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RAQUEL WELCH DONALD PLEASENCE: FANTASTIC VOYAGE : PHOTO GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Stephen Boyd (Charles Grant), Raquel Welch (Cora Peterson), Donald Pleasence (Dr Maxwell Michaels), Arthur Kennedy (Dr Peter Duval), William Redfield (William Owens), Edmond O’Brien (General Carter), Arthur O’Connell (Colonel Reid) 

PRODUCTION: 

Director – Richard Fleischer, Screenplay – Harry Kleiner, Adaptation – David Duncan, Story – Jay Lewis Bixby [Jerome Bixby] & Otto Klement, Producer – Saul David, Photography – Ernest Laszlo, Music – Leonard Rosenman, Photographic Effects – L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank & Emil Kosa Jr, Art Direction – Dale Hennesy & Jack Martin Smith, Submarine Design – Harper Goff. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.  

SYNOPSIS:

Scientist Jan Benes defects to the West but an assassination attempt leaves him a coma. Agent Charles Grant is recruited by the top-secret organization Combined Miniaturized Deterrence Forces. He learns that he is to be part of a crew aboard a submarine The Proteus. The crew and submarine will be reduced to microscopic size and injected into the Benes’s bloodstream in order to operate on the surgically inaccessible clot in his brain using a laser. Injected into the body, Grant and the surgical team travel through the bloodstream in the submarine, marvelling at the wonders of the human body seen on a microscopic level. They must reach the brain within 60 minutes or else the effect will wear off and they will return to full-size. However, the voyage is undermined by one of the crew who is a saboteur and is prepared to risk everything to stop the mission.

COMMENTARY:

Fantastic Voyage is one of my all-time favourite science-fiction films. It is one of the most ingenious pieces of pure conceptual science-fiction poetry that the genre has ever created. One can ridicule its problems and holes, which are manyfold, but it is impossible to argue with the conceptual brilliance of the film, the sheer imaginative splendour of the idea of conducting a journey by miniaturized submarine through the human body. The script, which comes in part from science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby, knows exactly what a sense of wonder is. And the film creates an amazing view of the human body as a veritable Aladdin’s cave of marvels, more wondrous, colourful and lit up than it could possibly ever be in real life. Even if the superb sets and effects are occasionally beset by grainy mattes lines and the visibility of wires, the imagination of the exercise soars. It is a pure celebration of science-fiction as conceptual poetry rather than as science. Indeed, Fantastic Voyage is an object lesson in what science-fiction can do on screen that the written page can never replicate.  

Jerome Bixby originally envisioned the film as a Jules Verne-ian period piece a la the fad for retro-Victorian science-fiction created by Fantastic Voyage director Richard Fleischer’s own 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). This is something that would have been fascinating – but it was changed during rewriting and the film updated into the Space Age. Now it echoes with the sense that humanity was on the frontier of taking a quantum leap forward and conquering the whole universe. “Maybe the ancient philosophers were right – man is the centre of the universe. Man stands between inner and outer space and there is no limit to either,” says Duval during one of his many such pronouncements. The film is almost a hymn to Space Age technology. 

Richard Fleischer follows the operation with wonderfully methodical exactitude – the journey through the vast labyrinth by golf cart, the operation being monitored by characters in lab coats on blinking, whirring computers, the submarine slowly being placed on an hexagonal dais, the pickup trolley being wheeled in and the submarine being shrunken in a glass tube and then connected to a syringe. The sense of detail and detached clinicism to the operation is enthralling. Contrast this to the wave of hand that usually produced marvels of super science in 1950s science-fiction or the heated fervour of madness under which discovery was conducted in 1930s and 40s mad scientist films – there is the sense that the future is here right now. 

Once inside the body, Fantastic Voyage is dramatically construed as a series of set-pieces involving journeys to a particular part of the body whereupon something goes wrong with regular predictability. It is the things going wrong that makes the story dramatically gripping. The scenes navigating through the temporarily stopped heart, the manned venture into the lungs, and especially the seat-edge suspenseful passage through the inner ear as everybody in the operating room has to remain absolutely still and not make a sound lest they cause the inner ear to vibrate are utterly gripping.

Unfortunately, in the numerous re-writings the script clearly underwent, not much attention was paid to the characters who are all written to type – the square-jawed jock hero, the curvaceous token female, the atheistic traitor. Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, in her first leading role, are both wooden, although this is not a film where one has come expecting penetrating character depth. What is worse is the character of Duval the surgeon has no other characterization than to stand around and delivers ponderous pronouncements about “the miracle of life.” “40 million beats a year,” someone comments in reference to the heart, to which his reply is “All that stands between man and eternity.” It is a not particularly subtle debate – the side of good shows religious awe at the miraculous nature of the human body, while the contrary opinion represents godless atheism and is ultimately revealed as being a Communist traitor (even if Communism is not directly referred to in the film), not to mention is also the perpetual voice of cowardice and defeatism on the mission.

You cannot deny that there are numerous logic holes in the film. One can forgive minor quibbles such as the impossibility of squeezing normal-size air molecules into a micro-sized snorkel, or how surface tension would make it extremely difficult to swim inside a tear. However, there is one gaping hole that you could drive a full-size submarine through and that is this:– the film establishes that it is necessary that the operation be completed within a 60 minute limit otherwise the crew and submarine will return to full-size. (Interestingly, the dramatics of the journey take longer than 60 minutes to occur on screen). However, at the end of the film, the crew return to full-size but somehow leave a submarine and the body of the traitor behind in Benes’s brain after both have been consumed by a white blood cell. Do the filmmakers somehow think that being consumed by a white blood cell will fail to cause them to return to full size? Not to mention the fact that at some point between when they complete the operation and swim out, the crew also discard the laser in the brain. Everybody also seems to have forgotten about the fact that a six foot tall cylinder of water was reduced to the size of a syringe and injected into Benes – indeed, the amount of water injected into Benes’s body is far more than his body mass, which would surely cause him to literally explode when it too returns to normal size. At least, the producers had the good sense to recruit science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov to write the novelization Fantastic Voyage (1966), which is one of the finest in the usually creatively impoverished arena of film novelizations, wherein Asimov patches up many of the scientific and plot holes. For all its logical failings, Fantastic Voyage is still one of the most ingenious pieces of total Hollywood bunkum. 

There was a short-lived animated tv series Fantastic Voyage (1968-9). There have been plans in the 1990s to mount a remake as directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day (1996) fame. James Cameron also expressed interest, although apparently Roland Emmerich rejected his script. Joe Dante’s Innerspace (1987) was a spoof.

Richard Fleischer has directed a number of other genre films – Disney’s classic Jules Verne adaptation 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), the musical version of Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), the psycho-thriller See No Evil/Blind Terror (1971), the true life serial killer film 10 Rillington Place (1971), the over-populated future film Soylent Green (1973), Amityville 3-D (1983), and the Robert E. Howard adaptations Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985).

REVIEW:HERE

IMGAES: MARCUS BROOKS   

BARBARELLA: BLACKBOXCLUB PROMO : JANE FONDA

'THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS' : HOWARD KEEL JANETTE SCOTT: REVIEW AND GALLERY OF THE 60'S CLASSIC

CAST:

Howard Keel (Bill Masen), Nicole Maurey (Christine Durant), Janina Faye (Susan), Kieron Moore (Tom Goodwin), Janette Scott (Karen Goodwin), Carole Ann Ford (Bettina), Mervyn Johns (Professor Coker), Geoffrey Matthews (Luis de la Vega), Gilgi Hauser (Teresa de la Vega)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Steve Sekely, [Uncredited Additional Scenes – Freddie Francis], Screenplay – Phillip Yordan, Based on the Novel by John Wyndham, Producer – George Pitcher, Photography – Ted Moore, Music – Ron Goodwin, Special Effects – Wally Veevers, Makeup – Paul Rabiger, Production Design – Cedric Dawe. Production Company – Security Pictures.

SYNOPSIS:

Sailor Bill Masen is in hospital for an eye operation. With his eyes bandaged, he is unable to witness a freak meteorite shower that occurs that night. When he wakes up in the morning, Masen finds London in chaos with the entire populace having been blinded by radiation from the meteorite shower. The shower has also brought with it triffids, a form of ambulatory, carnivorous plant that now emerge to prey upon the helpless populace. Gathering a small group of seeing survivors, Masen makes his way across Europe fighting off the triffids and searching for survivors to reorganise civilisation.

COMMENTARY

In the 1950s, British author John Wyndham was for a time regarded as a successor to H.G. Wells. Wyndham had considerable success with novels such as The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). In effect, Wyndham took the apocalyptic science-fiction of Wells and reworked it into disaster parables for middle-class England of the 1950s. John Wyndham’s books proved very popular in the time, as much with crossover audiences as they were with science-fiction readers.

This film of the John Wyndham novel is mostly – and rightly so – lambasted for the complete demolition job it does of the book. The script was from Phillip Yordan a prolific Hollywood screenwriter who wrote a number of Cinemascope religious/historical epics – El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and had revealed an equally clod-handed hand for science-fiction with Conquest of Space (1955). The director was Hungarian émigré Steve Sekely, who had made a number of crime thrillers in the 1940s and previously visited genre material with the cheap Revenge of the Zombies (1943).

Most insulting of the changes that the film rings up is its need for a happy ending where humanity overcomes the triffid menace. This is hilariously tipped by a prominently featured sign: “Seawater: Warning – Highly Dangerous” sitting in the lighthouse – and it is no cheesier than when Dorothy employed it against the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939). The ending with the masses trouping in a long line up to a church to, what the narrator ominously informs, “give thanks” for their delivery, unhappily looks back to the pious ending of the equally pillaged film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1953). It is an ending that seems all the more false for the abject cheer in the face of the situation ie. 99% of the world having been blinded.

On the plus side, it should be said that The Day of the Triffids has its occasional moments. After a dull opening, the film impresses for a time, even if all that impresses has been taken direct from John Wyndham. The blindness is neatly introduced in a scene where a doctor gets Howard Keel to examine his eyes, confirming the diagnosis of blindness, then sends him to find a non-existent satchel while behind a screen one can see the doctor running up to the window and then the smash of glass as he jumps through. Steve Sekely is even good enough to improvise a series of apocalyptic vignettes of his own invention, most impressively the cutaway to the panic of the passengers aboard a plane about to crash because it has no more fuel. However, by the time the film has reached the continent, any semblance to John Wyndham has been abandoned and the plot peters out into a series of lacklustre incidents.

The effects work is of a decidedly variable quality. The opticals work with a meteorite shower flashing down behind and lighting up the interior of the conservatory is fine, as are the patchwork opticals of a burning London. However, when it comes to actually having to build models it seems the budget has run out, failing at all to show the crashing of the train into the station or the plane into the docks. The triffids move exactly as though they are being pulled along on a low trolley from below camera-height. At least Steve Sekely whips them up into some occasionally effective scares – one scene with a triffid closing in on a skidding car was clearly mimicked seventeen years later by John Carpenter in The Fog (1980). The lighthouse scenes with Kieron Moore and Janette Scott were in fact shot afterwards by Freddie Francis, later to become a genre director for Hammer and Amicus, when the film that Sekely delivered was not up to running length.

The film was remade as a tv mini-series The Day of the Triffids (1981) by the BBC, which is an excellent adaptation that is much more faithful to the novel and has far more convincing Triffid effects. The Day of the Triffids (2009) was a further tv mini-series remake from the BBC with Dougary Scott as Bill Masen and Joely Richardson as Josella, although this widely departed from the John Wyndham novel.

Other John Wyndham screen adaptations are Village of the Damned (1960), from Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was remade as Village of the Damned (1995); the alternate world film Quest for Love (1971); and the children’s tv series Chocky (1984) about an alien visitor. 


REVIEW: Richard Schheib
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks
REVIEW: HERE