I’d seen the science-fiction collection The Best of Henry Kuttner with an interesting feeling that I’d heard of the name before somewhere — and it wasn’t until I picked up the book and looked at its contents that I realized where I’d heard of Henry Kuttner: one of the 17 stories represented was called “The Twonky.” I’d first heard of “The Twonky” in 1990, in an issue of Filmfax magazine that contained a long article about the making of the movie version of it in 1950, written, produced and directed by Arch Oboler from Kuttner’s 1942 short story. What I hadn’t fully realized was that Oboler had taken a serious science-fiction story and turned it into a comedy (much the way Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern did with Peter Bryant’s serious novel about World War III, Red Alert, 14 years later to come up with Dr. Strangelove). Kuttner’s version of “The Twonky” begins in the Mideastern Radio factory, where an outer-space alien takes human form, infiltrates Mideastern’s workforce and produces a “twonky” in the guise of an ordinary console radio-phonograph. This particular model gets sold to college professor Kerry Westerfield, who finds the Twonky first doing ordinary household chores — helping him light his cigarettes and washing dishes for him — then deciding how much he will be allowed to drink (it lets him have one cup of coffee but won’t permit him a second), what he will be allowed to read (it lets him read Chaucer and Millay, but not detective novels, histories, Alice in Wonderland or anything to do with individualism as a philosophy) and even what music he may listen to (it allows him Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, but denies him Halvorsen’s Entrance of the Boyars — a piece I don’t know — and Ravel’s Bolero). Eventually it starts blocking out parts of his mind — anything relating (once again) to individualism as a philosophy — and finally it kills both him and his wife when they try to destroy it. Though the Twonky is a mechanical device, while the seed-pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers are organic, the premises of the stories are basically the same: an invader from outer space attempts to dominate human consciousness as a prelude to invasion and domination of the Earth.
Later I got out my videotape of the film version of The Twonky and ran it with Charles at his place. The
comparisons were interesting; the first half of the film is actually a fairly
close adaptation of Kuttner’s story, while the second half veers off into silly
humor that nonetheless remains surprisingly entertaining. Oboler updated the
story technologically — his Twonky is built into an Admiral free-standing TV
set instead of a radio-phonograph, and somehow Oboler found (or built) a TV
whose very appearance, with its all-white cabinet, four bow legs and no bulge
in the back for the picture tube (antedating the modern-day “flat” TV’s by
about 20 years), is comical. (Admiral may have been doing product-placement in
this film — a practice that was just beginning when it was made — because the
refrigerator in the central character’s kitchen is also an Admiral.) Oboler
abbreviates the character’s name — Kerry Westerfield becomes simply Kerry West
(just as well, I guess, given the low fidelity in the sound recording that
sometimes made it difficult to understand the dialogue) — and changes his
sidekick from the school’s psychology professor to a losing football coach who
dabbles in psychology on the side. (He also rechristens Kerry’s wife Carolyn —
Kuttner called her Martha.) I recall the Filmfax article claimed that the actors who were making The
Twonky had no idea (until they saw the cut
film) that Oboler had intended all along to change it into a comedy — a story I
frankly find hard to believe, especially since he cast Hans Conried in the
lead, and Conried’s overwrought overacting would clearly have been
inappropriate in anything but a
comic version of Kuttner’s sinister story. And Oboler did add some touches that reinforced Kuttner’s Body
Snatchers-esque point — instead of killing
those humans who try to harm it, Oboler’s Twonky merely hypnotizes them so they
stagger away, as if drunk, and mumble, “I have no complaints.” Also, Oboler’s
Twonky is considerably more low-brow in its tastes than Kuttner’s — while it
won’t let Professor West read history or philosophy, it will allow him a cheap
romantic potboiler called Passion Through the Ages; and it rejects Mozart records in favor of marching
music.
Charles, who hadn’t read the story, thought The Twonky was just a silly movie — bad, though not so
overwhelmingly bad that it deserved the fate it apparently aroused the first
(and, apparently, only) time it was ever publicly shown: the entire
audience walked out, except for a six-year-old kid who couldn’t leave because
his parents had dropped him off at the theatre and weren’t coming to pick him
up again until the movie ended. (There was one unmistakably Ed Woodian use of
repeated footage — at the end, when Conried is trying to get away from the
Twonky by abandoning his own car and getting into a car being driven by an
Englishwoman who is driving on the left side of the road because she refuses to
recognize that in the U.S. you’re supposed to drive on the right side — and the speedometer on her car looks identical to the one on Conried’s own, down to the exact same
odometer reading!) I remember seeing it in December 1992 (recording it off the
TNT network) with Garry Hobbs, who actually liked the film (as did I) — not
that it’s a great movie, but it
has a peculiar charm, and I remember writing in my journal at the time that the
reason it flopped when it first came out was simply that too few people were
familiar with the conventions of the science-fiction genre to get the jokes of a movie that was parodying them
— and I still like it, even
though I can’t help but suspect that Kuttner’s original story would have made a
stronger film if it hadn’t been parodied, and if it had had a more subtle
director than Arch Oboler (like Don Siegel, who did the first version of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers with a quiet
understatement — at least until the climax — that is exactly right for this
type of material).
In fact, reading the
Kuttner book — I made it through three of the 17 stories contained in it,
including the ones Ray Bradbury named in the preface as his favorites, “The
Twonky” and “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” — it was clear that understatement was
precisely his greatest strength as a writer. He could toss off sentences like,
“Once, when he couldn’t locate some tungsten, he hastily built a small gadget
and made it” (the punch line being that tungsten is an element, and therefore “unmakable” without elaborate
atom-smashing equipment), “Joe went over into a corner, felt around in the air,
nodded with satisfaction and seated himself on nothing, three feet above the
floor. Then he vanished,” or, “He went across the hall and stopped in the
doorway, motionless and staring. The radio was washing the dishes,” in a
matter-of-fact way that suggested there was nothing at all unusual about the
events being described. Kuttner may not only have anticipated the concept of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, he also may have
been the first science-fiction writer to describe virtual reality (as the
“Escape Machines” in the story “Two-Handed Engine,” whose plot — in which
humankind’s machines intervene to restore a sense of conscience to a world in
which the human race has lost it — seems more relevant in the Gingrich era than
it probably did in 1955 when he wrote it), and he seems to have been ahead of
his contemporaries in describing both the beneficial and the malevolent effects
of computers. It would surprise me indeed if none of Kuttner’s other stories
have been filmed — “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” (in which Lewis Carroll’s poem
“Jabberwocky” turns out to be a mathematical formula for interdimensional
travel, understandable as such only by children five and younger whose
perceptions haven’t yet been molded into the shape of Euclidean logic) would
seem to be a perfect story for Steven Spielberg. — 12/14/95
•••••
Last night’s screenings at the Vintage Sci-Fi event in
Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of
two early-1950’s movies, both featuring Hans Conried, an eccentric actor who
was the sort of performer who couldn’t ask another character to pass him the
salt without it sounding like a melodramatic invitation to torture or mayhem.
The first was a film I had actually supplied, dubbed from an old VHS tape of
mine that also contained a 1992 Tony Brown’s Journal challenging the idea that HIV caused AIDS and the
1942 film Dead Men Tell, the last
in the 20th Century-Fox Charlie Chan series with Sidney Toler (who
bought the rights to the character from the widow of original author Earl Derr
Biggers and shopped them around to various studios, but after Fox lost interest
no other major studio signed on and Toler got stuck making his later Chan films
at Monogram). It was called The Twonky and started life as a marvelously dark 1942 short story by Henry
Kuttner (though, as with a lot of his stories, his wife, C. L. Moore, might
have collaborated, and the original publication was credited to “Lewis
Padgett,” a pseudonym apparently used by both members of the couple, jointly
and severally) in which an alien named “Unthahorsten” infiltrates a Midwestern
factory that produces radio-phonographs and, purely out of boredom, decides to
insert a “Twonky,” a mind-control device from his home planet, into one of
them.
The Twonky-containing radio set ends up in the home of a professor named
Kerry Westerfield and causes him all sorts of problems; at first its
interventions in his home life are beneficent, lighting his cigarettes and
washing his dishes (Kuttner was such a master of understatement that he could
matter-of-factly toss off a sentence like “The radio was washing the dishes”
without any obvious indication that there was anything remarkable about it),
but then it starts deciding what books he can read, what music he can listen
to, and what he can write in the lectures he gives his students. Radio writer
Arch Oboler, who had just broken into film production and direction with a 1949
movie called Five — referring to
the number of survivors in the world after a nuclear war and in fact the first post-nuclear apocalypse movie — which was a smash
hit. So he took his backers’ money and invested it in a film adaptation of
Kuttner’s story that changed it into a comedy. Since he was filming in 1950
(though the movie didn’t get released until 1953, and then only in a limited
run — according to Filmfax
magazine, its first public screening was such a disaster the whole audience
walked out except for a
six-year-old kid who couldn’t leave because his parents had dropped him at the
theatre and weren’t coming to pick him up until the movie was over) he changed
the household appliance occupied by the Twonky from a radio-phonograph into a
TV set, and he got a white bow-legged model from Admiral whose appearance was
hilarious in and of itself. He also shortened the name of the lead character
from Kerry Westerfield to Kerry West and got Hans Conried to play him, and Conried
responded with a feast of overacting as his life gets more and more miserable
with the Twonky exerting control.
Kuttner was clearly an early libertarian — in
his story “The Iron Standard” a group of astronauts from Earth land on Venus,
which has a fully functioning socialist economy, and bring it down with their
entrepreneurial capitalist machinations; when I first read it I told Charles it
was the sort of thing Ayn Rand could have written if she’d ever shown any sign
of subtlety or wit — and the social message of “The Twonky” is that
individualism is good and any outside authority that tells us how to live,
think or entertain ourselves is bad. A little of that survives in the movie, but the film is
basically an excuse for Oboler to satirize the conventions of science fiction —
though, as I pointed out on one of my previous screenings of The
Twonky, one problem is that in the early
1950’s the conventions of science-fiction weren’t that well known outside the
limited, geeky circles of science-fiction fandom. Today the conventions of Star
Trek and Star Wars are so well known that even someone who’s never seen
a Star Trek TV episode or a Star
Wars movie can “get” a parody of them; in
the early 1950’s it was harder to find people who knew enough about science
fiction to laugh at a film satirizing its genre conventions. The Twonky (the movie) is a fun film as it stands, with some
marvelously barbed lines, notably the one in which Kerry West’s Black maid,
Maybelle (Bennie Washington), congratulates him on finally getting with it and buying a TV set, then boasts,
“Yours is only 16 inches! Mine is 20!”
It’s also got a great character of a collection agent (played by Joan
Blondell’s sister Gloria) who zeroes in on married men with outstanding debts
and poses as a floozy so they’ll pay up to get rid of her before their wives
come home. But it doesn’t even remotely do justice to Kuttner’s (and maybe
Moore’s) magnificent tale, which deserves to be remade as a film the way the
Kuttners wrote it. — 1/18/18
