1966 - FANTASTIC VOYAGE, dated but fascinating science fiction film

Two years before Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, a film that upped the game when it came to showing special effects in the movies, came this bizarre, fascinating and unique film.  It seems that the United States and the Soviet Union (although they are never called that), have developed a process of miniaturization.  They cane shrink a person or even an army down to the size of atoms.  The process only lasts one hour and wouldn't you know it the only scientist who knows how to make the process longer has been the victim of an assassination attempt which has put him in a coma.

The plan is to shrink a group of scientists and insert them into his body, where they will repair the damage and get out before they start to enlarge.  So begins our film.  The story is certainly on the rather ludicrous side but is it any more stupid than the ridiculous Twisters that is currently in the theaters?

20th Century Fox really didn't spare any expensive in the making of this film.   The sets were built on a fairly lavish scale.  The very cool looking shrunken submarine "Proteus" was designed by Harper Goff who had designed the Nautilus for Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

 The film actually has a fairly decent cast of Hollywood mainstays, Stephen Boyd is the secret agent assigned to the mission to make sure there is no sabotage good idea to bring him along.  Raquel Welch in one of her first mainstream films is the medical assistant to Arthur Kennedy playing a surgeon.  Arthur O'Connell  and Edmund O' Brien are the military guys in charge of the mission.  They are basically around to provide exposition and shout out orders.  Also on the team is Donald Pleasence an expert on the human body, watch out for him everyone.

 

Richard Fleischer who was kind of the house director for 20th Century Fox was behind the camera and I would guess this film was a big technical challenge at the time it was made.  Fleischer always seemed to get the difficult films at Fox.  He notably had to straighten out the big scale production of Tora Tora Tora after Kurosawa was fired from that film.  Truth be told the special effects don't really look that great but I guess they get the job done.  Apparently the film did make money.

Fantastic Voyage was written by Harry Kleiner a reliable mainstream screenwriter, the running time is 100 minutes.

1952 - THE NARROW MARGIN, excellent film noir

 Coming in at the beginning of the 1950's, this film is an extremely well made noir made on a low budget with a minimum of sets, and a cast of "B" actors which actually give a lot of verisimilitude to the film's plot.

Charles McGraw plays the tough cop transporting a mobster's spouse on a train so she can testify at an important criminal trial.  The wife played by Marie Windsor is one tough cookie who McGraw basically can't stand.  The action in the film comes from McGraw having to keep Windsor alive while a couple of mob hit men try to knock her off.  The enclosed space on the train which is imaginatively photographed and staged, creates a lot of tension.

The director is Richard Fleischer at the start of his career before he moved on to bigger budgets and more prestigious assignments. The screenplay is by Earl Felton who would go on to write Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and a good comedy called The Happy Time.

The running time is a tight 71 minutes.

1959 - COMPULSION, based on a true story

This thinly disguised story of Leopold and Loeb is turned into a reasonably compelling film shot in widescreen black and white.  Leopold and Loeb were clearly a gay couple,  homosexuality in this film is made to seem like about as big a crime as the murder they commit.  

Leopold and Loeb got it into their heads that they were intellectually superior individuals.  To prove their superiority they decided to commit the perfect murder.  Of course in real life their perfect crime unraveled and they went on trial for murder.  They were defended by the famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Orson Welles plays Darrow, he was apparently a big pain in the ass on the set.  The director Richard Fleischer had to use every trick in the photography book to match the continuity during the trial scenes with Welles.  Welles apparently was extremely uncooperative while filming his scenes.

An interesting film is not really a great one.

103 minutes.

1970 - TORA TORA TORA, on Blu Ray

Darryl F. Zanuck wanted to do for the Pearl Harbor attack what he had done with The Longest Day, dramatize a true life war story on a large scale.  This attempt fell short for a number of reasons.

Zanuck had originally hoped to have Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa film the Japanese sequences and integrate them with footage filmed by an American director.  For various reasons Kurosawa did not get along with the American producers assigned by Zanuck and 20th Century Fox was unwilling to give Kurosawa the complete artistic control he was used to.  In the end Zanuck settled for studio director Richard Fleischer to finish the project.  The end result was a film with a lot of talking heads and one large scale battle sequence

Dramatically if you are an American the film is kind of a bummer to watch.  The events leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack make the United States military look like a bunch of incompetent boobs considering the intelligence they had before the attack.  This hardly makes the film your typical inspirational war epic.

Tora Tora Tora is at times kind of pedestrian and somewhat incompetent film making considering the huge budget the film had.  Most notably the white subtitles on white backgrounds make the subtitles for the Japanese sequences impossible to read much less understand.

The large scale battle sequence at the end is impressive since Tora Tora Tora was filmed before the dawn of computer image effects.  Obviously the battleships are models but the airplane sequences are the real deal with the actual planes flying low and lots of stuff blowing up.

144 minutes. Screenplay by Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni, and Akira Kurosawa.

1950 - ARMORED CAR ROBBERY, good little crime film with Charles McGraw

Tough guy cop Charles McGraw is on the trail of a gang of robbers who committed an Armored Car Robbery that was responsible for the death of his partner.

McGraw is really a piece of work, slamming down cigarettes and being a total bad ass in his trench coat.  No time to romance the broads in this tight little film.

Armored Car Robbery has good direction from Richard Fleischer and packs a lot of tough guy action into it's short running time.

McGraw's the man.

67 minutes.

1973 - SOYLENT GREEN is people yeah ok

Soylent Green is one of those fondly remembered science fiction films from the 1970's that is thought better of than it actually is as a film.  Charlton Heston is the cop in the future investigating a mysterious murder of a corporate executive who is involved in the manufacturing a popular food source called soylent green.

Heston plays his usual stoic character as a rather unlikable guy.  Contrary to popular belief Heston wasn't afraid to play unlikable characters and his police detective of the future is actually pretty corrupt.  In his final role, Heston's research assistant is played by Edward G Robinson.  Robinson and Heston actually have pretty good chemistry together in this film.  It's probably even better chemistry than Heston has with his leading lady.

The director Richard Fleischer was always a competent technician for the most part.  Fleischer was pretty much a traffic cop when it came to making films.  He worked a lot of years at Twentieth Century Fox handling some of their big projects like Tora Tora Tora,  Dr. Doolittle and Che.  He directed Disney's big fantasy film 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.  Name a genre and this guy probably worked in it.

Soylent Green is from the period of film history when science fiction films were considered to be a second class genre to work in.  With the exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey,  nobody thought very highly of these films.  Soylent Green is about overcrowding and ecological disaster but nobody making this film was going to be doing a real serious film on these subjects.  This film was mostly a detective thriller with a science fiction setting that was put together by old style Hollywood actors and technicians.

Probably the most interesting things on the DVD are the special features.   The short "making of" documentary shot during the filming shows a production shot on the backlot of MGM.  It's a good example of conventional early 1970's film making.  The other special feature is a tribute to Edward G Robinson that Heston hosted during the filming of Soylent Green.   This was Robinson's 101 and last feature film, he was apparently a very sick man during the filming and died shortly after he completed his part.  Heston seems very sincere emceeing the tribute to Robinson and Robinson himself seems genuinely moved during what is probably a staged publicity event for the making of the film.  

As a film Soylent Green is OK if no great shakes as a science fiction story.  Soylent Green now looks like an interesting relic made by people in the 1970's trying to imagine what an ecological disaster would look like in the 21st century.  That's probably the most interesting thing about the film.  Not the actual film itself.

97 minutes, written by  Stanley R. Greenberg.

1954 - 20000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, Disney/Jules Verne

The Disney corporation seems hell bent on remaking this film they've hired the non talented director McG, who did such a great job on Terminator Salvation.

 

 

McG wants to add more humor to the film and has supposedly approached Will Smith and that guy who played the "good terminator" from the last Terminator film to possibly play Captain Nemo. I'm sure the film will be filmed in the wonder of 3-D as well. 

 

 Before all that happens, pick up the DVD that Disney released for their first version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to see how a team of real professionals put an adventure movie together.

 I know it's all about money these days but really...

The film was written by Earl Felton, the running time is 127 minutes.