wonderboss

By 1965 the Hollywood "Jules Verne" genre was ready to be spoofed. In much the same way that a big-budget film series which once terrified millions of people ended up, 25 years later, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so the phenomenon that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days got to the point where it just couldn't be taken quite seriously anymore. So director Blake Edwards conceived an ingenious idea: why not take the stalwart heroes and bumbling professors of classical Verne films and mix them thoroughly with the silent movie antics Mike Todd had only saluted? You'd include lots of improbable gadgets, of course, and a fantastic journey 'round the world. But you'd also turn some really first-rate comic talent loose on it—people like Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk. Yes, it'd have to have submarines and rockets and hot air balloons. But it would also need blackout gags, and mustache twiddling villains, and the pie fight to end all pie fights. Jules Verne meets Mack Sennett in other words. And thus The Great Race was born—dedicated, in its charming magic lantern prologue, to "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy." The set-up is simple enough: the impossibly good-looking and excessively virtuous hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis at his comic best) embarks on an around the world automobile race from New York westward to Paris (including a short jaunt over the frozen Bering Strait to Asia). Leslie's arch-rival, the black-hatted and entirely sympathetic megalomaniac Professor Fate, determines to thwart him at all costs and thereby affirm his own rather shaky sense of self-worth. Along the way there are madcap adventures in the Old West, on the Arctic Sea, on the steppes of Russia, and in the intrigue-ridden European Duchy of Potsdorf. Basically, it's Around the World in Eighty Days with the funny knob cranked all the way up. And many of us do find it extremely, extremely funny. The Great Race may not have been (as it was billed) "the greatest comedy of all time" but it is one of the greatest comedies of the Sixties and that's saying quite a bit. The principals are joined by Natalie Wood, who shows fine comic flair, and Keenan Wynn, as Leslie's faithful manservant Hezekiah. Composer Henry Mancini plays a vital part, too. The score for The Great Race is one of his very best and crucial to the success of the movie. Many people find the extended episode in Potsdorf—a lengthy, clever spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda—to be fatally overlong. I'm not one of them. In theaters, this nearly three hour comedy came with an intermission. Potsdorf opened the second half, and did so at just the moment when audiences had started craving a more substantial story to sink their teeth into. This section of the film also includes one of the greatest sword fights ever filmed—a classic saber duel, played perfectly straight, between Tony Curtis and the late, great Ross Martin. If the movie does have a serious weakness, it's the finale. I don't see how it could have ended any differently myself, so I'm not one to be giving advice; but let's just say that the outcome of the race fails to completely satisfy…Oddly enough, this film which signals the end of the original Fifties/Sixties Jules Verne craze managed to give birth to a whole little sub-genre of it's own—a sub-genre of the sub-genre, I suppose. These were the multitudinous (and consistently inferior) Great Race imitators. They came by the dozens for the next five years or so: everything from big screen spectacles like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965), Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), and Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) to TV spin-offs for kids; stuff like Wacky Races (1967) and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1970). But the original still retains a charm and panache that puts it in a class by itself.

After so many attempts by others to recapture the magic of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney's own belated return to the Jules Verne genre must have been greeted with tremendous anticipation. When it did finally come however, with 1961's In Search of the Castaways, audiences can only have responded with a bewilderment bordering on stupefaction. Castaways has a scenario so bizarre and features a set of adventures so patently absurd, that it makes Journey to the Center of the Earth seem like cinema verité. The fact that the makers appear to have been perfectly aware of these illogicalities and may have been indulging in some kind of a rarified joke only makes things worse in my opinion. You tell me: The children of a marooned sea captain receive from him a message in a bottle—a bottle found in the stomach of a shark. Unlikely, you say? So do about five characters in the film itself--repeatedly. Later, the party decides to rest overnight in "The Land of Many Earthquakes." The hut they sleep in seems, nonetheless, to have been standing for hundreds of years so they feel confident it will make it through one more night--and they tell us so. An enormous tremor strikes within moments and shakes the entire building down before our eyes. During this quake, the stone ledge the party has been standing on breaks loose and becomes a bobsled hurtling down the mountainside. Do the explorers cling to it for their lives in mortal terror? No, they laugh and yodel and enjoy the ride as if nothing at all were at stake--which the audience has now begun to realize is in fact the case. Soon, they come to the broad, treeless landscape of the Argentine pampas; here, the earth is parched and cracked, the sky cloudless. In spite of this, Indians warn them to beware of floods. The Europeans take pains to point out the extreme unlikelihood of such an eventuality--and are, of course, shortly interrupted by an 8-foot wall of water that reaches from horizon to horizon. As Disney expert Leonard Maltin remarks, "There seems no earthly purpose for throwing in a giant condor or a massive flood, and the slightly off-center feeling is only amplified when Maurice Chevalier starts to sing about their troubles!" On and on it goes until about the midway point of the film, at which time the searchers learn that their whole expedition has been a wild goose chase to begin with and that they've been looking on the WRONG CONTINENT. And the audience throws up its hands. If we could write In Search of the Castaways off as a low-budget quickie like Valley of the Dragons, padded out with stock footage, the whole thing would be easier to figure. But no—-extreme care was taken with Castaways. It has lush Technicolor photography, stunning miniatures, and a non-stop parade of the most gorgeous matte paintings you ever saw (Peter Ellenshaw). The special effects are, in fact, some of the best in any Verne film and were accomplished by the very same people who did similarly magnificent work for 20,000 Leagues. Yet the situations these effects are called upon to depict are so far-out that they would have been more appropriate in something like This Island Earth or First Spaceship on Venus. The aforementioned "sleigh ride" for instance, really does play out like an attraction at Disneyland, and would probably be interpreted by today's critics as a crass send-off for the inevitable theme park tie-in. (Actually, it seems to have been the other way around, with a Disneyland ride providing inspiration for the movie; the park's Matterhorn Bobsleds attraction opened four years earlier and was based on a different film, 1958's Third Man on the Mountain). Most curious of all, however, is the way this script actually rubs your nose in each of its many improbabilities and underlines every deus ex machina. In retrospect the filmmakers do seem to have tried to warn us in advance; the title work introduces the movie as "Jules Verne's Fantasy Adventure." This might have been our cue that it was all intended as some kind of a spoof of the genre, or "live action cartoon," and ought to be taken as such. Still, the joke sails right over my head. Make no mistake: In Search of the Castaways has plenty going for it. But the screenplay (based on Verne's 1865 book Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant) ought to have been sent back down Dopey Drive to the Story Department for some heavy revision. (Incidentally, the George Sanders villain in this movie, Thomas Ayerton, reappears in Verne's L'Île mystérieuse—which happens to be a sequel to both this book and 20,000 Leagues). Director Robert Stevenson, at any rate, did get another crack at Verne-flavored adventure for Disney—-1974's Island at the Top of the World—-and he fared much better there.

Flight of the Lost Balloon is one of the more interesting failures in the 50s/60s Jules Verne cycle. Rarely seen today, the movie has a game cast, a director with excellent genre credentials, and some outstanding widescreen photography to display. You can tell that the filmmakers wanted desperately to emulate the major epics that had gone before, offering a Verne-inspired plot, lots of stock Verne situations, and a lilting theme song crooned over elaborate animated title work. Unfortunately, you can also tell that they didn't have nearly enough cash on hand to follow through with these grand ambitions. Flight of the Lost Balloon is not only a low-budget film, it's a cheap film--and way too cheap to have attempted anything like the continent-spanning adventure story we see sketched out here. The movie seems to be based, if only in spirit, on Verne's very first novel Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Commissioned by the London Geographical Society, Dr. Joseph Faraday (Marshall Thompson) attempts an aeronautical voyage across Africa to rescue a lost explorer. Along the way, a mysterious, nameless "Hindu" commandeers the expedition for purposes of his own. Despite a lengthy cannibal episode played mostly for laughs, Flight of the Lost Balloon was definitely intended as a straightforward action-adventure movie (quite unlike the "official" version of Five Weeks that would appear a year or so later). The story features several interesting plot twists and includes some effective villainy by James Lanphier, in an oily performance reminiscent of Vincent Price. Sadly, the meager budget ruins everything. The production, apparently, couldn't even afford a real hot-air balloon: every single aerial shot in the picture appears to have been accomplished with the miniature balloon Thompson proudly displays (as a "test model") in the first reel! Actually, I wonder whether the budget wasn't cut drastically during the shooting of the film itself. That's the only way I can account for several of this movie's many curiosities. The music score, for instance, disappears completely about half way through, leaving nothing but a long inexplicable silence. Likewise, a major special effects sequence seems half-finished. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the giant condor attack over Lake Tanganyika had originally been intended as a stop-motion set piece ala Ray Harryhausen. Director Nathan Juran had just scored a hit with Harryhausen's 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and the "Projects Unlimited" effects group hired for Lost Balloon included several expert stop-motion animators. As it stands however, the episode is laughably bad, with two or three see-through condors-on-a-stick buzzing the miniature balloon to no apparent effect. The scene must have looked especially ridiculous on theatre screens. Marshall Thompson went on to star in the "Verne-flavored" Around the World Under the Sea later in the decade, and Juran made one of the best pictures in the entire cycle with 1964's First Men in the Moon. But Flight of the Lost Balloon is little more than a curio. Yet who knows what it might have been like with just a bit more finance available?

Harryhausen crossed Jules Verne with King Kong in his version of Mysterious Island, giving the author's Civil War castaways something really mysterious to look at for a change. The result is a Skull Island-style adventure with a nifty 19th century set-up, and one of the stop-motion maestro's most satisfying films. Harryhausen movies are at their best when Harryhausen is unabashedly the star—-as he is here in Mysterious Island. From this high-water mark in the early Sixties, Harryhausen's films slowly began to shipwreck on two constantly reiterated movie-making clichés. First, writers began to tell Harryhausen that his effects ought to be better integrated into the overall plot, that they ought not to be isolated set pieces sprinkled through the picture like plums in a fruitcake. Secondly, critics continued to repeat the old film music legend that movie scoring is best when it fades unnoticed into the background. Both of these old saws were, in fact, horrible lies. And Mysterious Island is great because Harryhausen and his composer were still refusing to take any notice of them. The effects sequences in Mysterious Island aren't plums in a fruitcake, they're solos in a symphony, they're like the soliloquies in Shakespeare. And Bernard Herrmann's scoring for these episodes is in your face…as it should be. It jumps up and screams "THIS IS A SET-PIECE…AND A GREAT ONE. KICK BACK AND ENJOY IT!" And this, once again, is as it should be. The truth is, that stop-motion isn't an effects technique. It's an art form. If you can't enjoy it for it's own sake, then you can't enjoy it. Every attempt Harryhausen later made to "integrate" his stuff just encouraged people to take it seriously--as a serious attempt, that is, to duplicate reality. Which it isn't. We go to a Harryhausen film for Harryhausen, just as we go to a Chaplin film for Chaplin. If you came in for some other reason, then you picked the wrong movie. That said, Mysterious Island really does work, I think, as a 60s "Jules Verne" picture. The period atmosphere is some of the best in any of those movies and the interesting Nautilus variation we see here is fun to look at in its own right. The acting is quite good also, and Cy Endfield is one of the better Harryhausen directors. But the Verne elements are really just the frame around the picture. Like I said, go for Ray's monsters--then go out and tell the world.

This is a hugely underrated western as eccentric and individual as anything by Peckinpah or Boetticher. One of the early Cinemascope adventures from Fox, GARDEN OF EVIL has a superb cast at the top of their respective games, fantastic special effects, wonderful widescreen photography, and one of house composer Bernard Herrmann's very best scores (which is saying a mouthful). Best of all, it showcases an utterly unique screenplay full of strange, world-weary philosophy that sounds like Hemingway on acid. (Ironically, the chief writer, Fred Frieberger, is best known for producing the third and weakest season of the original STAR TREK -- notorious for its bad writing). At any rate, check this one out the first chance you get. Years of bad pan & scan showings on TV have destroyed its reputation -- but if you ask me, GARDEN OF EVIL is a gem waiting to be discovered, if not a cult waiting to be born!

The world's first nuclear powered submarine, USS Nautilus, was launched at the Electric Boat Shipyard, Groton, Connecticut, on the morning of January 21, 1954. Capable of sailing beneath the polar ice cap, able to plumb depths seldom seen by man, it was the pride of the United States Navy and the literal incarnation of its fictional namesake, imagined 84 years earlier in Jules Verne's "Vingt Mille Lieues sous les Mers". Less than a year after this launching Verne's prophetic book came to theatre screens, resplendent in Cinemascope and blessed with a newfound topicality, as Walt Disney's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" -- one of the producer's best and one of the most thematically resonant films of its era. In 1954, the double-edged sword of high technology was hanging over the head of the entire culture. An almost religious faith in Progress, of course, is one of the distinctive notes of the decade, with Walt himself (producer of television films like "Our Friend the Atom") one of its chief proselytizers. Yet the know-how that won the war was showing its dark side by now; the Soviet Union had exploded its own H-Bomb just a year or so earlier, igniting a worldwide nuclear arms race. The launch then, of the real-life Nautilus was an event full of desperate internal contradictions -- like Captain Nemo himself. The sheer genius of the thing was astonishing, yet for all its godlike ingenuity the USS Nautilus was, first and foremost, a horrific engine of destruction. Most Americans, no doubt, felt that such weapons were necessary, if only to counterbalance the similar armaments the Soviets were undoubtedly developing for their own use. Similarly, Nemo would, in a better world, employ his own Nautilus solely for peaceful purposes, for exploration and scientific discovery. What he actually finds himself using it for however, is nothing less than mass murder. True, the Captain considers his violence different;a war being waged to end all wars. Yet when Aronnax accuses him of being "not only a murderer, but a hypocrite"; the indictment does not miss its mark. We've seen it in his eyes as he pilots the sub, as he watches dozens of "poor sailor men"(as Ned calls them) thrashing, drowning, sinking into the deep, put to death by the action of his own bloodstained hands. In short, Captain Nemo has become the very thing he hates -- and his scientific genius has only made him better at it. This profound ambivalence towards technology informs every foot of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". On the one hand, the Victorian setting allows us to contemplate our own vast progress by imagining how impressed someone like Professor Aronnax would be by encountering it. Like Walt himself giving personal tours of Disneyland, we jaded moderns get to rekindle our own sense of wonder by conducting guided tours of our now-workaday "World of Tomorrow" for a truly appreciative audience. Yet just as we start to really enjoy ourselves in this, "20,000 Leagues" feels compelled to remind us that Nemo is doomed, that not even Nemo knows how to control the terrible spirits now pouring out of science's Pandora's Box. Ned Land is clearly a dunderhead, clearly the lesser man of the two; just as the stalwart but slightly thick Captain Hendry was Dr. Carrington's pale shadow in Howard Hawks' "The Thing" a few years earlier. Yet Land lives to tell the tale, and Hendry brings Carrington home on a stretcher--not without a sad tribute on his lips to the Doctor's admirable but impractical idealism. In much the same way, Fifties filmgoers (a stupidly maligned species, in my view) were perfectly willing to admire Captain Nemo's dreamy pacifism; even willing, for 127 minutes or so, to wring their hands with him over all the moral ambiguities of the human condition. But this was, after all, the same intensely practical generation that had watched gentle, scholarly Neville Chamberlain wring his hands right into a second world war for humanity. So at the end of the day, with the lives and happiness of their children and grandchildren on the line, the Americans that first enjoyed "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" deliberately chose to hand their destinies over to Ned Land and Captain Hendry; to the hard-boiled, square headed Trumans and Eisenhowers of the world. Yet not entirely without regrets, I think...as the very existence of these films testifies.

This spectacular but ill-fated film was MGMs entry into the SF/Fantasy mini-boom of the 1920s. Attempting to cash in on the success of blockbusters such as The Lost World (1925) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924) Louis B. Mayer ordered a script fashioned which would be an amalgam of several Verne novels, with plot elements borrowed from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Master of the World, Michael Strogoff, along with the title book itself. As if to signal their hopes for the film to the world, the producers hired Lloyd Hughes, bright-eyed leading man from The Lost World, to play their hero and also retained the services of cameraman J. Ernest Williamson, who had photographed the groundbreaking underwater scenes featured in the 1916 version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The production was an exceptionally troubled one. The Mysterious Island was three years in the making, delayed and delayed, once by a hurricane that completely destroyed Williamson's underwater film laboratory. The decision to make the film in Technicolor (the original two-strip process introduced earlier in 1926 with Fairbanks's Black Pirate) was impeding progress as well. Then, just as the silent version of the film was approaching completion, the Talkie revolution swept the industry. This sent the filmmakers back to the drawing board yet again, where they reconceived the movie as a predominantly silent picture with several lengthy sound sequences. This decision not only necessitated a great deal of re-shooting, but also the replacement of Warner Oland (originally cast as the heavy of the piece, Baron Falon) with character actor Montagu Love. By the time The Mysterious Island was ready to show publicly it had cost the studio over 4 million dollars, an astronomical sum by the standards of the day. It was far and away MGMs most expensive project to date;and the future of science fiction in film was riding on its success. Those who did see The Mysterious Island during its original release certainly got an eyeful. Reclusive Count Dakkar (Captain Nemo's real name, by the way, as revealed by Verne in the 20,000 Leagues sequel) uses a spectacular volcanic island near the Baltic kingdom of Hetvia as home base for his scientific experiments. There he constructs two futuristic submarines with which he intends to investigate his theory of a mysterious race of half-human fish men living at the bottom of the sea. Just as the first of these submarines sets out on its sea-trials, however, Dakkar's old friend Falon betrays him, overruns his island with soldiers, and takes the Count and his sister Sonia hostage. Using them as bait, Falon lures the first submarine, captained by Dakkar's chief engineer Nicolai Roget, back into port and sinks it with cannonballs. As it descends uncontrollably into the depths, the triumphant Falon boards the second boat, which will now become an undreamed-of weapon of destruction in his ruthless and ambitious hands. The Baron hasn't reckoned on the determination of Sonia, however, who is willing to sink the second sub as well, with herself and Falon on board, rather than see her brother's work used for world domination. As Submarine #2 follows the other into the hopeless abyssal depths, The Mysterious Island begins to unleash its impressive array of special effects. Though undoubtedly crude by today's standards, these effects (similar to those seen in Thief of Bagdad) are nonetheless wonderfully imaginative, having something of the appeal of an elaborate puppet show. And the rigid diving suits the aquanauts use during the finale are worthy of mention also; somehow fanciful and yet believable at the same time, they're still impressive today. I think the drama in The Mysterious Island works well, too. Lionel Barrymore's transformation from idealistic, would-be benefactor of humanity into embittered vigilante is quite effective, and the torture scene that brings about this transformation is wrenching. Much has been made of the film's lack of fidelity to the original book;too much, in fact. What the filmmakers seem to have envisioned was an epitome of Verne, an attempt to capture the essence of the Vernian world rather than a literal adaptation of any one book. This being the case, I think it's interesting just how many of the author's themes did make it into The Mysterious Island. In fact, if you stopped the film just before the end it would work as an interesting prequel to Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The traumatic events that ignited Captain Nemo's anti-war crusade, merely alluded to in the Disney version, are vividly depicted here. At any rate, The Mysterious Island was, as you may have guessed by now, an abject failure at the box-office. For reasons that aren't quite clear, audiences of 1929 stayed away in droves and the film recouped less than ten per cent of its negative cost. The impact of this calamity, both on MGM and on the rest of Hollywood, would be difficult to overstate. The Mysterious Island disaster not only frightened producers away from Jules Verne, it cast a stink of failure over the entire concept of science-fiction cinema, a stink that clung to it for nearly 25 years. On the rare occasions when a sci-fi theme or concept did make it to the screen during the Thirties or Forties it was as part of a horror movie or in a cheap serial made for children. The Mysterious Island, in other words, managed to nip the whole burgeoning genre in the bud. The film itself was forgotten by MGM and nearly lost, perhaps on purpose. Even today, it can only be seen in black and white; no Technicolor print is known to exist.

This movie wasn't given a chance back in the 80s simply because it was based on a toy. Nowadays, with big-budget epics based on video games and other playthings being a common occurrence, you'd think people would be a bit more open-minded. It's true that MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE really is a low-budget movie but it does a great job stretching its meager funds into a very elaborate fantasy look. The production design by William Stout is fabulous and Gary Goddard's direction is quite stylish. Bill Conti's music score is especially noteworthy -- one of the best fantasy-adventure scores of the era. Skeletor's prosthetic make-up takes a bit of getting used to (not so great, I'm afraid) but Frank Langella plays him like he was doing Richard III at the Old Vic! I love it -- there's not an ounce of the tiresome eye-rolling which most "legitmate" actors feel compelled to introduce into these types of roles (think Peter O'Toole in SUPERGIRL). Many of the reviews already posted seem to fault the film for not being more faithful to the TV cartoon. I was already a grown-up when this one came out and had never seen the cartoon, so I took it at face value as a stand-alone film. The decision to set most of the picture on earth (which I'm told was done for budgetary reasons) actually gives MASTERS a nice "TARZAN'S NEW YORK ADVENTURE" quality that I find quite appealing. All in all, I think this is the best of the many low-budget STAR WARS imitations that came out in the 80s and a very entertaining drive-in style "night at the movies." My own kids love it as much as I do!

I can certainly understand why someone might not like A.I. (2001 polarized audiences in just the same way) but like it or loathe it, the film ought to be respected for what it is and not picked to pieces by "experts" who don't really understand Kubrick OR Spielberg. First of all, absolute RIVERS of ink have already been spilled about which parts are "obviously" Kubrick or "obviously" Spielberg...and almost all of this airy speculation is, in fact, complete nonsense. For example, many people have written that the first and final thirds of A. I. are "obviously" Spielberg's contribution and that the dark, frightening middle act is the Kubrickian part, with its echoes of "A Clockwork Orange" etc. The actual truth of the matter is an exact and precise mirror image. Kubrick had both the opening AND closing acts planned in minute detail well before his death in 1999 - complete with smiling Blue Fairy, talking Teddy Bear, the whole nine yards. The part he couldn't quite lick (according to his friend and "A.I." producer Jan Harlan) was the dark "Kubrickian" middle; believe it or don't, this is the part of the film where Steven ("Hook") Spielberg made his greatest contribution. Likewise, the same people who disdain "pop" movie director Spielberg in favor of the cynical, sophisticated auteur Kubrick are suffering from fashionable but foolish caricatures of both men. Stanley Kubrick (according to his daughter) listed "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" "American Werewolf in London" and "White Men Can't Jump" among his favorite recent films. And Steven Spielberg...well, anyone who claims NOT to be able to see that "Jaws" "Raiders" and "Private Ryan" represent some of the very best film art of the 20th century is, I'm sorry, simply PUTTING ON AIRS(and Stanley Kubrick would be among the first to say so). The fact is that Kubrick himself PICKED Spielberg for this film...and picked him FOR his "Spielbergishness." He tried repeatedly to give the project away to Spielberg, saying (again according to Harlan) that "you would be the best guy to direct this; I'll be the producer." They worked together on the project for nearly fifteen years, and both personalities are woven inextricably into the basic fabric of the work. The so-called "clash" of their two styles is something that Kubrick INTENDED, and (though I won't go into it here) is actually the key to the meaning of this important movie. At any rate, I encourage anyone who may have been disappointed with A.I. to go back and give it another shot...and this time think less about who did what and when, and more about the things that BOTH of these master filmmakers intended us to be thinking about: love, birth, death, duty, fear, longing, God, Mommy, and our own childhood memories.