The other movie on the Vintage Sci-Fi bill last night was considerably weaker, though it has a good reputation: the original 1963 version of The Day of the Triffids, based on a novel by British science-fiction writer John Wyndham (that was an abbreviation of his full name, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris) published in 1951. One of his later books, The Midwich Cuckoos (in which some alien force from outer space impregnates all the women in a small British town and the children, when they’re born, turn out to have mental super-powers and no emotions at all), had just been filmed as Village of the Damned (1962), and producer Philip Yordan saw an opportunity. He threw together a partly American, partly British cast and made a medium-budget thriller about a mysterious meteor shower that blinds everyone who witnesses it and leaves behind a batch of seeds that grow into huge (10 feet tall or more) killer plants that can move about under their own power and knock off people and any other life forms they encounter. The stars of this film are Howard Keel (playing a sailor, Bill Masen, who was lucky enough to have been blindfolded from an eye operation, with the ironic result that when he comes to in the hospital the morning after the meteor shower he can still see but almost no else can), Nicole Maurey (as Christine Durrant, the adult woman he picks up while fleeing the Triffid plants, along with the obligatory cute movie kid), Kieron Moore (the male lead to Vivien Leigh in her 1948 version of Anna Karenina, a film way overshadowed by the two Garbo versions) and Janet Scott (he plays Dr. Tom Goodwin, a burned-out ichthyologist who’s retired to a lighthouse in Cornwall, ostensibly to take a sabbatical but really to drink; and she’s his long-suffering wife Karen).
Apparently the scenes with the Goodwins were added
to the original script (by Yordan and Bertrand Gordon, a blacklisted U.S.
writer for whom Yordan reportedly fronted) when the film’s main intrigue turned
out to be only 57 minutes long and extra material had to be added to bring the
movie to a releasable length. This may explain why the two plot lines don’t
seem to coexist; the film just cuts from one to the other and back, and we
don’t get the impression of any tension level building. I think the proprietor
of the Vintage Sci-Fi screening did The Day of the Triffids no favors by double-billing it with the original
1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers
— perhaps because both are about invasions of earth by malevolent plants from
space — but whereas Don Siegel and Daniel Mainwaring carefully constructed
their movie and took their time revealing who and what the pods actually were,
Philip Yordan and his director, Steve Sekely (one of the most interesting “B”
directors in 1940’s Hollywood — his best credit is the quite good PRC thriller Lady
in the Death House from 1944, written by
Harry Hoyt, director of the 1925 version of The Lost World, from a story by cult writer Frederick Brown called
“Meet the Executioner”), bring the Triffids on way too early. And the Triffids themselves just look too
silly and campy to be genuinely frightening; though there’s one effective scene
early on in which their roots start oozing themselves out of the ground and
propelling the plants under their own power, once we see the full-scale
Triffids ambling along (with all too obvious wires suspending them) the whole
potential for shock flies out the window.
The acting doesn’t help: Kevin
McCarthy in Body Snatchers could
credibly play an ordinary man driven to near-madness by the bizarre events that
happen to him and everyone he knows, but Howard Keel is just too rhetorical: he
intones every line in his deep, booming baritone as if he’s about to burst into
song at any minute, which given that he was originally a musical star at MGM
should be no surprise. In his memoir Hollywood Garson Kanin recalled being called to Louis B.
Mayer’s office at MGM in 1951 and being told by Mayer that he had decided
Howard Keel was going to be the next big dramatic movie actor. Mayer was asking
Kanin to write a script for Keel that would take him out of musicals and
establish his chops as a serious actor, but then Mayer was fired from MGM and
his replacement, Dore Schary, shoved Keel back into musicals — wisely, if The
Day of the Triffids is a fair indication of
how well Keel could act without any songs to sing. Kieron Moore had proven he
could act in previous assignments in films for British producers, but after a
while he just gets annoying and one can’t imagine why his wife hasn’t left him
long before. It also didn’t help that writers Yordan and Gordon changed the
central premise of Wyndham’s story: in his book the Triffids are man-made,
product of a biological experiment gone horribly wrong à la
Frankenstein. In the movie the Triffids are
invaders from outer space, thereby bringing the story even closer to Invasion
of the Body Snatchers. The Day of the Triffids
seems not only to have been made in willful ignorance of the lessons provided
by Invasion of the Body Snatchers
on how to film a story about an invasion of Earth by malevolent alien plants,
it also seems to have made in willful ignorance of the lessons provided by the
genuinely chilling Village of the Damned in how to film a John Wyndham story in a way that was both
dramatically moving and would scare the hell out of an audience.
And while both
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and The Day of the Triffids have
received two official remakes each (as well as other films that have reworked
their central premises), it’s perhaps significant that the two Triffids remakes that have actually materialized so far
(imdb.com lists a fourth version “in development”) have been TV mini-series, as
if their makers realized that the premise needed more room to develop than
provided by the 93-minute running time of this stand-alone film. As it is, The
Day of the Triffids is one of those movies
that seems less to end than just stop: Howard Keel’s character learns that the Triffids are attracted by
sound and therefore can be made to go away just by keeping quiet and turning
off anything that makes noise, while after that in one of those “Meanwhile,
back at the lighthouse in Cornwall … ” cuts that abound in this film, Kieron
Moore and his movie wife have a fire in their lab which they put out by
flooding the place with salt water (well before the concept of “gray water”
became common, they’ve outfitted their lighthouse with pipes leading to the
ocean so in case there’s a fire they can let in the salt water, even though
signs warn that they’re not to use the seawater for any other purpose because
it’s “highly corrosive”), and when the incoming seawater kills the specimen of
a Triffid they’ve had on their operating table (and which has just grown more
every time they’ve tried to cut it, sort of like a starfish), they realize
they’ve stumbled on the monster’s one vulnerability. The Day of the
Triffids is the sort of film where you get
the impression there’s a better potential movie in the central premise than the
one that actually got made, and this is also one film from the classic era (or
about two decades after it, really) that would benefit from the greater
sophistication in modern-day effects work; while the $15,000 budget Ted
Haworth, production designer on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, didn’t give him much to work with (something
director Siegel actually thought was a plus, since it meant they had to build
their movie around complex, well-motivated human characters instead of
splashing a lot of effects on the screen and making the people out of
cardboard), the Triffids really needed to be more impressive, believable and
frightening than they could have been in 1963 — modern-day CGI would probably
be able to create a far more threatening species of killer plants than what was
available to Philip Yordan and his colleagues 55 years ago!
