The Forbidden Planet (1956)
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 7.5 by 53,000 cinematizens.
DNA: Of the time.
Verdict: A Keeper.
Tagline: Shakespeare did it.
A crew lands (a spaceship) where they are not welcome to save survivors (who do not wish to be rescued). They find the Tin man Robbie with the personalty of Ariel in the body of Caliban. Prospero is Mr Miniver, an icy but ever so polite host. Honey West as Miranda is such stuff as dreams are made of. (She had her last IMDb credit fifty years later.)
Frank ‘Antonio’ Drebin (his last posthumous credit in 2011) leads the merry crew including Bart Maverick, a cast of television regulars, and a painful comic relief who could and did better in other credits. They are all decked out in grey on gray garage mechanic boiler suits.
Then they encounter Id, and Id gets ugly. Very. Marvellous son et lumière show.
Though the Krell are the premise, we never see them. Yet they dominate everything.
***
What a high risk investment this film must have been at the time. No big name actors, a B-movie genre, an invisible enemy, a psychoanalytic explanation, and the voice of J. Michael Anthony from the Tin Man. Conspicuously lacking is any Cold War resonance, which was a staple for Sy Fy of the time. Surprisingly Prospero is a philologist not a physicist. Again inconsistent with the norms of 1950s Sy Fy, though the storyline was made to fit it. Nor was there a nuclear threat, rather the evil is within us…all!
The local Dendy, with its eight screens, devoted one Saturday to a Sy Fy revival – May the 4th be with us. About twenty films were cycled during the day from 10am onward and I chose this one, rather than the big ticket items in the larger theatres Blade Runner, Total Recall, and the Wraith of Khan. (I was tempted by the chance to see Ricardo Montalban’s pectorals again but passed.) One film was enough for me, and I chose this one.
Forbidden Planet screened in theatre 7 upstairs in the back around the corner, seating sixty, and it was completely sold out. And not all were geriatrics. Far too many of whom used their phone screens during the feature. Such is our time.
Here is a curiosity: on You Tube is this film backwards. Yep. It runs backward from the credits, both the audio and video. Yep. Why, one might ask? Good question to which there is no answer.
Judging by the crowds from the Nerd Kingdom about the Dendy on my entry and exit, the day must have been a commercial success. I can only imagine the work that went into corralling this collection of material.
My thanks.