by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago the third film on the triple bill at the
Vintage Sci-Fi screening in Golden Hill turned out to be unexpectedly
interesting: World Without End, a 1956
production by Allied Artists, nèe
Monogram, directed and written by Edward Bernds, who began as the sound
recorder for the 1930’s shorts featuring the Three Stooges. Eventually he rose
through the ranks to start directing the Stooges as well — his first film as
director, the 1945 radio spoof Micro-Phonies, is considered by Leonard Maltin to be the Stooges’
best short — and by the 1950’s he had become a feature-film director, oddly
concentrating on science fiction. Some of his sci-fi movies, including the 1958
howler Queen of Outer Space
starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, are pretty silly, but this one is quite good even
though the first 15 minutes or so are pretty slow going. Like the other two
movies on the Vintage Sci-Fi bill, La Jetée and Beyond the Time Barrier, World Without
End is about a post-apocalyptic future in
which humanity has experienced a self-inflicted catastrophe (a nuclear war)
that has essentially destroyed most of civilization and left the world in
shambles. A crew of four astronauts on a mission to Mars — John Borden (the
rather wooden Hugh Marlowe, inflicted on Bernds by his producer after the
actors he really wanted, Sterling
Hayden and Frank Lovejoy, were too expensive); Dr. Eldon Galbraithe (Nelson
Leigh); Herbert Ellis (Rod Taylor); and Henry “Hank” Jaffe (Christopher Dark) —
loop around the Red Planet and get to look at it from their spaceship but aren’t allowed to land there. They’re put out about this
but that turns out to be the least of their worries: like the lone test pilot
in Beyond the Time Barrier, their
loop accidentally puts them through a gap in the space-time continuum so they
end up landing not on Mars, but on Earth; and not in 1956, but in the 25th
century. Humanity has split into two races, the Mutates (which Bernds thought
sounded cooler than “mutants,” the accepted term now) who live on the surface,
look monstrous (as monstrous as an Allied Artists production budget could make
them, anyway) and have reverted to a barbarous existence — they’re led by a
leader named Naga (I inevitably joked they were going to kill him and turn his
skin into Nagahyde) who got power by killing the previous leader and will rule
until someone else kills him —
and the other ones, the more “civilized” but also more effete group who’ve hid
out underground.
Led by Timmek (Everett Glass), the underground race is
governed by a council of five; Timmek is nominally the chair but the real power
belongs to Moires (Booth Colman), who insists on taking the astronauts’ guns
away because he doesn’t want to see any recurrence of the sort of violence that left the world in this pickle
in the first place. Of course Timmek has a daughter, Garnet (Nancy Gates), who
immediately falls for John Borden — as does her maid Deena (Lisa Montell), a
former dweller on the surface who was left to die because that’s what the
Mutates do to anyone who’s actually born good-looking (which couldn’t help but
remind me of Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints
driving out the young, hot teenage boys from their community for fear the
young, hot teenage girls will
fall for them and not want to become the “plural wives” of the old and
middle-aged horndogs running the place) and was rescued by the undergrounders.
As one imdb.com “Trivia” poster noted at great length — and as was obvious to
me while watching the movie — World Without End is an elaborate allegory of the Cold War from a
Right-wing perspective: the Mutates are the Communists and the undergrounders
are the effete weaklings of the Free World too scared of violence to stand up
to them and fight them like men. They need the astronauts from 20th
century Earth to stand up and teach
them to fight. At one point Gordon says that the women of the underground
society seem to have the guts; it’s only the men who have turned terminally weak from their long
lives underground hiding from the enemies instead of going to the surface and
facing them head-on. Moires steals the astronauts’ guns from the place he’s
hidden them and knocks Deena over the head with one, then tries to frame Gordon
for the crime — but Deena comes to, tells Garnet and Timmek what really
happened, and the astronauts head for the surface with Deena in tow because
she’s the only one around who speaks the Mutates’ language. Once there, they
use a crudely-made rocket launcher (fabricated for them by the undergrounders’
workmen once Timmek has been convinced by Moires’ treachery that the astronauts
are right and the time has come for armed resistance) to flush out the Mutates
in general and Naga in particular, and Gordon challenges Naga to one-on-one
combat with only a knife and a tomahawk, the closest he has to the crude
weapons of the Mutates. Of course Gordon wins, kills Naga, claims that as
Naga’s killer he has the right to rule the Mutates, and sets them to work
building settlements on the earth’s surface so they and the undergrounders can
reunite the human race as the surface-dwellers we were meant to be.
What was
interesting about that ending is not only that the unwitting time travelers did
not get to return to their own
time, as they did (more or less) in the other two films on the bill, but that
it anticipates THX 1138, Logan’s Run
and Divergent in this intriguing
sub-genre of science fiction in
which a race of humans is living underground because they’ve been told the
surface is too dangerously radioactive or otherwise hostile to human life —
which may have been true at one time but isn’t by the time the story takes
place because enough of the radioactivity has dissipated the surface is
habitable again, but the people running the underground society either don’t
realize that themselves or keep that realization a secret from their people.
The proprietor of the Vintage Sci-Fi screenings showed World Without
End from a 4:3 print on a VHS tape and
announced his frustration that immediately after he’d announced the screening,
he learned that the film was coming out on DVD in a letterboxed version — which
would really help; the people who prepared the 4:3 version didn’t even bother
to pan-and-scan it. Instead they just showed whatever was dead center in the
middle of the original CinemaScope image, which means there are an awful lot of
shots with half-people at either end of the screen. While there are a lot of
other movies I want to see before going through World Without End again, the announcement that a DVD is available is
awfully tempting — especially since the DVD probably also has considerably more
vibrant color than the faded version on VHS we were watching — and even though
the politics of this movie aren’t mine, the fact that it has political and social commentary makes it unusual for
a 1950’s sci-fi movie, while the imdb.com listing of Sam Peckinpah as
uncredited dialogue director ties it in to the major films Peckinpah made
later, which also offered the “moral” that humans cannot be fully alive and
protect what is near and dear to them without being able and willing to resort
to intense amounts of violence.
