No Good Very Bad Movies 14: The one that invented the disaster movie

 

Title: When Worlds Collide

What Year?: 1951

Classification: Prototype

Rating: Who Cares??? (2/3)

 

In my reflections in the course of my reviews, one recurring theme that has crossed my mind is how much the whole idea of the “worst” movies was based on 1950s cinema. I suppose this is a major reason I have dealt only sparingly with movies from that period. On a deeper level, however, movies from that time simply don’t connect with me nearly as well as I’m sure people would expect. And that is what brought me to the present selection, a film that was a big-budget, near-mainstream offering in its own time, but now more forgotten than many of the notorious B-movies of the time including a few that probably ripped it off. Here is When Worlds Collide, the great-grandfather of disaster movies that ended up more like a cousin twice removed.

Our story begins with a shot of an illuminated Bible verse that looks like a press release from Westboro Baptist. We then get a sequence of astronomers watching the skies with increasing alarm. Soon, they deliver their news to the UN: A  pair of rogue planets have invaded the solar system, one on a collision course with Earth. All the human race can do is build a space ark to colonize the second rogue planet, which might be habitable. Meanwhile, we meet the main and least interesting characters, Joyce, the daughter of a scientist planning the evacuation, her boyfriend Tony, and David, a hotshot pilot that the lady is immediately infatuated with. The scientists manage to begin construction of the ark, with help from a crippled businessman who demands passage as a condition of his support. The rest of the potential colonists are chosen by lottery from a pool that doesn’t seem to include a single person who isn’t attractive and white. As doomsday approaches, humanity must choose between pooling together or tearing itself apart, but the focus remains on the pilot who can’t quite decide whether to die or get the girl and save his skin. Oh, and is there air on that new planet??? They don’t know!!!

When Worlds Collide was a 1951 science fiction drama produced by Hungarian-born George Pal, based on a 1933 novel by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. An adaptation was reportedly first considered by Cecil B. Demille. The film was directed by Rudolph Mate, known for the 1932 horror/ surrealist film Vampyr, and starred Richard Derr and Barbara Rush, with John Hoyt as the businessman Stanton. It represented one the first “big budget” science fiction films, with a pre-inflation budget of  $936,000, roughly equal to The African Queen released the same year.  The film was a potential disappointment at the time of release, earning $1.6 million, though it went on to be an undisputed if controversial classic. Philip Strick notably critiqued its social commentary as “a rather decorous affair”, while praising its effects as “classics of destruction”. Peter Nichols described it less flatteringly as “a likeable, rather silly film”.

For my experiences, this is a film I heard of a long, long time ago, but was very slow to seek out. As already alluded above, my real frame of reference in this review has been why I don’t really “like” 1950s sci fi. Of course, there are films from the decade that are among my all-time favorites, and a few that I absolutely despise. By and large, however, the whole period just leaves me nose-blind. There’s just not enough difference between the supposed classics and the infamous turkeys for me to get invested. I am left especially cold by the ridicule piled on the many entries that were simply and obviously made by people who obviously didn’t know how to make a movie. As a mature viewer and reviewer, I simply invoke Commander Worf, that there is no honor in attacking the weak. Meanwhile, I’ve grown to be vaguely annoyed by the blind eye turned to the flaws of the “classics”, and the extent to which they both accepted and perpetuated the illogical errors and self-dated conceits that held genre films back for years and decades to come. It all drove me to the point of thinking of covering just one representative example, and this one came right to the top, especially after I reviewed its knockoff Warning From Space.

With that out of the way, the most baffling thing about a film like this is just how much must have been unknown for this to make any amount of sense. At face value, these are mitigating circumstances. After all, this was a time when there was still at least an optimistic case for multicellular animal life on Mars and Venus; a body from outside the solar system would have been in literally unknown territory. But there are many more areas where even arm-waving clearly place the movie’s scenario in doubt, to the point that I had this movie specifically in mind when I went easy on Pinocchio In Outer Space. (I wasn’t even aware that many synopses describe a star approaching Earth, which apparently is at least at odds with the original novel.) What you can’t get around is that the “heroes” freely send Earth’s last hope straight to a body that they admit they know nothing about. The final “happy ending”, which I watched in cold blood a month or two before the present review, is so mindbogglingly absurd that I immediately wondered if it was an inspiration for the classic line in Galaxy Quest. This is how you get a mainstream, big-budget film with worse science than a Disney-knockoff cartoon.

All the scientific complaints still don’t get to the heart of what’s good and bad in the movie. On the pro side, it has to be given credit for being honest with its scenario, which is honestly the main thing that stopped me from giving it the lowest rating. There’s no super science or last-ditch daring-do here. Earth is doomed, and the vast majority of humanity are going to go with it. The obvious faults are the total lack of racial diversity (just as well considering what racial stereotypes were like at the time) and the very limited size of the crew. The deeper problem is that Hollywood wasn’t ready to ask or answer the film’s own questions. The fairest thing to be said is that in the years since, the genre has rarely if ever offered an answer that wasn’t set by the artist’s politics. Here, the answer is heroic self-sacrifice and implied Judeo-Christian piety (really handled with more subtlety than Pal’s War of the Worlds). It’s easy to ridicule the Cold War era optimism, especially given how close they were to making their own apocalypse. But then, a generation of  “gritty” post-apocalypses where most of the populace start looting over a few random zombie attacks haven’t done any better at giving a realistic picture or human nature. There are stories that show that people don’t become angels or monsters at the flip of a switch, but they have so far failed to take root in the studio system.

Now, it’s time for the “one scene”. After more melodrama with the lottery, the scientists are absorbed enough in an argument that they take little notice of a distraught man who returns his “winning” number rather than be separated from his beloved, something they could easily have headed off by making the lottery for couples. Then Stanton’s employee and personal servant enters, and seeing the number, declares it his own and draws a gun to reinforce his point. There’s a fine bit of monologuing as he expands on his hatred for his boss and just how happy he would be to see him dead. Naturally, the scientists try to reason with him, seemingly almost oblivious to the situation and his increasingly obvious psychotic streak. Then two shots ring out, and the real surprise is who fired them. It’s one of the better moments keeping the movie afloat, with an extra touch of seemingly calculated anticlimax, and one more reason I can’t quite hate it.

In closing, what I find myself coming back to is whether there has ever been a “worst” decade of movies. What strikes me is that it’s the odd decades that stand out,  and with them, you can trace certain flavors unique to each one. Most of the movies I’ve reviewed that annoy me the most have been from the 1970s (see Silent Running and ZPG), when there was a large infusion of truly stupid films from filmmakers too competent to be excused. By comparison, the 1950s were an all-time low for pure amateurism, at least after the 1930s (see Ingagi) when sound film was new enough that nobody really knew what the Hell they were doing. The really difference is that even “bad” ‘50s movies can rise to the level of amusing and even thoughtful, as I illustrated with my review of Plan 9 From Outer Space. In that context, the present film is perhaps the most fitting example of its time, with some good, some bad, and a lot that’s too dated to stir up strong feelings either way. Take it or leave it, it’s a snapshot of its era. And with that, I’m wrapping this up. We’ll meet again…