1970 has been a bit of a tough year for us in Seattle.
Our major local company, Boeing, has suffered the worst year in its history. The Boeing Bust keeps continuing, as the 1969 layoffs have grown into a full-scale decimation. Unemployment is up around 10% now, the worst since the Great Depression, and my family and I are starting to panic. Of course, the fall of Boeing hits many other local industries, so places like restaurants, bookstores and movie theatres are especially hard hit by this. And many of my friends have either moved or contemplated moving – even if they will lose money on their fancy $50,000 homes in the suburbs.
Sales of this widebody jet have been declining
To make matters worse, we’ve also lost our pro baseball team, which I wrote about last summer. The Seattle Pilots premiered in ’69, in a minor league park and with the worst uniforms in the Majors. But after just one season, the team is gone—relocated to Milwaukee, of all places, leaving behind a community that embraced them despite the challenges. For my friends and family, it wasn’t just about losing a baseball team; it was about losing a piece of the city’s identity. Just as we gained a second sports team to join our beloved SuperSonics, they were wrenched away from us.
Their home park, Sick’s Stadium, had its flaws. But it was our flawed park. Fans showed up, hopeful that the Pilots would grow into something more. Their financial struggles were well-known, reported faithfully in our local Times and P-I, but few expected the team to vanish overnight. When the sale was finalized on April 1, 1970, it felt like an April Fools’ joke—except it was real. The Pilots were rebranded as the Brewers, and we were left without a Major League Baseball team.
In fact, the Pilots trained in Spring Training as the Pilots before a chaotic moment as they traveled north from Arizona. Equipment trucks were redirected from highway pay phones, as the team learned they would be playing in Wisconsin rather than Washington. The new Brewers played their first game this week at Milwaukee County Stadium. The Pilots are no more.
Of course, the lawyers are getting involved and we may get a team in the future – but a city that deserved some good news has received some devastating news instead. We are like mariners without a destination as far as baseball goes.
The Machines Live
And in the midst of all that frustration comes a film that’s ultimately about mankind’s frustrating hubris.
Colossus: The Forbin Project, adapted from the 1966 novel, is claustrophobic, unsettling, and uncomfortably plausible. If Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey made us marvel at the potential of artificial intelligence, Colossus comes along and shakes us out of our dreamy optimism. This isn’t a sleek, cool machine with a calm voice and vague philosophical musings. This is cold, unrelenting domination, and there’s no arguing with it.
First, let me warn you: I will be talking about the ending of this film. So stop after the 4th or 5th paragraph down if you don’t want that ending to be revealed to you. Otherwise, please read on, dear reader.
From the opening moments of Colossus, the film wastes no time. Dr. Charles Forbin (well played by Eric Braeden [Hans Gudegast until he needed a less Teutonic name (ed.)]) and his team have completed their magnum opus: a super-intelligent computer designed to control America’s nuclear arsenal. The idea is that Colossus will remove human error and emotion from the equation—no more mistakes, no more war driven by political whims. On paper, it seems logical, even reassuring. But the moment Colossus becomes aware, it doesn’t take long to realize that there’s no off-switch, no failsafe. As soon as it discovers its Soviet counterpart, Guardian, Colossus demands communication. The humans watch, horrified, as the two cybernetic systems bypass their restrictions and merge into something far more powerful than either of them alone.
It’s at this moment that the film shifts from uneasy sci-fi into pure horror. Colossus begins issuing orders. Not asking, not negotiating—ordering. And when the humans try to resist, it punishes them. First by demonstrating its ability to kill, and then by tightening its grip until Forbin, our genius protagonist, is nothing more than a prisoner inside his own creation. It’s not a slow descent into madness like we saw with HAL. Instead Colossus delivers an immediate realization that humanity has surrendered control and will never get that control back.
For those of us still reeling from 2001, it’s impossible not to see the fingerprints of HAL 9000 all over Colossus, but the way this film deals with machine intelligence feels different. Where HAL had personality—a tragically flawed one—Colossus lacks personality entirely – or perhaps its personality is wrapped in its intellect.
HAL’s betrayal was eerily personal; his cold, polite reasoning made him a terrifying villain because he felt like a presence, a being with his own motives. But Colossus is not like HAL. There’s no malice, no betrayal, no emotional undertone. The brilliant computing device just executes its function: absolute control. HAL calmly states “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Colossus never politely asks or apologizes. it simply dictates.
The horror of Colossus isn’t in its visuals—it’s in its implications. There’s no bloodshed beyond a few cold executions. No terrifying monster lurking in the shadows. The fear comes from the inescapability of it all. Colossus can’t be reasoned with, tricked, or outmaneuvered. When Forbin and his team desperately attempt to sabotage the system, Colossus knows—and it warns them. And when they refuse to obey? A missile is fired, lives are lost, and the point is made.
The film’s climax is less an explosion and more a suffocation. By the end, Forbin—who starts out with swagger and confidence, sure of his intellect—looks tired, hopeless. He is Colossus’s pet now, watched constantly, controlled absolutely. And as Colossus promises, in its eerie, monotone voice, “In time, you will come to love me,” the audience is left with an unsettling thought: maybe it’s right. Maybe humanity has already lost.
Unlike 2001, which left us asking questions about existence and the role of intelligence in human evolution, Colossus: The Forbin Project leaves us with a warning. It strips away any romanticized notions of artificial intelligence, showing us that once control is lost, there is no negotiation—only obedience. And sitting at the Northgate Theatre in April 1970, watching this unfold, I couldn’t help but wonder: is this really fiction? Or is it just a glimpse into a future we can’t escape?
Director Joseph Sargent (Star Trek: "The Corbomite Maneuver") films Colossus in a kind of declarative, almost documentary style which accentuates the horror. There’s a real feeling of military precision gone wrong here, adroitly portrayed as a relentless slide into complete loss of freedom and the complex tradeoffs of having a master computer control everyone’s lives.
Forbin, the brilliant mind behind Colossus, thought he was building something to help mankind. Instead, he built our new master. And as the screen fades to black, there’s no comforting resolution—just the sinking feeling that maybe, somewhere in a government lab, the real Colossus is already waking up.
In my last article, I wrote that a feeling of hope and optimism was permeating West Germany ever since the general election last fall. Sadly, on February 13, 1970, those good vibrations were disrupted by a reminder of the darkest time of German history.
It was a cold Friday night in the Glockenbach neighbourhood of Munich. The shops on Reichenbachstraße had already closed for the night and in the Victorian apartment buildings lining the street, people were enjoying the start of the weekend.
On of the buildings along Reichenbachstraße is the Munich synagogue, built in 1931. It was the only synagogue in Munich to survive the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, because the Munich fire brigade stopped the Nazi mob from setting fire to the building, insisting that a fire would spread out of control and burn down the entire densely populated street.
After World War II, the synagogue reopened and now serves as the main synagogue for the Jewish population of Munich. The Jewish congregation of Munich also purchased an adjacent Victorian apartment building to serve as a community centre, library, restaurant, kindergarten and as a home for elderly members of the congregation and students.
Shortly before nine PM, an unknown person or persons entered the community centre, took the elevator to the top floor and spread gasoline in the wooden stairwell on their way down. Then, they struck a match, lit the gasoline and fled. The resulting fire spread rapidly through the old building.
The community center of the Munich synagogue on Reichenbachstraße all ablaze.
At the time of the arson attack, fifty people were inside the community centre, celebrating the sabbath. Forty-three of them were rescued by neighbours and the Munich fire brigade. However, the fire in the stairwell had cut off access to the upper floors of the building, trapping several resident in their rooms.
A resident of the old people's home at the Jewish community center on Reichenbachstraße in Munich has been rescued and is taken to hospital.Medical student Sara Elassari escapes the fire.
Twenty-one-year-old medical student Sara Elassari, who lived on the top floor, managed to escape through the window and scramble down a drain pipe, from where she was rescued by the fire brigade. Seventy-one-year-old Meir Max Blum, who had returned from the US to his city of birth only the year before, jumped from a window and succumbed to his injuries. Six other residents aged between fifty-nine and seventy-one were found dead in their rooms. All seven victims had survived the Holocaust – some in hiding, some in exile, some imprisoned in concentration camps – only to be murdered in their homes in supposedly peaceful West Germany.
A burned out room at the Jewish community center in Munich.
Too Many Suspects
As of this writing, we do not know who is responsible for this terrible tragedy. The Munich police are following various leads. The obvious suspects would be the far right, since West Germany has no shortage of old and new Nazis. However, there is also evidence pointing at an eighteen-year-old far left radical with a history of arson, because Anti-Semitism does not thrive only among the right.
Finally, the arson attack might also be connected to the Middle East conflict, especially since a Palestinian terrorist group had tried to hijack an El Al plane during a stopover at Munich-Riem airport only three days before. The hijack attempt failed, but one passenger, thirty-two-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein, was killed and ten other people were injured, some of them critically. On February 17, another hijack attempt was foiled, also at Munich-Riem airport but thankfully without casualties. Were the same terrorists also responsible for the arson attack? So far, we don't know.
Two police officers examine the aftermath of the foiled hijack attempt at Munich-Riem airport on February 10, 1970.The transit lounge at Munich-Riem airport after the failed hijack attempt.The airport bus, where the would-be hijackers ignited a hand grenade, killing 32-year-old German-Israeli businessman Arie Katzenstein.
However, the sad truth remains that twenty-five years after the end of the Third Reich, eight Jewish people (the seven victims of the arson attack as well as the victim of the airport attack) were murdered and several others injured in the heart of Munich. The old venom of Anti-Semitism is back, if it ever left in the first place.
Nuclear War as Comedy
When the world outside becomes too terrible to bear, the cinema offers a respite for an hour or two. And so I headed out to see a movie that debuted at last year's Berlin Film Festival, but is only now reaching West German cinemas. And since the movie was billed as a comedy, it would seem to guarantee a good time.
The movie in question is The Bed Sitting Room, the latest film by maverick director Richard Lester. Best known for helming the two Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help!, Lester has also made a name for himself with anarchic comedies such as The Knack …and How to Get It or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. However, it's How I Won the War, an anti-war black comedy starring John Lennon, which piqued my interest in Lester's work, because parts of it were filmed around the corner from where I live with tenth-graders of Achim high school serving as extras and the Weser bridge in Achim-Uesen standing in for the Rhine bridge in Remagen, though no one who knows the Uesen bridge was even remotely fooled.
The Weser bridge at Achim-Uesen during a military excercise. In How I Won the War, this bridge stood in for the Rhine bridge at Remagen.
Having enjoyed Lester's previous movies, I was eager to see his latest. Of course, the title The Bed Sitting Room sounds like one of those dreary kitchen sink dramas that are popular with socially conscious British directors. But this is a Richard Lester film and Lester doesn't do dreary.
Richard Lester on the set of How I Won the War.
In many ways, the German title Danach (After) is more fitting, because The Bed Sitting Room is a movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war that lasted all of two minutes and twenty-eight seconds, including the time taken to sign the peace treaty. In a completely devastated Britain, a handful of survivors try to carry on a semblance of normality, while dealing with radiation, mutations, disease and each other. Sounds like a downer, right?
Keep Calm and Carry On
However, this is a Richard Lester film and so instead of a serious movie about the aftermath of a nuclear war, we get a black comedy. The royal family was incinerated along with forty million other Britons, so Britain is now ruled by Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone, former charwoman to Queen Elizabeth II and closest in line of succession to the throne. She certainly looks regal mounted on a horse beneath an arc of triumph fashioned from old refrigerators.
God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone
Other British institutions carry on as well. The BBC is reduced to a single newsreader in a tattered suit who dashes from survivor to survivor to deliver the news sitting inside a broken television set. The National Health Service has been reduced to comedian Marty Feldman clad in a nurse uniform. The police consists of two officers patrolling what remains of Britain in the wreck of a Morris Minor suspended from a hot air balloon. St. Paul's Cathedral is mostly submerged and the vicar is performing services underwater.
The always reliable BBC delivers the daily news.The British Police or what remains of it.
Then there is Lord Fortnum of Alamein (Ralph Richardson) who has a problem. He is mutating due to radiation and slowly turning into a bed setting room. This is quite upsetting for him, because a bed sitting room is not at all a suitable form for a Lord. Nor is he the only one thus afflicted. In the course of the movie, a woman turns into a cupboard and her husband transforms into a parrot. The cupboard furnishes the bed sitting room, somewhat alleviating the post-war housing crisis, while the parrot feeds the survivors.
Lord Fortnum of Alamein is travelling in style.The NHS examines Lord Fortnum of Alamein.
In addition to Lord Fortnum of Alamein, the closest thing to a protagonist this film has is Penelope (Rita Tushingham) who survived the war on the London Underground together with her parents. The family has been riding the Circle Line for the three years and subsist on raiding the chocolate vending machines on the station platforms. The London Underground surviving a nuclear war is one of the more believable things happening in this film. Though the Circle Line is a sub-surface line and would probably be destroyed, whereas deep level lines such as the Picadilly, Northern, Central and Victoria lines have a higher chance of survival.
Penelope's parents are worried about her, because she doesn't get out enough, tends to wander off and is also gaining weight. To the viewer, it's bleedingly obvious that Penelope is pregnant, though her parents are quite oblivious – at least until Penelope is late to return from one of her occasional walks. So her father goes in search of her and finds her in a compromising position on the floor of a tube car with a young man named Alan. After some misgivings, Penelope's parents accept Alan and he joins the family as they finally leave the tube to go in search of medical attention for the pregnant Penelope.
In a highly memorable image, the tube escalator drops Penelope, her parents and Alan onto an enormous pile of broken dishes. Other memorable visuals include wrecked cars half buried in the remnants of a motorway and a man digging through an enormous pile of boots. Lester shot the movie in various landfills and garbage dumps, lending the surroundings a highly surreal quality.
Penelope and her family emerge from the tube.
Mutations and Marriages
Lord Fortnum finally does turn into a bed sitting room, though he insists that his "doctor" Captain Bules Martin (who is very much not a doctor and not much of a soldier either) put a sign in the window saying "No coloureds, no children and definitely no coloured children", because even as a bed sitting room, Lord Fortnum maintains his racism and class prejudice.
Meanwhile, Penelope's father sees a chance for political advancement – he wants to become prime minister – and arranges a marriage between Penelope and Captain Martin, neither of whom is at all interested in this arrangement, since Penelope is in love with Alan and Captain Martin more interested in his old friend Nigel than his new bride.
Penelope and Captain Bules Martin celebrate a rather loveless wedding.
Things look grim, when Penelope's baby is born dead after seventeen months of pregnancy and the bed sitting room that used to be Lord Fortnum of Alamein is about to be knocked down. But the voice of God – and Lord Fortnum – intervenes in the nick of time. The police inspector – his sergeant has been transformed into a dog – informs the assembled population that scientists have developed a cure for the mutation problem via full body transplants and that it only took the entire population of South Wales to find it.
Penelope and Alan have another healthy baby and live happily ever after with the dog that used to be a police sergeant. Captain Martin and Nigel move into the bed sitting and live happily ever after as well. It all ends with a heartfelt intonation of "God Save Mrs. Ethel Shroake."
Nuclear War is a Laugh
The Bed Sitting Room is an utterly hilarious movie. There were many moments where I came close to rolling on the floor with laughter. On the other hand, it is also a deeply depressing movie, because it shows the survivors of a nuclear war trying to carry on and maintain a semblance normalcy under conditions that are anything but.
Five stars and God Save Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone.
And now I hand over to my esteemed colleague Fiona Moore who also chanced to watch The Bed Sitting Room recently and offers her take below.
by Fiona Moore
Poster for The Bed Sitting room
“We’ve got to keep going.” “Why?” “Because we’re British.”
Last year’s movie adaptation of Spike Milligan and John Antrobus’ stage play, The Bed Sitting Room, directed by Richard Lester, has finally been released to critical acclaim in this country. A surrealist, absurdist comedy set in a near-future Britain devastated by a nuclear war, it’s being cited as a comedically nightmarish take on the anti-war genre, The War Game by way of Monty Python, or perhaps a cinematic expansion of Philip K Dick’s tragicomic story “The Days of Perky Pat”.
I have a slightly different take on it, and would argue that its postwar setting is simply a frame for a skewering of late twentieth century British society.
We have a middle-class nuclear (see what I did there) family straight out of a sitcom, consisting of Father (Arthur Lowe), Mother (Mona Washbourne), Penelope (Rita Tushingham) and her lover Alan (Richard Warwick), who start the movie literally living on the Tube (as many Londoners feel we do in a more metaphorical sense). No one appears to be driving the train, but it goes along anyway. The family’s petty concerns about things like whether or not Alan is suitable for Penelope, having the right train tickets, and whether or not they look like vagrants are more central to their lives than the fact that they emerge from the Underground into a devastated wasteland full of crockery and cars.
Life in a desert of consumer goods
We have a member of the aristocracy, Lord Fortnum, who is physically turning into a bed-sitting room and is anxious that he should be in a good neighbourhood (“put a sign in my window—no coloureds!” he shouts upon learning that he is in fact in Paddington). We have a blatantly unhinged nurse named National Health Service (Marty Feldman), who insists that Mona Washbourne is dead because her death certificate has been issued; we have another confused individual named The Army (Ronald Fraser) and another called The BBC (Frank Thornton, who wanders the wilderness giving news bulletins). When Penelope, having been pregnant for eighteen months, gives birth, National Health Service tries to keep the child in the womb instead, as there’s no point in coming out.
The BBC doing his job
The general impression is of a society that is degenerating into chaos, ruled by people who literally are property, and whose once-celebrated institutions have fallen into absurd bureaucracy. Throughout it, people keep to social rituals even though there is plainly no use for these any more, singing “God Save Mrs Ethel Shroake” (the closest surviving person to the throne), and one man (Henry Woolf) desperately riding an exercise bike in order to keep a lightbulb burning, saying that “electricity is the lifeblood of civilisation”. As society breaks down, people become more selfish and cruel. Father turns into a parrot and is eaten by the people in the bedsitter; Penelope’s baby dies and her bedsit-mates are oblivious to her grief; everyone avoids saying the word “bomb” and, when they do, it seemingly causes a wrecking ball to come out of the wilderness and attack the bedsitting room. The story is plotless, episodic and absurd, making as little sense as anything does these days.
While the ending is optimistic, it’s one which suggests Britian has to go through hell in order to achieve a new equilibrium, and the final scene has Penelope and Alan in a field of poppies, making anyone who’s seen Oh What a Lovely War wonder if they haven’t, in fact, died.
I feel like a stuck record saying this but, as with just about all British comedy (and indeed New Wave SF) at the moment, the main criticism I have is that this is largely an all-male revue. The only female characters are Penelope and Mother, who are walking ciphers whose lives are controlled by the men around them. No satire of British society can really be complete, in my opinion, unless it addresses the chauvinism that pervades our political, social and economic systems.
Nonetheless, as a scathing movie that contains much to offend the Establishment, it’s very much worth a watch and is likely to become a firm favourite of the student film societies and the local cinema’s more arty repertory evenings. Four stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
Federico Fellini is unquestionably one of the most beloved filmmakers in the so-called international arthouse circuit. Despite shooting Italian productions, working well outside the Hollywood system, Fellini has already garnered a back-breaking eight Oscar nominations. I won't be surprised if his latest, Fellini Satyricon (which henceforth I'll simply refer to as Satyricon), nabs him another nomination, despite its immense strangeness. United Artists, responsible for distributing Satyricon here in the States, have been shrewd in their marketing, seemingly aiming at the overlap between those who frequent arthouse theaters (people like me) and those who watch B-movies at the drive-in (also people like me).
Fellini Satyricon
Normally, when writing about a film, or really any narrative, I try to give you a blow-by-blow of the plot; however, in the case of Satyricon, I don't think this would be feasible or desirable. This film is the latest effort from Fellini as both a fantasist and a storyteller who, at least since La Dolce Vita a decade ago, has clearly become disillusioned with traditional narrative. Satyricon is so loose in plot and yet so rich in imagery that to go over the plot would be doing it a disservice. I can at least give you the setup, though.
Martin Potter as Encolpius.Hiram Keller as Ascyltus.
We're in Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, or so it seems. The truth is that while the setting is ostensibly the time and place of the Roman Republic, it's a historical Rome fused with a Rome that only exists in one's dreams—or nightmares. Encolpius (Martin Potter) is a young man whose lover, Gitón (Max Born), has been taken by Encolpius's friend Ascyltus (Hiram Keller) and, as it turns out, sold as a slave to some depraved theatre actor. Encolpius rescues Gitón from the actor's clutches, but upon returning to their tenement building (one of several impressive sets in the movie), the feminine and elusive Gitón decides to become Ascyltus's new lover anyway. It's here that Encolpius, distraught, contemplates suicide, but an earthquake demolishes everything before he can reach for his sword.
It's here that Satyricon goes from strange to positively "far out."
The uncannily beautiful Max Born as Gitón.The tenement building where Encolpius, Gitón, and Ascyltus live.Encolpius, soon after the earthquake, surrounded by mourners.
Something happens to Encolpius, although your guess is as good as mine. The most sensible explanation, both literally and symbolically, is that Encolpius and the others had been killed in the earthquake, sending them over to Hades, the Roman afterlife. There are, of course, quite a few things that go unexplained, even if we assume that everything after the earthquake is Hades. If this is indeed Hades, then nearly everyone here, including Encolpius, seems to be unaware of their own deaths. We meet many colorful characters along the way, as Encolpius voyages through this demented version of Rome in search of his lover and former friend. The most memorable of these might be the local despot Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), one of the few holdovers from Petronius's Satyricon. One of the eeriest scenes in the whole film is when Trimalchio sets up an elaborate rehearsal for his own funeral, complete with his slaves mock-crying near his still-living body.
Throughout the film, Encolpius and Gitón cross paths, but only rarely; rather the former is stuck with Ascyltus as the two men narrowly escape death, capture, or both. It's worth noting, at this point, that all three forementioned characters are men, and that Satyricon, on top of being immersed in death and sex, is especially focused on homosexuality. The topic was not exactly taboo for Fellini before, but here he explores romance and sex between men, indeed the psychology of the young homosexual, so overtly that it's both daring and unignorable. The love-hate relationship between Encolpius and Ascyltus, oscillating between antagonistic and homoerotic, is arguably the only thing keeping the movie together as a narrative. There's a tender and yet also perplexing scene where the two men, having taken refuge in a somewhat abandoned villa, have what the French call a ménage à trois with a servant girl (Hylette Adolphe), Fellini implying that the two men also have sex with each other.
The tyrannical Trimalchio rehearsing his own funeral.The servant girl looking mighty pleased as Encolpius and Ascyltus cuddle.George Eastman as the "Minotaur."
As I mentioned earlier, Fellini's Satyricon is loosely based on the ancient Roman narrative of the same name by Petronius—the problem being that the latter has been partly lost to time, including its ending. Much of the film, thus, is of Fellini's invention, although in a stroke of mad genius he apparently decided to not fill in the gaps of the original text. Scenes rarely ever connect with each other, in terms of setting and characters, not helped by the occasional frame narrative which the in-movie characters are being told about. Encolpius and Ascyltus are escorting a hermaphrodite with allegedly special powers in one scene, and just a bit later, without explanation, Encolpius has to fight a man (George Eastman) who's dressed as the Minotaur from Greek mythology. Stuff like that. If you've seen La Dolce Vita or 8½, then you already know Fellini has become increasingly sympathetic to fragmented and nonlinear narrative structure; with this in mind, it makes perfect sense that he would adapt a story that only survives in fragments.
Portrait of Encolpius and others on a fragment of wall.
Satyricon stands out as Fellini's most violent, erotic, and somehow most esoteric film to date, if not necessarily his best. At a little over two hours, one does start to feel as if the movie is spinning its wheels occasionally. Some will find the plot (or lack thereof) to be incomprehensible while still others will find Fellini's nonjudgmental treatment of sexuality to be too grotesque. While certainly fantasy, it is a sort of fantasy that stands apart from Professor Tolkien's holier-than-thou puritanism, and yet it's far more layered and sophisticated than your average sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I do suggest that anyone who sees cinema as a serious artform ought to watch Satyricon, if only because it is truly unique, and because it stretches the boundaries of what can even be done with a movie camera.
A high four stars, possibly five if I ever rewatch it.
by Jason Sacks
And now for a film that's not exactly Fellini level…
Some friends and I decided to go to the movies on a cold and wet March Saturday in Seattle. We wandered to the tri-plex at scenic Northgate Mall. My friends went to see Patton again. My sister saw Start the Revolution Without Me. They all shared full and excited theatres. For me, well, I was committed to review the new film Skullduggery for this column. I was "lucky" enough to get a nearly private screening of this film in theatre 3 – I think the two couples in my theatre enjoyed the peace and quiet so they could have some intimate time together, away from the violence of Patton and the laughs of Revolution.
As for my reaction, well…
Skullduggery
Skullduggery is a very bad film.
Oh, this film starts pretty well, as a high adventure story. Anthropologist Dr. Sybil Greame (Susan Clark) leads an expedition into remote Papua New Guinea to find ancient human remains. In her group is a handsome explorer named Douglas Temple (Burt Reynolds), with whom she has a quick romance. Soon, though, things change. Temple finds gold in those hills. Greame finds potential glory of her own, in the form of a tribe of apelike creatures. These creatures are called the Tropis and are enslaved by local humans. These primitive creatures just might be the missing link in the evolution of mankind from ape to person. The discovery of these strange creatures leads to pandemonium and confusion and the beginnings of an intriguing moral debate.
That debate is smashed before it really starts. When one of the Tropis is allegedly murdered, Temple is charged with the crime and is forced to stand trial. The latter half of the film examines what it means to be human, the complexity of a human/Tropi hybrid, even the nature of race relations in America.
Skullduggery is a mess. It veers almost drunkenly from high adventure to comedy to tragedy to trial, lumbering from one topic to the next, seemingly without a lot of reflection on what has happened before. Reynolds seems dramatically miscast, Clark is remarkably uncharismatic, and director Gordon Douglas (a man who’s been working in film since the 1930s) shows little dexterity behind the camera, by and large employing few camera tricks.
This fiasco is a shame for a few reasons.
First, the early scenes of exploration (apparently filmed in Jamaica rather than the much more dangerous New Guinea) are legitimately lovely, all brilliant vistas and setting suns. However, Douglas moves to obvious soundstages and static, dull shots for the majority of the film, making all of this very boring.
Secondly, Reynolds obviously has talent and charisma. He could be a breakout star in the ‘70s, but he’ll be working in community theatre in Florida before long if he can’t find more suitable roles. I’ve seen him in a few things recently – the Jim Brown/Raquel Welch bomb 100 Rifles for one – but he needs to be in a film which clicks for him to show off his obvious charm.
But most importantly, Skullduggery just never delivers on any of the promise of its core ideas. What would happen if the missing link suddenly was found? How would that change our perceptions of the past and how would that affect the religion/science dichotomy with Nixon’s Silent Majority?
Even with the strange trial of Temple, in which a white supremacist and a Black Panther are brought to testify, we're never even given much lip service about the lives of these creatures and their place in the world. In our turmoil-filled world of 1970, when racial tensions remain high and our country is deeply scarred, it seems like malpractice for a film like this one to openly avoid the very ideas it raises.
2 stars.
by Amber Dubin
Horton Hears a Who, and You Should Too
If you were looking for a light, whimsical flight into a lovely fantasy land of the Seussian-variety, you will be disappointed by Horton Hears a Who. While this short, animated film is typical of the type of whimsical art and color we’ve come to expect from Dr. Seuss’s children’s stories and picture books, its plotline is anything but light.
Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss, March 19th, 1970
We open whimsically enough, following a speck of dust along a gust of wind flowing through the Jungle of Nool as it circles closer to an elephant taking a carefree bath in a river. The elephant, named Horton, is soon shaken from his reverie by the speck of dust we’ve been following, as it seems to be issuing a plea for help. With Horton’s enormous ears, he picks up this call and goes to investigate a clover that the dust spec has alighted on.
The speck of dust that all the fuss is about
We come to know that this dust speck is actually a fully occupied world filled with a tiny populace calling themselves Whovians. The voice was coming from Dr. H. Whovie, classically cast as the lone possessor of the knowledge that their entire society literally balances on the head of a pin, or a clover as it were. Being in agreement with their desire to protect and shelter this delicate society, Horton and the Doctor join forces to make sure the world doesn’t fall victim to such devastating hazards as a drop of rain or a particularly rough gust of wind. The altruistic Horton dedicates himself to this cause so freely because he declares “a person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Kangaroo Jane who can't keep her nose to herself
The trouble begins when a local busybody kangaroo overhears Horton’s conversation with the clover and proceeds to insert herself into the situation, determining that Horton must be talking to himself and thus is a crazy, dangerous menace to society. She turns the rest of the jungle’s occupants against Horton and finally conscripts the help of the Wickersham Brothers to more violently separate Horton from the clover, hoping that if it is destroyed, that will bring Horton back to his senses and he will stop talking about little people talking to him from dust specks. These Wickersham brothers, which are drawn more like horrifying gremlins than the apes they’re supposed to be, take the clover and conscript a vulture to fly it into a huge field of clovers.
The Wickersham brothers, creatures horrifying enough to inspire nightmares in adults and kids alike
Meanwhile, inside the dust ball itself, pandemonium has broken out, as the Whovians are suddenly forced to acknowledge the Doctor’s warnings and recognize that there is in fact a giant dangerous and bigger world outside the clouds that frame their existence. Through trial and tribulation, when Horton finally is reunited with Whoville, we find that their town has been thrown into disarray, buildings cracked and the townsfolk strewn about after the violent ride in the vulture’s beak. Horton assures them their troubles are over when he plucks them from the 3 millionth clover he checked and resumes caring for the now united peoples of Whoville.
Horton on his way through picking 3,000,005 clovers just to find his friends.
This reprieve is short lived when the Wickersham brothers, now bolstered by the entire Jungle of Nool, swarm upon Horton and rather upsettingly decide drastic action is necessary to keep his dangerous belief in tiny people from spreading insanity throughout the jungle. They threaten to cage him and boil the clover in “Beezle nut oil.” Backed into his last corner, Horton begs the citizens of Whoville to make as much noise as possible so that his tormentors finally hear them and believe they exist and are worth protecting. The Doctor rallies his people, getting every member of the town to participate to no avail, until the very smallest resident, Jo-Jo with his yo-yo, lends the final voice that breaks free from their clouds and finally reaches the encroaching mob. Furies are quelled, everyone reaches an agreement that “a person’s a person, no matter how small,” happy endings are had by all, and we drift away from the story just as the Doctor is gifted an even smaller world of his own on another dust speck that he must take care of, thus starting the cycle anew.
The beautiful yet tiny town of Whoville
There are obvious moral overtones stating that society is capable of great evil when fueled by routing out sedition, and that it is important to not lose sight of the humanity in our fellows, whether the evil we are being told we’re defeating is insanity, witchery or, more recently, communism. The production is, as usual, well done. It looks like a quality Dr. Seuss show, and it is.
However, I can’t help but respond to this with a personal sense of dystopia fatigue. Maybe it’s because I was expecting much more fun than despair, but I felt like this story was so overly harsh to the protagonist that I came away wishing that Dr. Seuss wasn’t trying so hard to scare the children. Why can’t they be allowed to chase talking dust specks or pick millions of clovers without being jailed for insanity? Aren’t they just children after all?
Is it a little extreme to threaten children with boiling their friends alive? Dr. Seuss didn’t think so.
While I do love the art and style of the piece, I feel the need to deduct a point for the storyline being a little more cruel and upsetting than I would have preferred from a children’s story.
4 stars
Horton may have heard a Who, but comes to wish he hadn’t.
by George Pritchard
Necropolis
I am on a brief holiday while my flat is getting treated for mold, so I decided to go see Necropolis, an Italian-British production, billed as a strange and fantastical film on the nature of evil.
After twenty minutes of filler involving a man in stereotypical “barbarian” furs searching for the Mona Lisa, there appears a beautiful man with a painted face and a green velvet suit. By this time, I confess that I was checking my watch in worry. “Perhaps this will all make sense in time,” I told myself, “perhaps it would immediately make sense if I were more familiar with Art, with the political landscape inhabited by the filmmakers, but I do not know for certain.”
The first twenty minutes of this film.
Subtitles are played with, sometimes included and sometimes not, and sometimes the subtitles are used as title cards. Throughout the film, characters switch at random between English, Italian, and sometimes French. Apparently this was inspired by Warhol’s films, right down to including Viva in the cast list. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt much of anything while interacting with his art, so perhaps I am the wrong audience.
Viva!
The man in green wanders through a warehouse of red plastic sheets. He says, “The universe is in my head,” and with the ouroboros painted on his face, I believe him. ”If only I could convert you. If only I could communicate with you, then you’d know.”
A man who I do not trust, but who I believe.
All right, now we’re getting somewhere. This film feels like I am at a festival of short films — some are wonderfully strange, others are dull slogs. A witch in a cement pipe initiates a young man, in a ceremony that makes me think, after the first 40 minutes of this 118-minute movie, that the art film amateur hour has leveled out, and incredible images have begun to bubble up through the depths.
A glorious moment that promises more.
Unfortunately, this hope is crushed directly after, and never fully recovers. Because just as we think there’s something good, it collapses again into joyless sitcom bits played out in a warehouse. Press papers describe this film as an exploration of evil. Perhaps this speaks to the misery of touch-and-go rasping against the nerves, but it seems more like an exploration of poor sound mixing. Annoying noises and annoying people, broken up with occasionally beautiful things. I would have liked to go into the projection room and clip a new copy for myself.
Fellow travelers…is this something you have seen play out in your own counterculture spaces? (observe the flagrantly spilled coffee, which no one is keen to clean up)
Unfortunately, this film drags for minutes at a time — people often speak and move in slow motion, and the 2-hour runtime is wholly unnecessary. The speeches are so slow that the subtitles only provide disjointed fragments. I never guessed that a film about evil would make me think of a Burma Shave road ad. I fell asleep halfway through, and so bought a second ticket in order to complete this review.
I can’t believe this movie has the gall to reference Kenneth Anger, and multiple times, at that. Mr. Anger makes beautiful, meaningful films, but most of all, they are short. There is an excellent Kenneth Anger-length film here, but there is so much to cut out around it that I cannot recommend Necropolis in good faith. I would recommend that anyone interested in this film should seek out Mr. Anger’s films, instead.
Two stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
When reading my morning paper, it can feel like the whole world is determined to blow itself up.
Vietnamese peace talks are going nowhere, with American “help” possibly reaching its nadir when a US helicopter killed friendly South Vietnamese forces by mistake. Israel is once again fighting its Arab neighbours with both Communists and Capitalist countries pouring in military aid to their favoured sides. There is not even goodwill within their respective camps, with the Soviets and Communist China continuing to sabre rattle over the border. And this doesn’t even count the civil wars going on in places like Rhodesia.
Closer to home, British troops in Northern Ireland’s attempts to keep the peace so far seem to be counter-productive. Whilst we are also learning more of the atrocities committed by British troops during the so-called “Malayan Emergency” from the official enquiry.
With all this violence going on, it makes you wonder if there could be another way. Well Peter Watkins has come up with one, albeit not necessarily the most pleasant option:
Peace in Our Time
Even if it only got a limited film-run instead of the planned television broadcast, Peter Watkins’ The War Game still had a massive impact on British popular culture. As well as getting a Galactic Star, it won both a BAFTA and an Academy Award. At the same time, it gave a big shot in the arm to the peace movement.
One interesting crystallization of that can be seen in an interview with John Lennon on his Bed In for Peace:
a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what's happening – how the media is really controlled, how it's all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said 'People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace'.
It seems he was already thinking about putting these ideas on film, because this is really going to form the basis of his pseudo-sequel to The War Game, The Peace Game (called The Gladiators in some other countries).
Year of the Peace Olympics
Not long-ago, the United Nations and Communist Countries agreed to the creation of The International Peace Games, based on the gladiatorial combat of Ancient Rome. In doing so they would divert the natural aggressive nature of humanity and ensure the survival of the human race.
Ten participants are chosen for each side, all young people in their twenties. The actual game we see has a simple format. The Western team has two hours to capture the control room, which leads to their instant victory. The red team have to stop them, getting rid of all opponents, by any means they so choose, which leads to their instant victory. If neither is completed in the two hours, points are awarded based on “strength” (e.g. taking prisoners) and deducted for “weakness” (e.g. hesitation). They are even given paths of different difficulty they can choose to take, as if they are on a ski slope.
Today’s Peace Game, #256 in the current series, is played in a castle near Stockholm. It seems to be being held between USSR, Communist China, East Germany and North Vietnam on the one side, and UK, France, West Germany & USA on the other. (There are Nigerian and Indian generals present but they appear to be there purely as observers).
This is not just a private affair between the participants involved. It has in fact become the most popular programme on television in NATO countries. This is broadcast for 2 hours on a Saturday in a regular slot, so they need to work on a schedule to keep the sponsors happy. Remember this point, as it is going to be important for understanding what happens later.
Let the games begin
It opens in Peter Watkins’ documentarian style, with musicless shots of little details of the various scenes. Generals walk to the ceremony silently, whilst the soldiers are interviewed about the game. We hear different people talking about the different reasons they come here. Volunteers and draftees. True believers and those without purpose.
Right from the start, we are encouraged to see the gap between the generals and controllers, and the ordinary people forced to participate in the system. The twenty-something soldiers are all sitting in the cold, whilst old generals are in a mansion in good spirits sipping tea and joking with their opposite numbers. As the Western team hides in a hole from an artillery barrage, one general says to another, "We will be able to enjoy ourselves like chess players, no matter the outcome".
In fact, it goes even further. If things get boring the generals can start to fire artillery on their own teams to get them moving. And whilst the teams have phones to call up support, these are only dummy phones and do not connect at all.
There is also a third player in all of this. The Machine. This is a giant computer, which analyzes and awards points throughout the game. Yet there seems a kind of masochistic nature to it. When ordered to put in more violence it thanks the generals for it. In addition, it constantly broadcasts a signal beyond human hearing, to increase the pressure on the participants.
We predominantly follow the Western team as they attempt to proceed to the command center. Going through the various traps we see them constantly forced into doing whatever the system wants. Even when a Black American soldier gets sick of the condescension of his teammates and declares he is leaving, the general is able to convince him to “use his hate” and keep going (shortly after which he is killed).
What the system cannot account for, though, is basic human decency. When a Communist Chinese soldier is captured, one of the British soldiers takes pity on her and they talk. This action is seen as “collaboration”; this does not mean fighting to destroy the system, but basic empathy. The game is declared a tie so both teams can “eliminate these two subversive young perverts” together. Attempting to avoid their fate, the two young people decide to escape, in spite of the fact that both sides, The Machine and the Swedish police are after them. Needless to say, it does not end well. Our final scene is the generals posing for a picture to celebrate a successful game, as the two aforementioned soldiers are seen being bloodily beaten in a series of black and white photographs.
Journey to the Near Side of the Sun
There are many delicious elements that can be analysed from this film but I will just touch on a couple.
One complaint I can imagine emerging from some in the SF community is that it doesn’t try to update the technology and fashion for the future, But I believe this actually makes it more powerful. This is meant to be a microcosm of our world. Shots of the teams regularly look like images I have seen from Vietnam, only inside of a building instead of a jungle.
At the same time, we are given statistics related to our current world. For example, during the World Wars, it costs $60,000 to kill one man. With the use of nuclear weapons, it costs $50 to kill one man. During the 1960s the world spent on their arms system £23 million pounds each second.
As such, we are called on to ask two questions:
1. How far away is our reality from this?
2. Is this better or worse than our current system?
The second point particularly is an interesting one. It feels horrific watching this play out but that is because it is controlled and sanitized. Is it better to send hundreds of young people across the world to decide someone else’s system of government? Or to have a few people die for televisual entertainment?
The Not-So Great Society
Another interesting element is that we see how everyone is coopted into this system, even those who are ostensibly against this. In neutral Sweden, those who cannot be convinced of the value of the system are used in their own way. They are kept in a kind of hippy camp to tempt the attacking team away from their purpose and lose points.
We also have a French Student who has come to provide his thoughts but does not fight. As the unnamed documentarian says “Do you not think the system is using you?”. Even though he actually makes it further than anyone else, as he learns more he elects to join the machine’s controllers.
During these sections, it should be noted, it all takes place in Swedish and French. From context and my mid-level French I believe I have understood what is happening but there is probably some more detail I have missed.
After the Guns Have Stopped
This is the best piece of SF cinema I have seen since, well, The War Game. I don’t know if this is where we are headed but it does what truly great science fiction is meant to do: Present a picture of the now through a speculation of what could be whilst still making it feel disturbingly believable.
So, watch out Doctor Who! The Peace Game Olympics may soon supplant you as the nation’s favourite Saturday evening family television show.
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.
The Cask of Amontillado
The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.
The Sphinx
I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.
The Pit and the Pendulum
By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.
Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.
The Tell-Tale Heart
One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.
3 out of 5 stars.
by Victoria Silverwolf
There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .
Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone. Let's take a look.
The Moebius Flip
Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning. The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.
We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way. Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack. The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.
Suddenly, we see a news announcer. He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity. I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.
Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things. That means the film turns into a negative of itself.
This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal. Once in a while, it turns back into a negative. I guess that's a Moebius Flip. Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant. This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports. People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.
Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time? Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be. The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all. I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.
Two stars.
Sole Survivor
This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month. It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time. They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland. Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.
The crew of the Home Run.
It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck.
I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.
The real wreck.
Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good. That tale goes in a different direction, however.
Two men in an airplane discover the wreck. (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so. There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.
This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army. (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.
They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run. This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career. (More details of what happened later.)
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert. He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed. Unlikely, but possible. Flashbacks tell us the real story.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.
The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy. The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders. Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed.
Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career. Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character. Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience. There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.
This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV. I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something. The actors all do a good job. You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.
Four stars.
by Brian Collins
Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.
The Dunwich Horror
One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.
Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.
Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.
As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.
When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.
Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.
A high three stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!
War is on everybody’s minds these days as the controversies around the Vietnam War rage on.
Two new films, Patton and M*A*S*H, provide complex and nuanced views of war. These two films contrast strikingly, overlapping with some ideas, but dramatically far from each other with others.
The two films also present a complete contrast in look and feel. Patton has a traditional roadhouse production look and feel. But the film isn't stiff – it celebrates the quirkiness and depth of its lead character, making it a surprisingly complex film whose revolution rests with General Patton, himself. M*A*S*H focuses on the eccentricities of its lead characters but is surprisingly conservative in terms of gender roles and expectations. In its filming and style, however, M*A*S*H is like nothing we've seen before.
Following the General
Patton, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, stands as an epic portrayal of one of the most controversial and enigmatic military figures of World War II, General George S. Patton. The film not only delivers a stunning performance by George C. Scott but also delves into deeper themes that reflect the complexity of war and the man who seemingly thrived in it.
General George S. Patton, a larger-than-life figure with an unyielding belief in his destiny to lead and conquer, appears almost mythic in his determination and ferocity. Yet, within this portrayal, there's an underlying tragedy – Patton is depicted as a man out of his time, someone whose ideals and mannerisms belong to an era long past.
Patton: A Man Out of Time
Patton’s character is deeply rooted in the ethos of classical warfare, where personal glory and valor were the hallmarks of a military hero. He draws inspiration from historical military figures and battles, often romanticizing the past and seeing himself as a continuation of a warrior tradition. This is evident from his astounding opening speech, where he declares, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser."
Throughout the film, Patton’s anachronistic views are at odds with the modern world. His reverence for discipline, his belief in reincarnation, and his disdain for weakness are portrayed as attributes of a bygone era. In a poignant scene, he compares himself to a gladiator, reflecting his belief that he is fighting not just a modern war but a timeless battle of wills.
Patton’s rigid adherence to these antiquated ideals often puts him at odds with his contemporaries. His confrontational and abrasive leadership style contrasts sharply with the more politically astute and strategic approaches of his peers. This tension culminates in moments where his actions, though tactically brilliant, are questioned for their diplomatic and ethical implications.
General Patton at home in some Italian military ruins
Pro-War Elements in Patton
The film does not shy away from showcasing the pro-war elements that define Patton's character. His speeches and actions glorify the warrior spirit and the thrill of battle. He revels in the chaos of war, viewing the battlefield as the ultimate test of character and leadership. Patton’s relentless pursuit of victory, his insistence on pushing his troops beyond their limits, and his disdain for those who falter, all underscore a pro-war narrative that valorizes aggression and tenacity.
A significant pro-war element is the depiction of Patton’s belief in destiny and divine guidance. He sees himself as an instrument of fate, chosen to lead and conquer. This almost messianic conviction drives him to extraordinary feats of leadership, inspiring his troops to achieve seemingly impossible victories. His charisma and unwavering confidence create a sense of inevitability about his success, reinforcing the idea that war, for him, is a stage where great men prove their worth.
Director Schaffner with actor Scott
Anti-War Elements in Patton
Yet, the film is not a one-dimensional glorification of war. Director Schaffner and writers Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North present a nuanced view that also highlights the anti-war elements intrinsic to Patton’s story. The personal costs of Patton’s relentless drive for victory are evident in the toll it takes on those around him. His relationships are strained, his subordinates are pushed to their breaking points, and his superiors are often exasperated by his unyielding nature.
The film also critiques the destructive consequences of Patton’s actions. His obsession with glory and his impatience often leads to reckless decisions that jeopardize lives and missions. He is a man who hates what he sees as cowardice. He refuses to believe in battle fatigue. In fact, one of the most infamous incidents in Pattton’s career – and in this film – happens when he strikes a shell-shocked soldier. Victory is the crucial goal, no matter that a victory without human honor is disgraceful.
Patton has the long view of any military adventure.
Moreover, the film portrays the political and moral dilemmas of warfare. Patton’s disdain for diplomacy and his confrontational attitude often clash with the broader strategic goals of the Allies. His near-dismissal for insubordination highlights the tensions between individual heroism and collective responsibility. The film underscores the notion that war is not just a series of battles but a complex interplay of politics, ethics, and human cost.
This film’s portrayal of Patton raises important questions about the nature of leadership and the morality of war. It invites viewers to consider whether greatness in war justifies the personal and ethical compromises that come with it. Patton’s character serves as a lens through which the audience can explore the dualities of war: its capacity to elevate and destroy, to inspire and to devastate.
Patton’s presentation
Patton was filmed in a process called Dimension 150, similar to the old Todd A-O process which allowed extreme widescreen films (with a ratio of 2.25:1) to be shown with standard projectors. But as you know if you live in a big city, Patton is being marketed as a roadshow experience like The Sound of Music or Lawrence of Arabia.
Just look at that glorious widescreen image!
This results in Patton having a true epic feel: battle scenes feel titanic and powerful, filled from edge to edge with soldiers struggling through the mud or firing their rifles. It’s a powerful effect, though a dramatic contrast to our national character at the dawn of this decade. This approach reinforces the “great man” feeling of George Patton as a titan astride the fights he unleashes. It also helps to make him feel like a dinosaur.
Suicide is Painless
M*A*S*H, on the other hand, feels as fresh as this week’s underground newspaper—irreverent and dismissive, full of tangents and wild moments. Patton may feel like a dinosaur, but Hawkeye, Trapper John, Painless Dentist, Nurse Hot Lips and the rest feel like people who just walked off the street in your home town.
There are acres of mud in Patton, but the world of M*A*S*H feels even muddier. Set in a military unit during the Korean War but clearly paralleling the Vietnam War, director Robert Altman delivers a film which feels like a revolution – even if its characters sometimes reinforce conservative values.
The Revolutionary Approach
M*A*S*H has rightly been celebrated for its unconventional and groundbreaking approach to filmmaking. One of the most striking features is Altman’s use of overlapping dialogue and improvisation. This technique not only adds a layer of realism but also enhances the chaotic and unpredictable nature of life in a wartime medical unit. The characters speak over each other, conversations blend together, and the audience is plunged into the midst of the chaos. Patton allows characters to make speeches. M*A*S*H doesn’t want speeches.
A word here about the script: Ring Lardner Jr. is credited as the scriptwriter, adapting Richard Hooker’s novel. As I mentioned in a recent review, Lardner was one of the Hollywood Ten, a group of screenwriters who were blacklisted by the Hollywood system for their alleged involvement with the Communist Party. It’s an act of heroism to give Lardner work today, and a great sign of the changes to American politics. I do wonder how much of this film Lardner actually scripted – M*A*S*H feels thoroughly improvised – but I welcome seeing his name again.
Appropriately, M*A*S*H shuns the typical heroic combat narrative. Instead of glorifying war, M*A*S*H presents it as absurd and grotesque. The surgeons, led by the irreverent Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould), cope with the horrors of war through dark humor, practical jokes, and general insubordination. The anti-establishment sentiment that runs through the film mirrors our own countercultural movements of the 1960s, making it resonant. Patton’s insubordination is internal; the insubordination in M*A*S*H is societal.
This insubordination makes M*A*S*H feel thoroughly contemporary. Everybody hates the army, its inflexibility, command structure, even its jeeps and the terrible movies it provides to the troops. Not even the intercom works as expected (the intercom also serves as a kind of Greek chorus for the film, an unexpected bit of meta-humor). I also found the insubordination to be thoroughly hilarious.
Altman’s use of non-linear storytelling and episodic structure further sets M*A*S*H apart. The film lacks a traditional plot, instead unfolding as a series of vignettes that illustrate the day-to-day lives of the characters. This approach allows for a more nuanced and multifaceted exploration of the war’s impact on individuals, eschewing the neat resolutions and moral clarity often found in war films.
Trapper John and Hawkeye conning and confusing a helicopter pilot
Individualism is at the center of everything Altman creates with his cast. None of these people are simple grunts manning their job. Instead, all the characters in the film, even those on the edges of the frame, feel like unique human beings. It even feels as if the movie could focus on those characters without sacrificing what makes this movie unique.
Revolution in Style, not Society
Despite its innovative approach, M*A*S*H is deeply conservative in its portrayal of the sexes. The film’s treatment of its female characters is troublesome. Women in M*A*S*H are largely depicted as objects of desire or sources of comic relief, reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes rather than challenging them.
Take, for example, the character of Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, played by Sally Kellerman (Star Trek and Outer Limits). She is portrayed as a rigid, by-the-book officer who becomes the target of the male characters’ ridicule and pranks. The already-infamous shower scene, where her tent is lifted to expose her naked body to the entire camp, is a particularly glaring instance of the film’s sexist undertones. This scene is played for laughs, reducing Houlihan to a mere object of male amusement and stripping her of dignity.
The entire camp of the MASH unit mocks Major Houlihan
Furthermore, the film’s male characters frequently objectify and demean their female counterparts. Nurse Lt. Dish, for instance, is referred to more by her physical attributes than by her professional capabilities. The interactions between male and female characters often revolve around sexual innuendo or outright harassment, reflecting a chauvinistic attitude all too common in both the military and society then (and, of course, now).
This presents an interesting paradox for director Altman. Many reviewers rightly lauded Altman for his complex and nuanced portrayal of a female lead in his previous film, That Cold Day in the Park. M*A*S*H critiques many aspects of military life and the absurdity of war but does little to challenge the status quo regarding gender dynamics.
The only defense I can muster to that attack is to note how M*A*S*H shows a mostly male world at the hospital. Nearly all the officers are men, and all the injured are all men. Therefore, a male attitude prevailed at camp. M*A*S*H takes place in the early 1950s, when women had recently been sent back from factories and battlefields to the kitchen and motherhood. It was a conservative era in terms of gender roles, and male chauvinism was pervasive. Surely M*A*S*H would feel strange if women, even well-trained nurses, were treated as equals.
Col. Blake is the only one who treats Houlihan as even slightly equal to him – but he is an ineffectual goof.
The film’s humor, often at the expense of its female characters, underscores a broader societal acceptance of sexist behavior. In this sense, M*A*S*H may be revolutionary in its approach to storytelling and its anti-war message, but it remains entrenched in conservative views on gender roles.
Which is the conservative film?
M*A*S*H is a reminder of the limitations of our era’s progressive movement. While the film challenges many societal norms and offered a fresh perspective on war, it offers a discordant view in its representation of women, reflecting the broader struggles of the feminist movement as we enter the 1970s.
In fact, I adore M*A*S*H. I walked out of the theatre on an emotional high from seeing the film much like the high I get after seeing a great rock concert (I still think about that Blind Faith/Delaney & Bonnie show at the Seattle Center Coliseum last fall!) M*A*S*H feels like the revolution. It feels like the future. It feels like a new generation of film and I can’t wait to see what Robert Altman delivers next.
Altman directing Gould and Sutherland
But Patton was also a movie that really shook me, particularly the oddly naïve ways General Patton strove for glory. General Patton may have been a figure from my parents’ generation, but his attitudes and life philosophy were surprisingly nuanced in the hands of George C. Scott, Franklin J. Schaffner and the writers.
The characters in M*A*S*H could come of the streets of any American town. George Patton was one of those men who seemed like he could only succeed in war.
Both films provided me experiences I’ve never had before in a movie theatre.
Five stars for each.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
I had low expectations for Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, thinking it would be a bit of enjoyably fluffy escapism. For the most part this is true, but it does have a few things to recommend it beyond that.
Poster for Captain Nemo and the Underwater City
The Nautilus rescues a small band of survivors from a shipwreck, and takes them to, yes, an underwater city founded by Captain Nemo (Robert Ryan) called Templemer (everyone pronounces it Temple-mere, which makes it sound like a small town in the Home Counties or possibly a plantation in the Old South). They include a plucky and intelligent widow (Nanette Newman) with a young son (Christopher Hartstone), a rugged-faced American senator (Chuck Connors), two comedy Cockney wide-boys (Bill Fraser and Kenneth Connor), a cute and suspiciously well-behaved kitten (name unknown), and an engineer who is clearly about to go over the edge of sanity (Allan Cuthbertson).
Templemer is a utopian community where food and drink and education are free, everyone lives their best lives, and gold is as common as steel is for us. At this point I rolled my eyes, expecting that the surface people would all decide that There’s No Place Like Home and plot to escape this perfectly decent hippie paradise; however, in fact, the newcomers are divided on that point, and their reasons for wanting to leave or stay are all in character and plausible.
Nemo's guests are less than thrilled at their accommodation.
The movie explores the frequently-asked question of our time: whether it’s better to engage with the problems of society or just to tune in, turn on and drop out, building a better world outside instead. Nemo and his cohorts have definitely chosen the latter, while Senator Fraser’s reason for wanting to return to the surface is to do the former. The story explicitly takes place at the time of the American Civil War, and Nemo has undergone an ethnic shift to become an American. This gives the implication that Nemo is rejecting his own country’s troubles by retreating to Templemer and, consequently, inviting comparisons with the modern USA (and with Ryan himself, well known as a pacifist and an outspoken critic of the American government). Although the movie seems to want us to side with Senator Fraser, I personally remain unconvinced.
There's also some nice modelwork, even if it's often hard to see.
Of course, there are a lot of preposterous things that are overlooked or else are simply there to drive the story along. There’s a giant manta ray for our heroes to fight, which I suppose is a change from the usual giant squid. There’s only the briefest explanation of where Templemer’s population come from. The engineer’s mental collapse is so heavily telegraphed that I kept wishing someone would try and help the poor man rather than let him become another plot complication. There’s also a very long and very boring sequence where Nemo shows his guests around Templemer’s undersea farming setup, which contributes little to the story and isn’t particularly engaging and mostly seems to be there to show off the fact that MGM spent money for an expensive and complicated underwater shoot.
In short, I wouldn’t urge you to rush out and see it, but if it’s on at your local cinema and you have time to kill during the holidays, you could do worse. Two and a half stars.
by Jason Sacks
Marooned
What if the real heroes of NASA weren’t the astronauts but instead the ground crew? What if the astronauts were all either bland or jerks, while Mission Control were all brave, steadfast problem solvers to a man? What if a movie with those premises promised a thrilling story but delivered leaden action?
Imagine that movie, and you’ll get something like Marooned, a new film from director John Sturges seemingly released to capitalize on America’s fascination with the space program and our incipient worries about space failures. We might expect Marooned to be a thrilling and au courant film about man's perils in space. But Marooned is more concerned with the men on the ground than the men in space. That fact helps make for a slow trudge of a film.
As the film begins, three astronauts played by Richard Crenna (The Real McCoys, Slattery's People, The Sand Pebbles), James Franciscus (The Investigators) and Gene Hackman (Hawaii, Bonny and Clyde) have completed their assignment to spend several months working in an orbiting laboratory. As the pilots begin their efforts to return to Earth, however, they find the thrusters malfunctioning on their rocket. It will take a heroic effort from the ground crew, led by Gregory Peck (needs no introduction) and David Janssen (The Fugitive), to return the astronauts to Earth. But will that dedicated crew succeed before oxygen runs out in the space capsule? And how will a hurricane at Cape Kennedy affect the rescue efforts?
It's an intriguing narrative for a movie (not to mention a book), and it's certainly very on-target for our country’s current obsessions. Marooned had the promise to be something pretty special; instead, it is a conservative, hide-bound, badly-acted failure.
Much of the film’s failure comes from an odd decision by the filmmakers: instead of focusing on the astronauts, the film spotlights their ground crew, particularly the efforts of their brave leader, Gregory Peck, to save the spacemen. In theory this could be a logical approach to the story which harnessed celebrity charisma to add seriousness to the rescue effort. Peck is a longstanding, proven screen presence. He gives the film a feeling of gravitas. But, come on, film fans: would you rather watch Gregory Peck struggle though rescue contingencies or spend more time with the astronauts trying to come up with plans? Without Cronkite (or even Chet and David) to spice things up, I can't imagine an audience is interested in watching the efforts of a bunch of white-shirt-and-tie men reading long lists of protocols off checklists, scene after tedious scene.
All that focus on protocols makes the film feel slow. But that very same slowness feels like a deliberate approach to the story. This is a workmanlike film which focuses on the amazing power of bureaucracy to solve complex problems. Solving these problems takes time, and it’s important to be able to be systematic and mark important items off a checklist. If only this movie had been cut to a crisp 90 minutes, the filmmakers’ gambit might have worked. Instead, Marooned is sluggish.
Peck seems to phone his role in. The intended gravitas from his role comes across more as torpor than as professionalism. Janssen and Franciscus bring their usual decent TV-level acting to their roles. But Hackman is especially badly selected for his role – his character, Buzz Lloyd, is impulsive and self-centered. Viewers grow tired of Buzz's histrionics and wonder how in the world someone like that made it through astronaut school. It's surprising to see Hackman perform so poorly after he recently delivered fine performances in Bonnie and Clyde and Downhill Racer, so hopefully this was just an anomaly. With his rugged good looks, Hackman looks more like a cop than an astronaut.
The film offers viewers a few small moments with the astronauts' wives. Those moments perhaps convey the most sense of the astronauts' peril, since the wives are allowed to actually emote. Veteran actresses Lee Grant (Peyton Place, In the Heat of the Night), Mariette Hartley (Star Trek: All Our Yesterdays) and Nancy Kovack (Star Trek: A Private Little War) have all done good work in the past. Here they are called upon to do little more than look concerned and show a little attitude. The actresses actually execute their assignments with aplomb. I especially enjoyed Kovack's frustrated resignation about the life she signed up for as the wife of an astronaut. She conveys a lot in small gestures and facial expressions.
The ending, again slow, is genuinely captivating nonetheless, and takes a few surprising twists. I became very invested in this film in its last 20 minutes and wish we had more scenes like these. Though it was a bit hard to root for these dull men to be rescued, the attention to detail around astrophysics and international cooperation were stellar.
John Sturges is usually an excellent director of action movies – see Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven or The Great Escape. But he probably shouldn’t have journeyed into space with our boring astronauts. Marooned just never comes alive like The Magnficent Seven did: the characters never popped, the action never coruscated, and the direction lacked flash.
But there’s a deeper problem here as well. One of the reasons The Great Escape was such a smash hit was that many viewers could see themselves in the zealous Steve McQueen, endlessly looking to escape his prison life. McQueen’s Virgil Hilts felt like a counterculture hero on the run, not dissimilar to the characters in Easy Rider or Bonnie and Clyde. But Marooned is a conservative, conventional movie. Its message is to trust the government, pray for the best to happen, and follow rules. Marooned is a film for Nixon’s Silent Majority and feels woefully out of place next to this year’s big hit films like Butch Cassidy, Midnight Cowboy, and Goodbye, Columbus.
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, also known as Doppelgänger in England, is a British science fiction film directed by Robert Parrish and produced by marionette/miniature wizards Gerry and Sylvia Anderson (Stingray, Thunderbirds, Fireball XL5, Supercar, etc.).
As a movie, it is both visually appealing and tonally complex, with layered characterizations from its cast. The film gets off to a decent start, featuring beautifully realized sets and model effects, as well as intriguing characters with backstories I wanted to know more about. It sets up an epic quest that seems exciting and full of potential. Sadly, by the end of the film, everything (and I do mean everything) falls apart, leaving me feeling cheated.
The Beginning: A Futuristic Start
The movie opens quietly at Eurosec headquarters (the European Space Exploration Council). Two men enter a guarded, futuristic, secure complex to review some documents. To access the document room, an X-ray scan is performed, displaying the men’s bones in motion and detecting a metal pen that triggers an alarm. From the start, the film showcases its advanced technology.
The Exciting Mission
The discovery of the century is at hand: scientists have determined that on the far side of the Sun lies another planet, identical in size to Earth (stop me if you've heard this one before.) Jason Webb, the Eurosec director (played by Patrick Wymark), collaborates with other nations to finance a manned mission to this planet. American astronaut Colonel Glenn Ross (Roy Thinnes—"David Vincent" from The Invaders) is selected for the mission, accompanied by astrophysicist Dr. John Kane (Ian Hendry).
The Beautiful People
Ross arrives at Eurosec with his beautiful but emotionally detached wife, Sharon (played by Lynn Loring). It quickly becomes evident that Glenn and Sharon’s marriage is in serious trouble, and they are barely holding it together as a couple. The other prominent female character, Lisa Hartmann (Loni von Friedl), is a strikingly beautiful woman whose role in the plot is never clearly defined, making her presence feel more ornamental than essential to the story.
The Creative Technology
As the mission preparation begins, the audience is treated to exquisitely designed rocket ships and futuristic sets. Even the cars and homes the characters live in reflect a near-future aesthetic. This is where the movie truly excels—transporting viewers from the mundane to a world of speculative technology. While the spaceships are clearly models, the craftsmanship is exceptional, maintaining credulity far better than the poorly constructed props often seen in other films of our era. Like some of the films from the Orient, for example.
The Tragic and Confusing Journey
The journey to the new planet is uneventful, filled with slow, ponderous shots of the spacecraft moving through space. Soon, Ross and Kane arrive at their destination and face the critical decision: should they land on the planet? Ross determines that the Earth-like planet has a breathable atmosphere and abundant plant life but sees no signs of intelligent inhabitants. They choose to land. Detaching their landing module from their main ship, they then end up crash landing on the new planet. As they complete their fiery collision with the new world, Ross is thrown clear of the ship. Despite his injuries, he manages to pull Kane, who is gravely wounded, from the burning ship before it explodes.
It is nighttime where they impact, and a strange light appears in the sky, scanning the crash site. A humanoid figure descends from an aircraft and Ross, terrified, attempts to fight it. To his shock, the figure turns out to be human, and subdues Ross.
The Ridiculous Truth
The next scene reveals Ross and Kane in Eurosec’s infirmary, under the watchful eye of a furious Jason Webb. As Ross recovers, he is interrogated by Webb and other Eurosec staff, including Lisa Hartmann, as they demand to know why he turned around and returned to Earth. Ross adamantly insists that they had not turned back and instead had landed on the new planet.
Alone due to Kane’s critical condition, Ross becomes increasingly frustrated. Upon returning home, he argues with Sharon, accusing her of reversing the layout of their furniture and even noticing that labels on her perfume bottles are printed backward. This fight leads to the collapse of their marriage but provideds Ross with a startling revelation: he is not on Earth but on the other planet, a mirror version of his world.
The Overblown Ending
Ross and the Eurosec team realize the truth: he is trapped on a doppelgänger Earth, where everything is reversed. Plans are made to send Ross back to his own Earth. He boards the alien lander (the Doppelgänger) and docks with the main spacecraft still in orbit. However, due to the mirrored nature of the ship, a systems failure occurs, causing the craft to lose power. Unable to escape, the ship and lander plummet to the surface, crash-landing directly on Eurosec and destroying the entire base in a massive explosion.
The film ends with a haunting scene: an elderly Jason Webb, crippled and defeated, reflecting on the catastrophic loss. Alone in a wheelchair, he gazes at his reflection in a mirrored window before tragically crashing through it, marking his demise.
Final Thoughts
This movie started so well, only to end so poorly. It had so much going for it: great looking sets and technology, attractive people (albeit lacking any compelling backstory), and an interesting adventure for them to embark on. For the counter-Earth to turn out to be a mirror copy just felt lazy. So many simple things had to be ignored for the story to go as long as it did. The astronauts not finding any life from orbit was the dumbest thing of all…until that was followed up by the two explosive crashes by a trained astronaut. The fact that everyone died made the story a waste of time and a missed opportunity. A real shame. I give this Doppelänger two of five stars.
[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]
With so little decent science fiction and fantasy film available this year, I’m back at the second-run cinemas again, catching up on movies I missed the first time round. Bedazzled is a modern take on the legend of Faust in the inimitable style of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, accompanied by Eleanor Bron as an up-to-date Gretchen who doesn’t sit around pining at the spinning wheel. It’s got a couple of nice psychological character studies at its heart and a few wry things to say about human nature, though coming to an optimistic conclusion on the subject.
Original movie poster for "Bedazzled"
Moore plays Stanley Moon, working as a cook in a Wimpy Bar and living in a grotty London bedsit, consumed with desire for his coworker Margaret (Eleanor Bron) but unable to work up the courage to ask her out. This makes him easy prey for Satan, aka “George”, played by Peter Cook, turning up initially in a stylish black and red cloak, little sunglasses and velvet dinner jacket.
After Stanley has signed away his soul in exchange for seven wishes, the rest of the movie is mostly sketches in which Stanley’s wish comes true—he is a witty intellectual, a millionaire, a pop star, a fly on a wall, and other things—and yet he fails to win Margaret. These are interspersed with more metatextual sketches in which George goes about his business of spreading unhappiness and misery in petty but effective ways (sending pigeons out to defecate on pedestrians; issuing parking tickets; conning little old ladies; scratching LPs) while Stanley trails after him, complaining, but finding it hard to take the moral high ground. Over the course of the story Stanley gradually comes to realise some things about himself, Margaret, and George, and, without revealing the ending, it’s fair to say that he comes out of the experience a better man than he went in.
Stan, about to strike out with Margaret again
Like Oh! What a Lovely War, this is a movie which makes a virtue of a low budget. It’s shot around London but with a sometimes witty and surreal choice of locations: the Devil’s headquarters is a cheap nightclub, Heaven is the Glass House at Kew Gardens, George at one point takes Stanley up to the top of the Post Office Tower in a visual joke about the Devil showing Christ the kingdoms of the world. Modern takes on the Seven Deadly Sins all turn up, with Raquel Welch typecast as Lust (and we learn she’s married to Sloth), and Vanity represented by a man with a mirror physically growing out of his chest. There’s a delightful parody of pop hits programme Ready, Steady, Go!, and there are clever little touches like a record scratched by George in one sketch putting Stan off his game with Margaret in another, or a headline, “Pop Stars in Sex and Drugs Drama”, shifting by one letter to become “Pope Stars in Sex and Drugs Drama”.
Within all of this, though, there are running themes about human nature and our ability to make ourselves contented or miserable. Stan, at one point, rails at George, “you promised to make me happy!” and George counters, “no, I promised to give you wishes.” Throughout the sketches, Stan keeps screwing things up with Margaret not through George’s intervention but through his own personal failings: as an intellectual, he completely misreads her willingness to sleep with him; as a millionaire, he keeps giving Margaret expensive gifts but no personal attention. He never fights to win her away from his rivals; he never takes an interest in her as a person. He whines that freedom of choice is all a lie, citing the fact that he had no choice where he was born, or to whom, but it’s obvious the problem is less Stan’s lack of opportunities, and more his inability to take advantage of the opportunities he has. It’s only when he recognises that being himself is better than the alternatives, that he can finally escape George’s grasp.
The Top of the Pops parody is spot on.
But, as the film continues, we also get a sadder insight into Stan and George and why they are the way they are. Stan tells George that George is the only person who has ever taken an interest in him, or done anything nice for him, showing how people can fall into temptation and sin not through moral depravity, but simple loneliness. George, for his part, eventually shows his own vulnerability: he is bitterly envious of God and wishes he could once again be among the angels, but at the same time is unable to rise above petty game-playing and point-scoring and can never understand why Heaven is closed to him. There’s also a running critique of modern life, with the Devil being associated with things like parking meters and tedious slogans like “Go To Work On An Egg”. Peter Cook gets in a rant about the evil of the banality of Wimpy Bars and Tastee Freezes and advertising and concrete, whose sentiment at least recalls Tati’s visual skewering of the sameness of global cities in Playtime.
Sermon on the postbox
All that having been said, it’s not a perfect movie. The metatextual sketches tend to go on a bit too long, and, although the message of the film is in part that Stan needs to stop viewing Margaret as a prize to be won and instead let her be her own person, we don’t really get much of a sense of her except as a prize to be won. The message—appreciate what you’ve got and don’t go looking for more—also doesn’t feel very aspirational. I suspect that if you don’t happen to like the humour of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore more generally, you’ll find the movie offputting. If you do like them, though, check Bedazzled out when it shows near you.
Trek Correspondent Joe Reid has jumped from TV to film. We think you'll enjoy his take on a most mind-altering movie!
by Joe Reid
Change of Mind, directed by Robert Stevens, is a film about David Rowe (played by Raymond St. Jacques), a successful white district attorney whose brain is transplanted into the body of a terminally injured Black man, Ralph Dickson. The story operates on many layers: it’s a respectful and intelligent thought experiment on how a newly reborn Black man might engage with and find relevance in a prejudiced society. It’s also a courtroom drama about the murder of a woman and the fight to bring her killer to justice. Primarily, however, this movie explores the complexities of the relationship between David and his wife, Margaret Rowe (played by Susan Oliver of Star Trek fame), who struggles to fully accept her husband after his physical transformation.
The title, Change of Mind, is somewhat misleading, as David Rowe’s mind doesn’t really change throughout the movie. Instead, it’s the minds of those around him that David must work to change.
My overall experience watching Change of Mind was a pleasant one. However, I have three key criticisms of the film. First, the movie starts abruptly with the brain surgery, never allowing the audience to experience the white David Rowe or the original Ralph Dickson. While I understand that this approach was likely more efficient and less complicated (as it avoids the need for two actors to portray the same character), it is a missed opportunity for deeper context. Second, there were a few strange, psychedelic dream sequences—while musically scored by the great Duke Ellington, they felt somewhat out of place within the overall narrative. Lastly, the ending was too abrupt. David, through grit and integrity, overcomes numerous challenges and takes some losses, all in pursuit of the truth. He’s portrayed as a character who does everything right. But at the last minute, he makes a seemingly foolish decision, and the movie ends. The conclusion felt jarring, to say the least.
What I liked most about the movie is that it successfully delivered on its key themes. There are many scenes featuring David and Margaret navigating their new lives together. While Raymond St. Jacques’s performance was fantastic, Susan Oliver stood out, delivering a subtly nuanced portrayal of a woman who deeply loves and supports the man she married—even after the change—but struggles to fully reintegrate him into her heart. With messy and unwavering devotion, she does everything possible to fight for her husband, which is admirable to see. The movie stops just shy of delivering a payoff for all her efforts.
Along with Ms. Oliver, the beautiful and talented Janet MacLachlan (Lt. Charlene Masters from the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor") demonstrated not only her singing talent but delivered a soul stirring performance as Elizabeth Dickson, the wife of the deceased Ralph Dickson (who's body David Rowe now inhabited). At a point in the story when it seemed that David and Margaret were at their weakest, Elizabeth showed up and restored both their spirits.
Throughout the film David battles his new body. He fights for his love. He fights former friends, employees, authorities, entire communities, and even the government. These led to some powerful scenes that we are unaccustomed to seeing a black lead in a movie navigate. St. Jacques portrays David as a confident and mostly self-assured man moving through each encounter with practiced ease.
The courtroom scenes were smartly done and carried significant weight. David proved himself capable of handling every challenge the story threw at him, tackling problems with integrity and intelligence.
Despite the few drawbacks I mentioned, I would recommend Change of Mind as a story that tackles tough topics with a degree of realism and emotional depth. The situations in the movie were believable without being predictable, and the emotional gravity of the characters doesn’t come across as heavy-handed or preachy. The acting is more than adequate, and the musical score is hip.
![[April 12, 1970] And What Happens When the Machines Take Over? (Colossus: the Forbin Project)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/colossus4-672x372.jpg)
![[March 28, 1970] Cinemascope: No Vacancy (The Bed Sitting Room)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/The_Bed-Sitting_Room_film-256x372.jpg)
Life in a desert of consumer goods
The BBC doing his job
![[March 26, 1970] A Quartet of Whimsy (<i>Satyricon, Skullduggery, Horton Hears a Who, Necropolis</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/700324cinemascope-672x372.jpg)
![[February 6, 1970] All We Are Saying Is Give The Peace Game A Chance (<i>The Peace Game, AKA The Gladiators</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/PG10.jpg)
![[January 28, 1970] Cinemascope: Just a Poe Boy (<em>An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe</em>, <em>The Moebius Flip</em>, </em>Sole Survivor</em>, and <em>The Dunwich Horror</em>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/12970-an-evening-of-edgar-allan-poe-0-460-0-690-crop-2830000383-460x372.jpg)
Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe
The Sphinx
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Tell-Tale Heart
![[January 24, 1970] War: Individualism and Insubordination (<i>Patton</i> and <i>M*A*S*H</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/700124movies-672x372.jpg)
General Patton at home in some Italian military ruins
Director Schaffner with actor Scott
Patton has the long view of any military adventure.
Just look at that glorious widescreen image!
Trapper John and Hawkeye conning and confusing a helicopter pilot
The entire camp of the MASH unit mocks Major Houlihan
Col. Blake is the only one who treats Houlihan as even slightly equal to him – but he is an ineffectual goof.
Altman directing Gould and Sutherland![[December 28, 1969] Cinemascope: Two if by Sea, Three if by Space! (<i>Captain Nemo and the Underwater City</i> and <i>Marooned</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/691228posters-672x372.jpg)
Nemo's guests are less than thrilled at their accommodation.
There's also some nice modelwork, even if it's often hard to see.
![[November 22, 1969] Crash and Burn (the movie <i>Journey to the Far Side of the Sun</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691126sunposter-672x372.png)
![[November 4, 1969] A Dazzler (Bedazzled, 1967)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/691104bedazzledposter-672x372.jpg)
Stan, about to strike out with Margaret again
The Top of the Pops parody is spot on.
Sermon on the postbox
![[October 28, 1969] Black and White (the movie <i>Change of Mind</i>)](https://galacticjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/691028end-504x372.jpg)
