George Pal

The Power (1968)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-09-262023-03-18 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) It just takes a few moments in producer George Pal’s The Power, as the title pulses in unison with a heartbeat, to realize that we’re headed into weird science-fiction thriller territory. The strangeness soon intensifies as a government man walks into a respectable-looking laboratory in which human endurance tests push volunteers to their frontiers of pain … for space science! (This is unnerving, but never actually portrayed as evil. Nor is our sadistic scientist portrayed as anything but the story’s hero. And you won’t believe the set design. But let’s move on.) But for sheer plotting contrivances, wait a few minutes as a conference begins and an overly dramatic scientist states that a questionnaire has revealed the existence of a super-powered human sitting around the table. Even a convincing demonstration of power doesn’t bring the audience closer to guessing who’s the superhuman. Of course, this wouldn’t be a horror/SF hybrid without superpowers being used for evil, and soon the nature of reality takes a turn (in a rather charming late-1960s way) as the bodies start piling up. I shouldn’t be too hard on the story, which is adapted from a Frank M. Robinson genre SF novel. But this little-known movie adaptation takes things in uncanny directions, with eerie moments sandwiched between inelegant exposition and classic suspense movie thrills. It doesn’t make a shred of sense (why would a super-smart person, even evil, let himself be detected, let alone go on increasingly baroque ways of killing off everyone around him?) but there are a few good moments along the way. Heck, we even get to attend a swinging sixties party in between the chills and thrills. And ho boy, what about that cimbalom score. A surprisingly normal-looking George Hamilton (by later super-suntanned standards) stars as a dashing scientist, with some assistance from bouffant-coiffed Susanne Pleshette at a scientist used as love interest and a dapper-thin Michael Rennie as a government agent. There are dozens of ways The Power could have been made differently—funnier, scarier, smarter, more believable. But none of those more restrained way would have had the dash of craziness that the result does. The last few minutes are an audibly delightful mixture of the entire film’s highlights mixed with proto-psychedelic imagery and a plot twist that explains a few things. Good movie? Not really. Worth a look? Almost certainly … but you must expect some weird stuff by late-1960s MGM standards—it’s no accident this one landed in 1968, just as Hollywood was beginning to stretch its muscles in terms of what it could be doing outside the constraints of traditional filmmaking.

Movie Review

The War of the Worlds (1953)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-07-222023-03-18 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, July 2019) Science Fiction movies of the 1950s often featured aliens invading Earth, but none of them were as expansive as The War of the Worlds in showing us a big-scale invasion. Led by producer George Pal, it loosely takes the classic novel H. G. Wells novel as inspiration for a widescreen depiction of an international invasion, even if the story stays focused quite tightly on a Californian scientist and his distaff counterpart. Surprisingly sombre at times (seeing WW2 footage used to portray city devastation is sobering enough, even without realizing that the film was released less than a decade after the war), and downright horrifying enough to give nightmares to my younger self (young boy not yet jaded by horror plus that shot of a soldier being disintegrated to a green skeleton equals unhappy memories), The War of the Worlds is at its best when adapting the Wells novel to the realities of the 1950s—even in a twenty-first century where Steven Spielberg delivered his own take on the story in 2003, this version is often fascinating as a pure period piece. Alas, some things don’t work as well. The initially super-competent female character played by Ann Robinson starts out fascinating, then degrades throughout the film until she becomes a shrieking simpleton right in time for Gene Barry’s character to rescue her during the film’s biggest suspense sequence. The Technicolor cinematography is striking, although it’s taken a bit too far when the alien tripods show three-coloured cells in their tools. Still, you have to admire the audacity of the film’s intention in showing a global engagement and its lovely period California setting. Both explain why The War of the Worlds remains worth a look now, despite the now-creaky special effects and the outdated social values.

Movie Review

Destination Moon (1950)

ByChristian Sauvé 2018-05-232019-03-25 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2018) Among Science Fiction readers of a certain age, Destination Moon is famous as “The Heinlein movie”—that is, the movie that famed SF author Robert A. Heinlein went to Hollywood to write. Chapters of his biography are dedicated to his Hollywood adventure, and the episode is greatly enhanced by the recognition that for the time and nearly two decades until 2001: A Space Odyssey, Destination Moon remained the purest hard-SF story ever brought to the big screen. (Well, aside from some truly dumb decisions at the end of the first act that seem motivated by ideology rather than any kind of logic.) Focused on showing how humans could go to the moon and come back, this is a film that eschews aliens, monsters and fantastic situations in order to focus on the nitty-gritty procedural details of space travel. Completed more than a decade before humans went into space and nineteen years before Americans actually landed on the moon, Destination Moon certainly looks dated now, but it remains relatively competent in pure technical details, and its sober treatment of the subject makes it an oddity in the otherwise lurid 1950s SF filmography. A number of legends are found in the credits: Heinlein aside, the film was produced by George Pal and visually informed by noted artist Chesley Bonestell. Much of the film’s heavy exposition is handled through a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, echoing the similar Mr. DNA sequence in Jurassic Park. I’m not particularly charmed by Destination Moon (aside from the film having very little narrative energy, I’m really not happy about the antigovernment pro-business screed at the beginning of the film), but I’m reasonably happy at having seen it at least once.

Movie Review

The Time Machine (1960)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-12-072018-02-01 Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2017) The bad news is that The Time Machine isn’t particularly faithful to the H.G. Wells novel, but the good news are that the film is at its most fascinating when it does diverge significantly from the source material. While the film suffers a partial lobotomy in not really taking an interest in Wells’ social-class parable about the Eloi and Morlocks (instead presenting the Morlocks as straight-cut monsters) and isn’t geared toward the melancholic far-future envoi of Wells’ narrative, it does make up for these deficiencies by strong period content. Diverging from the novel in order to update our Victorian-era protagonist on the evolution of the twenty-first century up to the film’s release, The Time Machine touches upon both World Wars and a nuclear holocaust, inserting them where the original novel could only imagine. The film being from 1960, this means that we get twice-filtered atmospheric content, as we look at the late 1950s look at Victorian England look at the far future. Whew. It may be scientifically indefensible (I rather liked the way our protagonist ends up in 1966 right on time for a nuclear war … and then outruns a lava flow) but it is interesting in its own way. Director George Pal concocts an entertaining blend of SF concepts, then-ground-breaking special effects and intriguing set design. Rod Taylor makes for a likable square-jawed hero, while Yvette Mimieux is fetching enough as promoted-to-love-interest Weena. Special-effect evolution aside, this 1960 version is significantly better than the dull 2002 remake.