Back this week with another double feature of movies I feel should be overlooked.
THE MAGNETIC MONSTER(1953)
I seem to be on the opposing side of this one with a lot of reviewers on IMDB. Too many of them seem to consider it a minor SF classic. I’m not sure if we watched the same movie. I sat in wonder at the awful dialogue, the heavy use of stock footage, the sonorous tones of the narrator. The star was Richard Carlson, a favorite from a number of my favorite monster films of the era(CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, and the later THE VALLEY OF GWANGI), but this one came before all of them. King Donovan played his partner and Jean Byron as Carlson’s pregnant wife. Curt Siodmak directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Ivan Tors.
Carlson and Donovan are agents for the O.S.I., the Office of Scientific Investigation, which investigated strange happenings around the country. The agents were called A-Men(make your own jokes here).
The film opens in a hardware store opening for business and all the clocks are magnetized with the time of 12:02. All metal in the shop is magnetized as well. Naturally O.S.I. is called in. Carlson and Donovan arrive with a load of equipment and eventually trace the magnetic effect to a floor above the store. There they find a dead man and evidence of radiation. The source is gone though.
Carlson functions as narrator also(more on that later) and the warning goes out, Carlson intoning that the source must be found and stopped, shoot to kill if necessary. Eventually they find the plane an old man with a heavy brief case flew out on and call it back as the engines start to fail. Told to isolate that brief case in the back of the plane, the pilot(the co-pilot left to fly the plane is a very young Strother Martin) borrows a cane from a blind man and drags it to the back. When they O.S.I. come aboard, they are wearing radiation protection suits. As a matter of fact, whenever the isotope is moved, protective gear is worn, with folks unprotected walking alongside.
The isotope is a new one formed by accident and it feeds on energy, reaching out every eleven hours(it’s finally figured out) and sucking in every bit in range, doubling in size, radiation, and magnetism. It will eventually overbalance Earth and spin it out of orbit. The plan is to overfeed it, choke it on so much energy, it splits into two stable, inert elements before it gets too big.
The only thing capable of providing such power is a cyclotron in Canada. In order to get it there in time, before the next eleven hour expansion, it’s loaded on a jet fighter. Carlson and crew leave first on a slower plane. here’s where a lot of stock footage came in. I’m no plane expert, so I’m relying on the IMDB entry. The isotope is loaded on a T-33 jet fighter, but the plane in flight is an F-86. Stock footage is used to show in-air fueling, supposedly to save time, and Carlson’s voice ties it all together, saying the wing tanks had been dropped(though we see then attached in the footage) and of course their plane has to be seen refueling also.
The cyclotron in Canada is stock footage from a 1932 German science fiction film titled Gold. You have the mad doctor who doesn’t want to have his machine destroyed despite the Canadian government’s agreement and the eventual fate of the world. The technobabble they spouted to explain it all as they went kept me giggling most of the picture.
It wasn’t a totally bad movie, but by no means a minor classic.
Click for the trailer:
RED PLANET MARS(1952)
I know the problem with this one: the era and the climate in Washington, D.C. in which it was produced. It starred Peter Graves and Andrea King as a married couple with two 
children.
Despite the title, it takes place solely on Earth. A scientist takes pictures of Mars and over a period of time, the ice caps seem to be melting, green spreading across the planet. The answer seems obvious(?): intelligent life is adapting the planet. At the same time, Peter Graves’ character contacts being on Mars by radio, at first with mathematical concepts, then specific questions. It seems Mars is a Utopia ruled over by God.
The knowledge causes economic and political upheaval on Earth, mainly in the west. Then the signals from Mars stop.
It turns out to be a dastardly plot by those wretched Commmies from a base in the mountains of Peru, the signals bounced off so they appear to be coming from Mars. It’s all run by a former Nazi scientist and his base is collapsed by an avalanche, thus stopping the signals, the Nazi barely escaping. He heads to America to blow the lid off.
The movie is rather ham-handed in it’s portrayal of Communism and the virtues of religion. Debuting to tremendous reviews, from this point years later, I can only conclude that everyone was afraid to pan the movie what with the witch hunts McCarthy and his bunch were conducting. The title says all I think. Now days, more lucid reviews decry it for what it was: an anti-Communism propaganda film.
Graves and his wife, confronted in their labs by the Nazi. who reveals the true story and his plans to announce to the world what fools they were, make a decision to force the man to kill them, causing an explosion that will wipe out all of them and prevent him from spilling all. Just before it happens, a message from Mars comes in, a real one, that the Nazi frantically tries to stop.
The lab is destroyed, but what message got through was recorded by machines away from the lab. All they got was “Ye have done well my…”
The movie was based on a 1932 play, Red Planet, by John L. Balderston. Never heard of it and wonder if it was really as anti-communist as the film. I don’t think Russia was quite the ogre back then as after WWII.
Click for the trailer:
For a selection of better movies, go to SWEET FREEDOM.
I think it only fair to say that it is important to distinguish between the independent problems of the hysteria with which we percieved the Soviet Union and how bad the communist leadership in the Sovet Union actually was from the outset: purges, murder on a vast scale, ethni cleansing, destruction of culture – I will allow that in a communist society confiscation of property and forbidding of religion were only to be expected – but the other acs of Stalin and his henchmen were vast and inexcusable crimes even, indeed, especially, by the standards of those who authored communism. We tend to lose this perspective because these men stood in the shadow o their slightly more destructive and evil contemporaries the Nazis. It is easy to confuse the philosophy of Marx, effective or ineffectve, stifling or not, with what his followers did after 1918. But there was never a point prior to the infusion of a tragically brief breath of needed sanity by Khruschev (yes the shoe banger) into the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death, one that in fairness, though it waned terribly, never entirely disappeared. The only difference between the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1952 was the number of people dead as a result of Stalin’s madness and our informed understanding of the situation. This again is a completely different situation from our own peculiar sickness of the 1950′s, the Red Scare. Geopolitially I can understand how the Red Scare happened but in terms of day to day life – our parents and granparents and what they thought (arguably a majority of Americans bought into it at some point. Some of course were vocally opposed from the start). One argument that I think that can fairly be made is a kind of inertia of the threat of an all encompassing foreign war, transferred from the war we had just gotten out of via the nifty vehicle of intense and intentional communist bloodthirstiness in Korea. We transferred enemies. Whatever it was, and granting that the witch hunt was the worst of it, I think the “eeriest” thing was that we favored movies and other cultural fare like Red Planet. I enjoy your writing. Keep up the good work.
I could never understand why neither of these got any Oscar nominations.
Grady, I wasn’t speaking of the veracity of claims of Stalin atrocities, but what was going on in this country at the time this film was being made. Communism was made the bogeyman, rightly or wrongly, for everything going on at the time. The truth had little to do with it.
I wholly agree. What did or did not happen in Russia should not have changed us the way it did. I have always thought it was a bizarre thing that we let ourselves get caught up in it. Then again, I guess back at the beginning, there was Salem and the witch trials and the odd episode of hysteria after that as well. Advanced communications in the 1950′s drove the phenomenon nationwide and made it pervasive.
Good comparison, the Salem witch trials, Grady.
My vote for a movie that should be forgotten is Monster a Go Go. It deserves and OMG. Even from me.
During the thirties in Europe there were two growing political movements, fascism and communism. So without the history lesson, yeah, anti-communism was a big deal in the thirties. I doubt Russia or Nazis were featured in the original play. And Nazis and Russia were no doubt what made the movie so much unforgettable than the play.
Charles, MONSTER A GO GO is the worst film, as presented by HG Lewis, that I’ve ever sat through, though it helped, of course, that the first time or so was the MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 treatment. Even they, who among them have partisans who argue instead for MANOS, THE HANDS OF FATE or the Coleman Francis films they did, particularly RED ZONE CUBA, have a strong contingent who think MONSTER is the worst film they ever did.
Indeed, the comparison of the Red Scare of the ’50s (vs. that of the 1870s-1940s that led up to McCarthyism and HUAC) as congruent to the Salem trials is the point of Arthur Miller’s THE CRUCIBLE…if anything, the viciousness toward the radicals particularly during the overrated Wilson Administration was greater…
Ivan Tors even had his own, shortlived and reportedly very dull, sf tv series in the late ’50s, some years before FLIPPER. But as a kid I had a fondness for his goofy productions, as they seemed to me even then.
Todd. you’re probably thinking of Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges. I remember loving it as a kid, but, now that I’ve tried to watch the episodes a local 24 hour hi-def runs early in the morning, I find them unwatchable.
Ivan Tors had a successful career including a handful of TV series such as Daktari and Cowboy In Africa.
Randy: Nope. Tors’s sf series was SCIENCE FICTION THEATER, no less (ran in the ’55-’56 season). Actually, the Antenna TV network affiliate you’re watching is digital broadcast, but not HD…but SEA HUNT is still better than its Ziv TV companion they rerun along with it, HIGHWAY PATROL…
Yup, Michael…he really hit his sweet spot with animal-oriented series, though FLIPPER, the first, was a natural outgrowth of SEA HUNT and THE AQUANAUTS…
Sorry! It’s actually Antenna TV competitor (and slightly older predecessor) This TV (also a digital standard-definition broadcast network, as is Retro TV/RTV, older and better yet) which is rerunning the Ziv syndication stalwarts SEA HUNT and HIGHWAY PATROL in the wee hours nationally.
Great idea and I think the list would be very long indeed.
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