One A Week Reviews #2: Forbidden Planet

 
While I'd never seen it all the way through before, once I got myself a blu-ray player, I moved Forbidden Planet to the top of my Netflix queue. With both Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis having recently passed away, and my memories of it from snippets on cable television are of it being a lavishly set-bound and colorful movie. All I knew about it going in was that it was inspired by Shakespeare and that, according to The Rocky Horror Picture Show "Anne Francis stars in 'Forbidden Planet' woah-oh-oh-OH-oh/to the late night/double feature/picture show" Obviously, I thought it was just the thing to show off what the player could do.

If you're not familiar with Forbidden Planet, a space crew from Earth, headed by Nielsen, land on Altair-4, a planet inhabited by the dry, creepy Dr. Morbius, his overripe daughter Alta, and Robby the Robot. The planet had been inhabited by the Krell, and their magnificent matte-painted underground cities, but now their technology lives on only to serve Morbius and his wish-fulfillment fantasies. It increases his intellect and winds up killing a few people by manifesting his Id as an invisible monster. (Oh, hush about spoilers - this movie came out in 1956)

It's a very stilted, silly movie by today's standards, dull as dishwater in places. For every charming, quaint animated special effect there's long slogs of talk-talk-talk, but the charm still comes through. And those effect are charming. The "invisible footprints" still hold up and the matte paintings, even though fantastical, please the eye. Lavish, enormous sets and grade-A production values are the standard here. Miniature work, big cyclorama backdrops, everything here is very stage-bound and expensive, but beautiful. However, the Fifties ponderousness of this take on The Tempest doesn't prevent it from also being downright pervy at heart.

The center of Forbidden Planet seems to be "all impending date rape, all the time." This focus on Alta, who's never met anyone besides her father, and her spaceman love triangle is down right creepy. Sure, she's a girly girl who designs her own jewel-encrusted gowns, but in real life you can't help but think she'd probably have a terrified skittishness at these strangers. Instead they go for "typical Fifties female" with just a hint of simmering libido. She's really rather non-plussed by their appearance after all these years, waiting to get snatched up and married even if she's unfamiliar with the concept.

One also gets the impression she'd have been turned into a bit of a love slave by Morbius, since he certainly comes off as a bit of a creep.When he takes the Krell "test of intelligence" he winds up creating a hologram of his daughter in a mini-skirt. His Id Monster goes to sabotage the ship after Lieutenant Farman kisses his daughter and he nearly does in Captain Adams with a tiger. It's all rude and more than a little passive-aggressive. The first go-round, Morbius cleans off the planet so it'd all be his. This time, the Id is in it just to protect Anne Francis' maidenhead.

Leslie Nielsen is... well, pretty damn dull. His later fame as a comic stems from the same super-serious delivery he employs here. Without that spark of madness he's just kinda wooden, and I'm from a generation conditioned to expect him to spark laughter. Anne Francis has a character that I'm not sure anyone could do well with at that time, but she's lovely enough. Towards the end she starts to stand out as Alta makes proactive choices, but otherwise she's a Fifties movie-gal all the way through.. In reality, she'd be odd, as overly-mannered and educated as she'd be near-feral from lack of exposure to other people. Walter Pidgeon is good, very dry and very "old Hollywood." A definite curio from the Fifties, with it's glacial pacing, shoe-horned-in love story, and ponderous morals, it's still a beautiful, classic movie movie. A satisfying, old-fashioned entertainment
Gotta say, when you see that red-outlined, Tasmanian Devil-looking Id creature, he is pretty nightmarish. He can't be defeated by laser beams or electric fences. No, just lots of scenery-chewing by Leslie Nielsen and Walter Pidgeon can do the critter in, with the help of flashing lights, weird electronic noises, and static shots of the set since the critter's invisible. Forbidden Planet is a beautiful piece of CinemaScope eyecandy. Enjoy.

One A Week Review #35 - Skyjacked

Your boy is back after a couple weeks (okay, a couple months, really) hiatus and he's got a gem to kick off a new round of One A Week reviews.

Skyjacked is an odd, "A Picture" rip off of Airport that has all the Seventies "disaster film" tropes you know I love. It even has that terrific head shot poster practically required for this kind of movie. It's as luxe as Airport  but has the slightly trashier storyline more apropos to Murder on Flight 502. You have an "all star cast" headlined by Charlton Heston (did he carry this character on to Airport 1975? I choose to think so.) and Yvette Mimieux at her Breck Girl best (seriously, there's a killer "romantic flashback" that'd make a perfect shampoo commerical).

A dashing, pipe-smoking-in-the-cockpit Airline pilot and his head Stew ex-girlfriend are on a flight to Minneapolis that gets "skyjacked" with threatening notes to Anchorage. Thankfully it's a plane right out of the works of Arthur Hailey populated with a bomber, pregnant gal about to pop, mysterious Senator with a son romancing a hippie gal in first class, and Claude Atkins as George Kennedy.

They're supported capably by an overacting James Brolin, Walter Pidgeon at his Walter-Pidgeon-iest, plot point pregnant lady Mariette Hartley (you see her belly before you see her), and cast against-type-as-a-Cellist Rosie Grier. Susan Dey, Jeanne Crain, and Leslie Uggams (even classy in a rainstorm on an inflatable emergency slide) show up to decorate the airplane set with their (ahem) star-wattage.

Most impressive is the totally set-bound interiors (you see the wrinkles in the "sky" background at one point) and the sequences featuring one or more planes in flight. This was a time before CGI, after all. They're flying real planes, sometimes in what looks to be very close formation. There's a nice 1972 sheen to the whole thing with fantastic fabrics, a conservatism hungover from an older day of film-making, and stewardesses who bother to learn every passengers name and whip out the occasional Bloody Mary at the request of a woman eight months pregnant. Did I mention the captain smokes a pipe in the cockpit?

I don't know how I had never heard of this film prior to a couple of weeks ago, when I accidentally stumbled on it on Netflix.  It's really just Airport 1.5 and pleases the palate well enough for any lover of plane dramas and disaster films. In the end, it suffers what so many Hollywood pictures of the time are afflicted with. With a bomb, birth, the threat of a midair collision, unconvincing Judo, the Cold War, and more, it's still not trashy and melodramatic enough. (Lord knows they try with some truly awful flashbacks.) There's tension, soap opera, barely there subplots, and an impossibly lovely set of actresses. That's a crime, but this is still a decent way to kill a couple hours with an old-fashioned time capsule of a movie.

I just wish at some point the Stewardess got to fly the plane...