Some Sci-fi/horror from the 1950s.

Project Moon Base (1953), directed by Richard Talmadge. The story of the first moon base was supposed to be a TV series in the early fifties, but it did not make the cut and so producers pieced pieces of the TV episodes together and came up with this film. It has its charms – a person walking on the ceiling of the space station, a sign saying “Don’t Walk on the Walls,” and some nifty special effects of docking in outer space. The acting is pretty bad, and the ending calls up thoughts of Adam and Eve. We also have a woman as Commander, and, even more surprisingly, a woman as President of the United States. Of course, we also have agents of a foreign country (guess which one) who wish to destroy America’s Space Station. This one is not particularly well filmed or acted, but somehow it manages to overcome its liabilities. Taken in the right spirit, it is fun.

 

The Magnetic Monster (1953, directed by Curt Siodmak and Herbert L. Strock. This is an intelligent low budget science fiction film about the dangers of nuclear radiation; here it runs amok. We have no giant insects or oversize robots or creatures from the deep. What we have is an atomic isotope that devours energy and doubles its size every 12 hours. If not stopped, this thing will send earth spinning out of control and way into space. The end! Trying to solve the mystery of how to get rid of this thing are Jeffrey Stewart (Richard Carlson) and his colleague Dan (King Donovan) who work for the Office of Scientific Investigation. What they learn is that the only way to rid the world of this thing is for them to take it to Nova Scotia. I’m not kidding – Nova Scotia. Canada’s maritime province saves the world. What could be better? The spectacular climax here is actually lifted from the 1934 German film, Gold, directed by Karl Hartl. This is an earnest little film that somehow works. It also can claim to initiate a cycle of films about the dangers of nuclear research. The early scene in the appliance store is fun. Also fun is the large computer that assists the scientists; it is called MANIAC.

 

Stranger from Venus (1954), directed by Burt Balaban. Made just three years after Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, Stranger from Venus revisits the story of an alien come to earth to warn the people of earth to cease and desist when it comes to nuclear bombs. Unlike the earlier film, this one has a miniscule budget, hardly any special effects, and a cast of humans who prove their ignorance and stupidity. The Stranger here is a man without a name (Helmut Dantine) who has the power to heal, and who likes gardening. What’s not to like. He also seems to have a force field around him that impedes people from touching him, that is all people with the exception of Susan North (Patricia Neal – yes, she was in The Day the Earth Stood Still too). Susan can embrace and even kiss this stranger with a green thumb. Most of the action takes place in an out-of-the-way English pub. Why the alien decided to drop in to this place remains unclear, but he is not going to save humankind from a lonely pub in the “wilds” of England. The film is noteworthy precisely because of its lack of production flourishes and for its earnestness. Oh, and for its unflattering picture of our species.

 

Them! (1954), directed by Gordon Douglas. This is one of the best known Sci-fi/horror films of the 1950s, and for good reason. The production values are excellent, the creatures impressively believable, the characters interesting, and the locations nice. The films opening with the little girl wandering the desert, unable to talk, vacant and then that sound, so chilling. The creatures, by the way, are large ants, and the film lets us know quite a bit about ants and their ways. The ants are large because – you knew this – of atomic testing back in the 1940s. This film is one of many in the 50s that dealt with the atomic bomb and the consequences of radiation. It is also one of the best ones. Edmund Gwenn as Dr. Harold Medford gives a great performance as the person who, along with his daughter Patricia (Joan Weldon), who is also a doctor, figures out what is going on. He also delivers the sobering news that humanity is in a precarious situation now that the nuclear genie has been loosed. Other stalwarts in the cast include James Whitmore, James Arness, Olin Howland, Dub Taylor, Walter Coy, Sean McClory, Fess Parker, Sheb Wooley, Dick York, Jack Perrin, Leonard Nimoy, and Willis Boucher, familiar faces all. Sidney Hickox is the cinematographer, and his work here is sharp and impressive.

 

The Collosus of New York (1958), directed by Eugene Lourie. Here is a 1950s monster film that mixes Frankenstein with Der Golem. The story s preposterous, but somehow engaging. In short, the family of famous scientists comes a cropper when one son, Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin), a “genius” who is slated to help humanity is hit by a car and dies. His lunatic father William (Otto Kruger) is a brain surgeon, and he decides to remove his dead son’s brain and revive it. Another son, Harry (John Baragrey), is a whiz with robotics and automation. William convinces Harry to fashion a 12-foot body in which to lodge Jeremy’s brain. What could possibly go wrong? Jeremy, now a colossus, finds a way to reconnect with his young son Billy (Charles Herbert), and he is not pleased when others try to keep Billy from him. So he learns how to mesmerize people, making creaking sounds and flashing his bright eyes. The action moves on to a United Nations Peace conference where Jeremy turns up and fries any number of people by sending a beam of light from his eyes. I suspect this film could have had something to say about science overreach, about automation, about family, and maybe other things too. As it is, the film stumbles along delivering one impossibility after another. The bits that deal with Jeremy’s desire to connect with Billy and his family may point forward to Robocop. But this is, perhaps, the least of Eugene Lourie’s four monster features: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Giant Behemoth (1959), Gorgo (1961), and this one.

 

The Hideous Sun Demon (1958), directed by Robert Clarke. Another 50s cheapie, this one a riff on the werewolf and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde films. Robert Clarke plays Dr. Gilbert McKenna who does research that uses radiation. Somehow, he gets a severe and rare case of radiation poison. His exposure to radiation isotopes proves deadly. Rather than just growing sicker and sicker until he passes, Gilbert discovers his illness only turns him into a hideous demon when he is exposed to the sun. This hideous demon is a throwback to the early stages of evolution. Like poor Larry Talbot, Gilbert is the victim of a terrible affliction. We know how these things turn out. The demon suit here is pretty good, reminding me of a cross between the werewolf we all know and love and the creature from the Black Lagoon. The script has its moments: for example, “I've told him before that bourbon and water go together, not bourbon and radiation!" The focus on Gilbert’s struggle to come to terms with his affliction does give the film a little heft. The finale at an oil field that seems to sit right aside a suburban housing zone is memorable, if predictable. The scene in the shack with the little girl meeting poor Gilbert reminds me of a scene in James Whale’s Frankenstein, although the outcome here is rather more benign. Also memorable is the infamous “rat scene.” Quickly let me add, no rats were harmed during the making of this film. All in all, this is a film for those who like the oddball outings from Poverty Row.

 

Corridors of Blood (1958), directed by Robert Day. I suspect the title caught the eye of Stanley Kubrik. Now I wonder if he was disappointed not to find corridors of blood in this film. This is not to say the film disappoints; it does not. Here Boris Karloff plays the good Dr. Bolton who offers free service to the poor when he is not conducting surgery in a London hospital in the 1840s. In his spare time, he seeks a way of providing painless surgery, or separating the knife from the pain, as he says. This is before the arrival of chloroform. Anyway, you can bet that things go awry for the good doctor who before long finds himself without a job and with an addiction to the stuff he has been inhaling as he tries to find a way to make surgery painless. He also finds himself under the influence of Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee) and Black Ben (Francis De Wolff). This is all very captivating, but what is even more engaging is the mise en scene. The sets for the London streets and inns are excellent. The film is worth watching just for its visual delight in recreating London in the mid nineteenth century. But we also have Boris managing to convince us of this good man’s turmoil as he descends into addiction and grows more frantic to solve the problem of painful and bloody surgery.

 

The Haunted Strangler (1958), directed by Robert Day. Here is one for fans of Boris Karloff. He plays novelist James Rankin who is convinced that twenty years ago an innocent man went to the gallows, and he, Rankin, is out to exonerate this man and identify the actual murderer. As things move along in dark musty chambers, the Judas Hole, a cabaret with a lively set of cancan girls dancing up a storm and a couple of buxom women followed by someone sinister, and a creepy graveyard with rats, we begin to unravel a tangled plot as Rankins’s detective work reveals the truth. The film gathers elements of the Jack the Ripper story with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and when I tell you this, you will have a spoiler. Sorry. But the film is worth seeing if you like this sort of thing. Karloff, in the late stage of his career, is just fine, and the atmospherics are also just fine for a modest low-budget film. This little horror gem is character driven, and satisfyingly so.

 

The Lost Missile (1958), directed by Lester Wm. Berke. Shot newsreel-style, this little pot-boiler has a rogue missile shooting across Canada and northern United States, leaving a five-mile swathe of devastation in its wake. Ottawa goes up in flames. Where this missile comes from, who controls the missile, its motives, all remain a mystery. Nothing is revealed. The warning about atomic destruction is as clear as it could be. Main characters include Dr. David Loring (Robert Loggia) and his fiancé, Ellen Parker (Joan Woods). As things turn out, only Dr. Loring can save the world, or at least New York City, and to do so, he must sacrifice himself. Special effects are minimal, the acting bellicose, the story familiar. On the plus side, the whole thing is brisk and to the point. The film works as a low-budget precursor to such later films as Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Fail Safe (1964). 

 

The Brain Eaters (1958), directed by Bruno VeSota. Made for a mere $26,000, The Brain Eaters does not manage to live up to its title. It does, however, attempt to cover similar ground to Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), only here the pods are replaced by small furry tentacled parasites who have lived beneath the earth for millions of years and are only now, in 1958, making themselves visible in small town Illinois. If one of these parasites attaches itself to the back of your neck, you become zombified. The acting is worthy of the $26,000 budget. The camera work shows a few nifty tilts just to let us know that things have gone awry in this Illinois town. Like a few other films of the 50s, The Brain Eaters turns to electricity to finish off the parasites. If you are interested in the paranoia of the post-war period, then this film will hold some interest. By the way, Leonard Nimoy turns up as Professor Cole; he is unrecognizable as we see him looking a bit like Gandalf as he sits in a hazy room. This hazy room is inside a strange cone that has appeared for some reason (I may have missed the reason), and the good professor Cole has been taken over by the parasites. But don’t worry, the end here is not like the end of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

The Mugger (1958), directed by William Berke. This little police procedural is quite captivating. It is also rather daring for 1958. Well it is 1958, and so the film does exhibit an insensitivity to gender issues, the men here, both good guys and bad, leering whenever a pretty woman is nearby, and making sexist remarks regularly. The story concerns the police trying to identify a man who terrorizes women in the dark streets of an unnamed city. This mugger uses a knife to cut the women’s cheek, and he also steels their purse. Knife and purse, see. As detective and psychiatrist Dr. Pete Graham (Kent Smith) explains, these two objects have a Freudian significance, although he never mentions Freud by name. While looking for the mugger, Pete is asked to help a taxi driver friend, Eddie (James Franciscus), with a problem at home. It seems the sister of Eddie’s wife is giving them difficulty. Meanwhile, Pete’s fiancé Claire (Nan Martin), also a cop, is working undercover at a sleezy dance hall where Eddie’s sister happens to work. Finally, the muggings escalate to murder. The mystery grows deeper. Is the mugger the same person as the murderer? This tangle of a tale is carried out efficiently and, to my mind, satisfactorily. 

 

Giant from the Unknown (1958), directed by Richard E. Cunha. “A very large, degenerate, Spanish conqueror is freed from suspended animation by lightning and goes on a killing spree in a small town.” This is the synopsis on IMDB, and its okay, although the large conquistador does not make it into the small mountain town of Pine Ridge. He stays above the snow line while Sheriff Parker (Bob Steele – yes, that Bob Steele), and others seek him here and there. Meanwhile Dr. Frederick Cleveland (Morris Ankrum) and his daughter Janet (Sally Fraser), accompanied by Wayne Brooks (Ed Kemmer), look for artifacts left by the Spanish in the 15^th century – or whenever long ago. One of these Spanish conquistadors has been preserved in some exceptional soil until a bolt of lightning rouses him from his centuries old slumber. Awake, this large fellow goes about hurling people hither and yon. Jack Pierce provides the makeup for the giant, the same Jack Pierce who worked on Universal’s Frankenstein and Mummy films. This is one of many low-budget monster films tossed off in the 1950s. Despite its budget, this film is well made. The locations are fine, the group of people familiar, the plot predictable, and the whole agreeably hokey. The one quite laughable moment occurs when the giant falls at the end.

 A few films.

Immensee (1943), directed by Veit Harlan. Here is a tearjerker from mid-war Germany. Immensee is a film that aspires to the condition of Hollywood’s Casablanca, even echoing that film at the end when our two protagonists part ways, one leaving on a plane and the other staying where she is. These two are star-crossed lovers, their stars crossed mostly because of the wanderlust of Reinhardt Torsten (Carl Raddatz), a music conductor and composer of international fame. The woman he leaves behind when he embarks on his peripatetic journeys is Elisabeth Uhl (Kristina Soderbaum), a woman hopelessly in love with Reinhardt, but also loved from afar by her neighbour Erich. What happens is this: Reinhardt stays away too long and Elisabeth marries Erich, only to have Reinhardt return looking to pick up with Elisabeth from where he left off. What is a poor girl to do: go off with the man she pines for or remain with the steadfast husband who loves her deeply, even to the pojnt of self-sacrifice? In this very Aryan world, there is only one thing she can do: fulfill her duty to her husband. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this film is its colour cinematography. The music is by Wolfgang Zeller. The melodrama has, I suspect, lost effectiveness over the years.

 

Opfergang (The Great Sacrifice 1944), directed by Veit Harlan. Once again Carl Raddatz and Kristina Soderbaum are star-crossed lovers in this melodrama concerning duty, the human heart, and behaving stoically in the face of a dire fate. Raddatz is the adventurer Albrecht Froben who finds himself infatuated with the chilly Octavia (Irene von Meyendorff). In fact, he is so infatuated with Octavia that he proposes to her, and she accepts. Then comes next door neighbour, the peripatetic Finnish woman Äls Flodéen. Äls is adventurous and flirtatious, and, of course, Albrecht is smitten. Oh, but wait, Äls is also ill with something that portends her imminent demise. So we have a love triangle and each person involved must make sacrifices. So we have love, duty, sacrifice, and even honour working their way into the viewers’ feelings. This is a movie made during the worst of times, and yet it holds onto hope. As with Immensee, we have sumptuous colour and excellent set designs. The actors perform with conviction. 

The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes (1937), directed by Karl Hartl. This film from UFA in Germany just a couple of years before the war is a romp. We have two con men, Morris Flint (Hans Albers) and his sidekick Macky McPherson (Heinz Ruhmann), stopping a train and after boarding being taken for the famous English sleuths, Holmes and Watson. Many hijinks follow involving a master forger, a gang of thieves, and two young female innocents, Mary Berry (Marieluise Claudius) and her sister Jane (Hansi Knoteck). At times I was reminded of Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931). The film has lots of energy, much action (even a song and dance number performed by the supposed Holmes and Watson), many changes of scenery, a courtroom sequence, and sly talk. There is also much spying and many mistakes of identity which just may be a comment on the state of things in 1937 Germany. The early scenes on the train are reminiscent of Hitchcock in such films as The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Finally, I will confess that the mysterious laughing man was an irritant.

The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), directed by Harald Reinl. The first Dr. Mabuse film arrived in 1922, courtesy of Fritz Lang. The series continued into the early 1970s. This one from 1962 is rough. Lex Barker, one time Tarzan, plays agent Joe Como, out to find a murderer in Berlin and then finding himself on the trail of the dastardly Dr. Mabuse who has a plan to create an army of invisible fighters to take over the world. He is ambitious, to say the least. We have the familiar stuff with invisibility. The invisible man, however, is not Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss), but rather a scientist who has invented a gadget that renders its wearer invisible. This scientist also happens to be infatuated with cabaret singer, Liane (Karin Dor). We have the invisible stuff with opening doors, footsteps in a carpet, chairs sagging and so on; we also have a disfigured person, and a melting face. I must not neglect the clown who plays an important role in the action. Fights are furious, if a tad unconvincing. The acting, well enough said. The film is a mix of H. G. Wells, James Bond, and The House of Wax.

Fata Morgana (1971), directed by Werner Herzog. Christopher S. Long ends his review of this film with the remark: “But really, there’s just no way to describe it.” And yes, the film is a hallucinatory experience offering the patient viewer the simulation of a mirage. The opening of the film gives us four minutes (seems like more) of airplanes of various sizes landing on the same strip in the rippling heat. This opening should tell us we have arrived on a strange planet, a planet with beauty and ugliness and devastation and hilarity and sadness and things seen that remain unseen, mysterious, disturbing, shaped and shifting. Meanwhile a voice over gives us remnants of a curious creation myth. Curious and curiouser, we travel a wonderland of desert images. We have abandoned places and vehicles, an assortment of people, including child soldiers, a frogman scientist, a man with a monitor, a child holding a strange fox-like creature, a musical duo the like of which you have probably never seen before, and a fellow lying back and puffing a small ball up and down. As we watch these strange goings-on, the soundtrack gives us everything from Mozart to Leonard Cohen, Blind Faith, and Third Ear Band. What does all this add up to? Is this a documentary or simply a vision of Hell pretending to be Paradise? The tourists, or are they tourists, near the end who bend and wave from beneath the sand dunes just might remind us of the Inferno, or they just may be having fun. In any case, we have enough shots of destroyed spaces and desiccated carcases to let us know the planet has not fared well under the stewardship of human beings. This is quite an amazing film, even for Werner Herzog.

Baal (1970), directed by Volker Schlondorff. Rainer Werner Fassbinder stars as the eponymous character, bad-boy poet Baal, in this exercise in “New German Cinema.” The film is an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first play, and it has that Brechtian manner of alienating the viewer. Be prepared. While watching the film, I kept thinking of Chatterton, the marvelous boy who died sleepless in his pride, although Baal is the antithesis of the Romantic Chatterton. Baal is the quintessential bad boy, rebel without a real cause, except for a general disdain of everything. The film proceeds in some 24 short chapters in which Baal displays disgust for everything and everyone he meets. He is supposedly a poet of some genius, the film Bucket of Blood kept coming to mind whenever Baal began intoning his “poetry.” Perhaps the one thing Baal, both the film and the character, have going for them is an, what shall I call it?, appreciation for earthiness, even dirt and the body’s place in the earth. What comes to mind here are the likes of Norman O. Brown and Wilhelm Reich, and a certain aspect of the 1960s. In short, this is not a film that will “entertain” you in the usual sense of the word, but it is a film that may set you thinking about such things as conformity, celebrity, non-conformity, anonymity, sexuality, and the surprising unpleasantness of humanity.