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World Without End / The Indestructible Man; March 1956
Topic Started: Feb 20 2016, 08:24 AM (313 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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World Without End (1956) Dir. Ed Bernds
The Indestructible Man (1956) Dir. Jack Pollexfen

Strange Science Cinema #57/58

One of the things I live for is double-features like this, so we took the ol' Balcony WayBack Machine to the spring of 1956 to enjoy it on the big screen, the way nature intended. We took a slightly used Studebaker for a test drive and headed off to the drive-in; we'll return the car next time we're in that era.

Up first: The Indestructible Man, a very cheap (VERY), very entertaining (DITTO) movie that would be a sci-fi film noir if it weren't so inept.

Lon Chaney, Jr. is Butcher Benton, death row inmate. He swears he's gonna get even with the shyster lawyer and two pals who turned states evidence against him, and when he's executed but then resuscitated by mad scientists Robert Shayne and Joe Flynn (yes, Inspector Henderson and Old Leadbottom), he gets his chance.

Hoo, boy, where to START with this puppy.

Detective Casey Adams is one of those guys you realize you've seen in hundreds of movies and TV shows and yet you have no idea who he is. He narrates the whole thing in a deadpan, Joe Friday style, and consistently talks about his dedication to spending every waking hour, either on-duty or not, relentlessly tracking down Butcher Benton while spending most of the movie taking a stripper out for hamburgers.

Chaney has a few lines of dialog pre-execution, and then stalks around Los Angeles (wearing a very silly coat and a Gene Vincent haircut) mutely. When we're not watching Casey Adams chew a hamburger and smoke at the same time, we're enjoying one closeup after another of Chaney's quivering, puffy eyes! This movie's drinking game: guzzle something every time the director cuts to Lon's peepers. You'll never make it through the film conscious.

Marion Carr is the stripper who swears she didn't know her friend Chaney was a criminal; uh, his nickname is BUTCHER, baby; that didn't give you a clue?

Million-dollar Dialog:

The stripper, turning down a drink offer: "An artist can't drink while she's working."

The climax puts Chaney in Mr. Bubble makeup and a chase across a factory; in fact, all of the cinematography - in and around the streets of L.A., including the Angels Flight people-mover, all obviously filmed surreptitiously (none of that "apply for pricey permits" HERE, bub) - is a fun time capsule of mid-50s L.A's seamier neighborhoods.

There's no downside to this film at all. If you want to watch it in your own home and you don't have a time machine, get the Retromedia "Lon Chaney Collection" - a great, uncut print but you'll have to blow it up on your teevee to see it properly - they have it full mat, which is obviously wrong.

Next on the program, a helpful and timely advertisement for the snack bar reminding us to leave lights off and to remove the speaker when exiting the drive-in. Okay, we shan't forget. Then it's a Popeye cartoon called Big Bad Sindbad, in which our favorite sailorman tells his three ugly nephews about his battle with Sindbad, courtesy of much-better-animated footage from the 1930s Max Fleischer Technicolor cartoon, only with the voices redubbed to match 1950s Popeye cartoons. Hmmm.

After that, it's a trailer for next weekend's show: The Creature Walks Among Us! Wow!

Okay, everybody back in the car for the next feature in our outstanding Allied Artists double-feature, World Without End.

This film, as it turns out, is huge (CinemaScope!), colorful (Technicolor!) and stupid (Stupid!)

Four astronauts are sent to Mars, but only to circle the planet, look for buildings, canals, or billboards, and then return to Earth to report. Alas, a freak accident hurtles them through a time warp and into Earth's far future, where our planet is populated by murderous one-eyed cavemen (on the surface) and colorfully-clad old white guys wearing bathing caps and their gorgeous young women (living in caves). Hilarity ensues.

Suddenly, The Indestructible Man appears to have been written by Einstein.

Follow this: the astronauts are going to Mars, but they're not going to land, just circle the planet. So why did they bring hats and coats and six-shooters? The answer, folks, is that the film is (a) from Allied Artists, a/k/a "Monogram", and (b) it was written, produced, and directed by Ed Bernds, of Three Stooges and Bowery Boys fame. Because they saw what "looks like grass" before crashing on "Mars", they reason that it might have a breathable atmosphere, and there's "only one way to find out": yep, open the rocket door and take a deep breath.

The cast includes Hugh Marlowe, Rod Taylor (in one of his first films, and it's lucky he looks good without a shirt on, it might've been his last) and Nancy Gates. I'm being a little hard on it, on the surface, but heck, as 1950s science-fiction films go, I've seen a lot worse. Well, I've rarely seen a worse giant rubber spider, that IS true.

Million-dollar Dialog:
"You mean that one-eyed monster we buried back at the camp is the heir to 10,000 years of human progress?"

Thankfully, while a stripper can't drink while she's working, a film critic can, so by the end of the film, I was enjoying it quite a bit. It's on DVD.
Edited by Laughing Gravy, Feb 20 2016, 08:28 AM.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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