TCM has scheduled a sci-fi mini-marathon next week (March 31st – April 1st) featuring several great and not-so-great films of the genre. (We’ll leave it up to you to decide which are which.)
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March 31st — Tuesday
8:00 PM — I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
Cast: Tom Tryon, Gloria Talbott, Peter Baldwin, Robert Ivers
Director: Gene Fowler, Jr.
BW-78 mins, TV-PG (Letterbox)
"In 1942, both I Married an Angel and I Married a Witch posited happy fantasy unions of humans and otherworldly creatures of uncommon beauty; by the end of the decade, however, the mood had darkened considerably. Though their titles would be changed for theatrical release, I Married a Communist (aka The Woman on Pier 13, 1949) and I Married a Dead Man (aka No Man of Her Own, 1950) broached a connubial incompatibility of epidemic proportions, a marital malaise that reached its apotheosis in 1958 with I Married a Monster from Outer Space."
(Source: Richard Harland Smith on TCM Movie Database)
9:30 PM — Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Cast: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan
Director: Don Siegel
BW-80 mins, TV-14 (Letterbox)
"Don Siegel’s classic exercise in psychological science fiction has often been interpreted as a cautionary fable about the blacklisting hysteria of the McCarthy era. It can be read as a political metaphor or enjoyed as a fine low-budget suspense movie, and it works well either way."
(Source: Mark Deming on allmovie)
But those involved with the production disavow any conscious effort to tie in to "the blacklisting hysteria":
"Despite the general agreement among film critics regarding these political connotations of the film, lead actor Kevin McCarthy said in an interview included on the 1998 DVD release that he felt no political allegory was intended. The interviewer stated that he had spoken with the author of the original novel, Jack Finney, who also professed to have intended no specific political allegory in the work. In his autobiography, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History, Walter Mirisch writes: ‘People began to read meanings into pictures that were never intended. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an example of that. I remember reading a magazine article arguing that the picture was intended as an allegory about the communist infiltration of America. From personal knowledge, neither Walter Wanger nor Don Siegel, who directed it, nor Dan Mainwaring, who wrote the script nor the original author Jack Finney, nor myself saw it as anything other than a thriller, pure and simple.’"
(Source: Wikipedia)
11:00 PM — The 27th Day (1957)
Cast: Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voscovec, Arnold Moss
Director: William Asher
BW-76 mins, TV-PG
"The 27th Day is the story of what happens when a representative of a much-advanced alien race comes to Earth and forces its inhabitants to come to grips with possible annihilation, courtesy of a set of capsules which contain the power to kill everyone on the planet. . . . [The film] was released in July of 1957, but soon disappeared into relative obscurity, despite its science fiction hook. Reviewers of today reassessing the film give credit to its almost unparalleled literacy and clearly the film is ripe for rediscovery. Despite its modest production values, The 27th Day is a dandy little science fiction tale completely infused with the inescapable political zeitgeist of the time."
(Source: Lisa Mateas on TCM Movie Database)
The "inescapable political zeitgeist of the time" evidently never entirely went away, to judge from this recent schizophrenic review of The 27th Day which oscillates between admiration and politically correct condemnation:
"Were The 27th Day more widely remembered, we would now be using this space to declare that time has not been kind to a film with a powerful reputation. We would also note its many flaws, including among them chauvinism of both the national and sexual varieties. . . . We must therefore note that it’s more thoughtful, and literate, than almost every science-fiction film of its era, let alone our own . . . and that it deserves credit for accomplishing what films of this genre rarely manage, which is to say, use its fantastic premise to tell a story that hinges upon the very contradictions of human nature."
(Source: Adam-Troy Castro on Sci Fi Weekly, November 21, 2006)
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April 1st — Wednesday
12:30 AM — The H-Man (1958)
Cast: Yumi Shirakawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihiko Hirata, Eitaro Ozawa
Director: Inoshiro Honda
C-79 mins, TV-PG
"Although The H-Man was unfairly accused of being a Japanese ripoff of The Blob which was released the same year, the movie has little in common with the Steve McQueen cult favorite except for the oozing, jellylike substance that devours human flesh in both films. The H-Man was actually a fusion of the sci-fi thriller and the gangster film with a plot that brought together such incongruous types as policemen, sailors, nightclub entertainers, scientists and drug dealers to fight a deadly menace."
(Source: Jeff Stafford on TCM Movie Database)
(Note: More about this film is on Wikipedia.)
2:00 AM — Forbidden Planet (1956)
Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens, Robbie the Robot
Director: Fred McLeod Wilcox
C-99 mins, TV-PG (Letterbox)
"Forbidden Planet was made inside MGM studios (except for a handful of shots) and used a 10,000 foot circular painting as a backdrop. One oddity about Forbidden Planet is that the film we see today is more or less an unfinished rough cut. What happened is that experimental composers Louis and Bebe Barron had been asked to supply the music for the film. (They’d previously only scored a few avant-garde shorts.) It would turn out to be a landmark score, utilizing only generated sounds (no conventional instruments like violins or pianos) and paved the way for both new forms of film scoring and for a more open approach to music. But the studio was a bit uneasy about the eeri
e score so they arranged a sneak preview to see how audiences would react. The response was so positive that MGM decided to release the film as it was, not even letting the editor tighten up the pacing or rework some rough patches."
(Source: Lang Thompson on TCM Movie Database)
The film isn’t merely great to look at:
"If the visual reigns in Forbidden Planet, the audial is its consort. In commercial film, sound often gets short shrift — it’s filler, it’s inconsequential, and it’s often recycled from other productions. Here, sound is character. These are not the re-warmed blips and twitters of an old ham radio. These are eerie and intriguing modulations that, combined with the art direction, make everything on Altair-IV ruthlessly alien and forbidding, yet irresistible and full of promise."
(Source: Tamara I. Hladik on Sci Fi Weekly, February 10, 1997)
3:45 AM — The Lost Missile (1958)
Cast: Robert Loggia, Ellen Parker, Phillip Pine, Larry Kerr
Director: William Berke
BW-71 mins, TV-PG
"The situation is a familiar one for frequent viewers of 1950s science fiction films; a producer goes into production with an ambitious premise, but has at his disposal only a small budget, a cast of unknown actors, and an overabundance of stock footage. The result is usually disastrous, as one can witness in such films as Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (1953) or any number of others. In the case of The Lost Missile (1958), however, the result of these limitations is an acceptable, and even an occasionally taut and suspenseful disaster picture, as opposed to disastrous picture. The film opens in a Soviet Bloc country, as radar screens there pick up a mysterious rocket-shaped craft hurtling at over 4,000 miles an hour. The military launches a defensive missile toward the object (the Soviet missile is depicted using stock footage of a V-2 rocket launch). Contact is made with the alien missile, but it is not destroyed. A booming narration tells us that ‘the terrible object has been diverted into an orbit by the explosion. It streaks across the northern curve of the Earth at an altitude of only five miles. A wild missile loose on the surface of the earth—burning a track five miles wide below it.’"
(Source: John M. Miller on TCM Movie Database)
—Mike Gray
Mike, what a superb introduction to a very interesting slate of films. I hope that you’ll watch The 27th Day and perhaps do a write-up about it for TAC. I suspect that what bothers the person who seemed so ambivalent about the film is that it is indeed of very high quality but also has very serious and clearly intentional religious and political implications. For instance, the notions of original sin and the need for the entire human race to obtain redemption are very clear in the film. As if that were not enough, much to the additional dismay of leftist critics the film openly critiques Communists as enemies of all that is good in human life, and it characterizes (through the action, no less, not just talk!) their ideas as springing directly from our legacy of original sin.
Released in July 1957, the film appeared at a time when both anticommunism and Christianity were very much under attack in the American culture. Despite the false claims of leftists in the years since, the 1950s in America were a time of strong movement to the left politically and against Christianity. The people who made this film had the courage to buck that trend, quite openly.
It’s a brilliant and rather bold film on both the political and religious levels, and indeed quite a lost gem. This is William Asher’s best work as a filmmaker (and TV producer) by a good measure, and it stars Gene Barry, who also appeared in the superb and quite openly Christian adaptation of War of the Worlds by George Pal and several other good films and TV shows. He deserves more appreciation than he has received, as does The 27th Day.