, it became a wax museum, containing desperately poor simulacra of the Pope, some Irish prime ministers, and U2, who looked like a bunch of ageing transsexuals. It’s now a hotel, I think, although I don’t tend to frequent that part of the city now that it no longer contains a place in which one can watch films comfortably.
The Plaza was a peculiar entity, one that simply could not exist in the present day now that most old movies, however poor, are easily available on DVD. It showed mainly second-run, or even third-run, films, as well as new releases that represented something less than the finest work of those involved, or films that just weren’t good enough for the main city centre cinemas. It was in the Plaza that I watched Buddy, Buddy (1981), Billy Wilder’s last, misguided gasp as a director; and Zulu Dawn (1979), the only marginally less misguided prequel to Zulu (‘It’s like Zulu, except the Zulus win!’ ‘Oh. What else is on?’); and At the Earth’s Core (1976), in which Doug McClure and Peter Cushing battled men in rubber suits, á la the Japanese Godzilla movies.
What links these movies, apart from their generally flawed nature, and the role that the Plaza played in ensuring that someone, somewhere, made some money from them, is the presence of my father. At least once every year, but always at Christmas, he would take my younger brother and I to dinner and a movie in the city centre, and for some reason we nearly always seemed to end up at the Plaza, not least because it was cheap, but also because my brother and I often quite wanted to see the films that it showed, poor though many of them now seem in retrospect.
I saw Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in the Plaza. I don’t remember the year in question, although the film itself was made in 1958 which meant that, even by the Plaza’s fairly lax scheduling standards, it was a bit on the old side when I sat down to watch it. I can only assume that it was the bottom part of a double-bill, but the title of the main attraction eludes me. It doesn’t matter, because whatever it was, it didn’t match up to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, in which Kerwin Matthews tries to foil the machinations of the magician Sokurah and find the necessary ingredients for the potion that will restore his love, a miniaturised future Mrs Bing Crosby (Kathryn Grant) to her full height.
This is the best of Harryhausen’s three Sinbad movies for a host of reasons (Harryhausen didn’t direct it, but that’s beside the point: it belongs to him as much as The Thing from Another World belongs to Howard Hawks, regardless of Christian Nyby’s director’s credit on the latter): a decent script, a Bernard Herrmann score, and special effects that were, for their time, quite groundbreaking. In particular, I can still recall my horror at the sight of a sailor being spit-roasted – in the non-sexual sense; one can’t be too careful about these things – by the Cyclops, a scene that distressed me so much I think I may have cried.
I was fortunate enough to meet Ray Harryhausen some years ago. He was signing copies of Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life with Ray Bradbury at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. I shook his hand. That’s important. I shook Ray Harryhausen’s hand.
Because here’s the thing: creaky though those special effects in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, or Jason and the Argonauts, or even the much later Clash of the Titans may seem to the modern eye (and by that I mean those unfortunate children and teenagers brought up only on CGI) they have a substance, a density, that modern computer imagery lacks. Harryhausen’s creatures – the Cyclops, the Roc, the Gorgon – exist on the same level of reality as the actors on the screen. They have weight, and breadth, and height. They are created from plaster, and plastic, and fur, and metal. They can be touched, and moved, by hand. And they were, for every action of the creatures, however miniscule, required human contact, a moment when the craftsman and his creation came into intimate contact, which is as it should be.
This is not to denigrate the c
raft involved in creating CGI figures and worlds, the hours and hours spent manipulating code in an effort to create a simulacrum of reality. Rather, it is to point out that a virtual simulacrum remains just that: virtual. It has the same relation to the real that a symphony listened to over the headphones of an MP3 player, one that has been cleaned up and then compressed into a file, has to a live performance of the same piece by an orchestra; or indeed, that the Plaza’s waxworks had to their human models.
Take James Cameron’s aforementioned Avatar, for long mooted as the deal-breaker when it comes to creating virtual people, and virtual worlds, for the screen. It is an astonishing technical achievement, even a labour of love by its creator, but for all the talk of a ‘fully immersive experience’ through 3D (which ignores the fact that great cinema is already a fully immersive experience in 2D), was I really the only one who felt at one remove from all that I was seeing on screen? Fantasy cinema, by its very nature, requires a suspension of disbelief for it to be enjoyed, but it is not something that can be forced upon the viewer. Instead, it is earned by the film. Avatar was so desperate to convince me of the reality, the substantiality, of what I was witnessing (perhaps because it was so conscious of the fact that little of itself existed in the physical realm) that I ended up feeling slightly bullied by the experience, and more aware than ever that nothing, beyond the actors and the props, was real or of any substance. It is a film that I was glad to see, but I will be equally glad never to see it again.