“If your number’s up, why fight it?” : Fate Is the Hunter

Now Playing: Fate Is the Hunter (1964)

Pros: Haunting, character-driven story; Great cast; Excellent widescreen cinematography
Cons: Plot implausibilities and a slow-burn mystery may send some looking for the emergency exits

This post is part of the Aviation in Film blogathon hosted by Rebecca Deniston at her Taking Up Room blog. After you’ve boarded the flight here at Films From Beyond, don’t forget to make connections to the other great flight film posts at the blog hub.

Back in August 2019, I wrote about a couple of TV movies -- The Horror at 37,000 Feet and The Ghost of Flight 401 -- featuring supernatural occurrences on airliners ("Fear of Flying: Special TV Movie Double Feature Edition").

For a lot of people, you don’t need to introduce ghosts or demons to make air travel scary. If you think too hard about it, there’s something unnatural (if not downright supernatural) about taking a 50 ton jet airliner up to 35,000 feet and cruising merrily along at 600 mph. Considering that it’s been a little over the span of a single lifetime since the Wright brothers flew their motorized equivalent of a kite for a few seconds, it doesn’t seem like jet airliners should be possible. (Okay, maybe a Betty White lifetime, but still…)

Covid only added to the ranks of the fear-of-flying club, with many folks reluctant to share a cramped airliner cabin and recirculated air with a hundred other people wearing cheap disposable masks dangling from their chins.

For all the misgivings, air travel remains the safest way to get around. If you’re nervous, but you absolutely, positively have to get there overnight, it’s best to think of other things and board that flight -- the statistics are overwhelmingly on your side. 

But whatever you do, don’t screen any of the dozens of airline disaster flicks before your trip. They depict a distressingly large number of ways for a flight to go wrong, each one more heart-stoppingly frightful than the last.

Sit back, relax, and leave the flying to us!

In just the infamous 1970s Airport series alone, there are mad bombers, hijackers, heat-seeking missiles and mid-air collisions to send fear-of-flying into the stratosphere. The ridiculous culmination of the '70s fascination with air disasters was the made-for-TV SST - Death Flight (1977), which, not content just to feature mechanical problems and a mid-air explosion, upped the ante with a deadly virus outbreak.

Even before the golden age of flight frights, films like No Highway in the Sky (1951), The High and the Mighty (1954) and Zero Hour! (1957) explored more mundane but no less frightening sets of circumstances that could potentially send a multi-ton aircraft plunging to earth. (Zero Hour, with its premise of food poisoning taking out an airliner flight crew and many of the passengers, was hilariously lampooned by Airplane! a couple of decades later.)

It’s one thing when evildoers conspire against us -- where humans are involved, the best laid plans often go astray and the good guys at least have a fighting chance of prevailing.

But when Fate comes calling in the form of a loose fuselage bolt, or an unnoticed computer glitch, or sudden wind shear, or all of the above adding up to a perfect storm of disastrous failure, we start to lose confidence in ourselves and our vaunted technology to keep us safe and secure. We need a convenient scapegoat to restore our faith.

Fate Is the Hunter jettisons the long, nail-biting build-up to disaster of a Zero Hour! or Airport to tell a much more somber story of the aftermath of a tragic crash, and one investigator’s determination to explain the inexplicable and salvage the reputation of his friend, the captain of the doomed plane.

The horrific crash that propels Fate Is the Hunter’s drama is shown in a pre-titles sequence. Captain Jack Savage (Rod Taylor) and Sam McBane (Glenn Ford) are old buddies who flew army transport back in the war, and are now employees of Consolidated Airlines. McBane is a desk jockey working as the airline’s director of flight operations. They exchange pleasantries as Savage gets ready to pilot a routine flight from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Consolidated Airlines flight 22 is getting ready for its rendezvous with Fate.

Shortly after take-off, one of the plane’s engines catches fire. The ship is still airworthy, but three other planes are in the vicinity, and Savage has to fly a holding pattern while the traffic clears. The crisis escalates as an alarm bell sounds that the plane's only remaining engine is on fire. Savage has no choice but to try to land on a stretch of beach, and almost makes it safely before plowing into a pier. The toll is 53 dead, with only a flight attendant, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette) surviving when she is miraculously thrown clear.

A detailed examination of the wreckage reveals that a seagull got sucked up into one engine, causing it to jam and catch fire. But mysteriously, the other engine is in perfect working order. Webster, who was in the cockpit when everything hit the fan, swears that alarm bells for both engines were going off shortly before the crash, but still suffering from shock, her testimony is discounted.

Savage’s posthumous reputation takes a big hit when a bartender contacts the investigators, saying that Savage was in his bar buying drinks only a couple of hours before the flight. Savage was well-known for his womanizing and hard partying, so the airline executives, wanting to cut their losses, are prepared to pin everything on the captain. Everyone except McBane, who co-piloted transport planes with Savage over the treacherous Himalayan “Hump” route during the war, and knew that under his care-free exterior, Jack was an extremely skilled and responsible pilot.

McBane conducts his own investigation to get to the truth and head off the scapegoating of his friend. In trying to reconstruct Savage’s movements in the last few hours before the flight, McBane interviews several people, all of whom provide important insights into the kind of man Jack was: Lisa Bond (Dorothy Malone), a wealthy socialite and Jack’s fiancée for a short time; Sally Fraser (Nancy Kwan), an oceanographer who came to know the dashing pilot as a tender, compassionate man; Ralph Bundy (Wally Cox), whose life Savage heroically saved during the war; and Mickey Doolan (Mark Stevens), another wartime co-pilot who owed his life to Savage, and later knew him as non-judgmental friend when Doolan became an alcoholic.

McBane, a rational, by-the-numbers sort of guy, is thrown when Sally, a sober scientist, suggests that Fate can explain the seemingly senseless tragedy.

Sally: "…There must be faith attached, the acceptance of a divine operation, a plan."
McBane: "Fifty-three people were destroyed! If you can see the divinity in that..."
Sally: "As I said, there must be faith."
McBane: "Alright, suppose you use that instead of logic, I’m sorry, I can’t."
Sally: "Once you can, so many things will fall into place. It may even occur to you then that Fate has been moving you too."

Sally and McBane reflect on the vagaries of Fate.

But as McBane delves more deeply into the mystery and prepares to testify before the Civil Aeronautics Board, the bizarre chain of events that contributed to the crash has him coming around to Sally’s way of thinking:

• The type of seagull that got sucked into the engine was normally not found in the area
• Three other aircraft being in the same vicinity at the same time, forcing the crippled airliner into a holding pattern, was a 1 in 1000 occurrence [Note: people in the know report that a crippled plane would always, always, always take landing priority over other air traffic, so this is a problematic plot point.]
• The pier that ultimately caused the aircraft to crack-up and burn had been scheduled to be taken down just days before, but the contractor had decided to go fishing instead

At the hearing, McBane doubles down on the idea that Fate was behind the crash, causing consternation among the board members, the victims’ families and the press. The embarrassed airline executives can’t wait to fire him, but somehow he manages to convince the bigwigs to let him recreate the flight down to the last detail in a last ditch attempt to solve the mystery of the flight’s final moments.

Martha, the sole survivor, is terrified of getting back on board an identical airplane and tempting Fate all over again, but at the last minute agrees to come along to help reconstruct the flight as accurately as possible. It’s a million-to-one shot, but it’s McBane’s only chance to get Fate to show all of its cards and save Savage’s reputation.

It's deja vu all over again for Martha (Suzanne Pleshette).

Fate Is the Hunter is only nominally based on the best-selling 1961 book of the same title by Ernest K. Gann. The book is a fascinating account of Gann’s aviation career, piloting commercial passenger DC-2s and DC-3s in the rough-and-tumble 1930s, and then during WWII flying army air transport in the north and south Atlantic and over the infamous “Hump” route across the Himalayas to China. 

Gann was an all-American go-getter and renaissance man, a type that has become all but extinct in the 21st century. Before becoming a pilot, he worked as a movie cartoonist and helped make documentary newsreels. He was also an accomplished sailor, and even tried running his own commercial fishing business for a short time. But his biggest fame came as a best-selling author and screenwriter.

By the time that the movie Fate Is the Hunter was released in 1964, six of Gann’s novels had been made into motion pictures, and he had contributed screenplays to five of them. Fate the book, a memoir with numerous anecdotes ranging over several decades, was more of a challenge to turn into a coherent drama.

Gann tried his hand at some early drafts of the screenplay, but the author was so disappointed with the final version, credited to screenwriter Harold Medford, that he asked that his name be removed from the film. He lamented in a later autobiography that this was a bad move, as Fate Is the Hunter played constantly on TV for many years, and by having his name removed he missed out on some healthy TV residuals.

Fate the book is a compelling read. Gann had a knack for sizing up people, especially his fellow pilots, in just a colorful sentence or two. He could also wax eloquent about a profession that was 99.8% boring routine, but then could send your heart in your throat at a moment’s notice. He knew very well that when tragedy strikes, rational people do everything in their power to deny that sometimes, the difference between delivering a plane safely to its destination and crashing it is a matter of sheer luck:

“An airplane crashes. There is a most thorough investigation. Experts analyze every particle, every torn remnant of the machine and what is left of those within it. Every pertinent device of science is employed in reconstructing the incident and searching for the cause. Sometimes the investigators wait for weeks until the weather is exactly the same as it was during the crash. They fly exactly the same route in exactly the same kind of airplane and they go to elaborate trouble trying to duplicate the thinking of the pilot, who can no longer communicate his thinking. Often at considerable risk to themselves, the investigators attempt what have been reported as the final tragic maneuvers of the crashed airplane. And sometimes they discover a truth which they can explain in the hard, clear terms of mechanical science. They must never, regardless of their discoveries, write off the crash as simply a case of bad luck. They must never, for fear of official ridicule, admit other than to themselves, which they all do, that some totally unrecognizable genie has once again unbuttoned his pants and urinated on the pillar of science.” [Ernest K. Gann, Fate Is the Hunter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961/2011, p 8.]

In spite of Gann’s disappointment, Fate the movie expands on and effectively dramatizes the author’s central thesis.

It’s all there: the inexplicable tragedy, the rush to judgment to explain it away as pilot error, McBane’s lonely crusade to defend Savage’s reputation, the meticulous reconstruction of the flight, and ultimately, awe and wonder at the workings of remorseless Fate.

Lonely is the man who talks about Fate when everyone else wants a rational explanation.

Whatever you think of the Fickle Finger of Fate premise, the film’s stellar cast helps to sell it as a serious drama instead of cheap melodrama. Glenn Ford is just the right mixture of intense determination in defending his friend’s reputation, and vulnerability as his faith in science and statistics turns to humble acknowledgement of a universe that has its own plans, humanity be damned.

Nancy Kwan has a challenging role as McBane’s philosophy “tutor,” delivering lines that are only a step or two above a carnival fortune teller’s schtick. It doesn’t help that her character is introduced as a Chinese war orphan who was adopted and brought to the States, furthering the hackneyed notion of Asian inscrutability. To the film’s credit, she is also presented as a capable and knowledgeable scientist, an oceanographer, which helps tamp down the banality.

In the flashback scenes, Rod Taylor walks the devil-may-care pilot routine right up to the point of being insufferable, but when called on to interact with honest emotion, he’s very good. Suzanne Pleshette’s role as Martha, the flight attendant and sole survivor, is a relatively small one, but allows for some vivid emoting, from casual banter to pure terror in the pre-titles sequence, to survivor’s guilt when she is interviewed by McBane, and back to terror at the climax when history seems to be repeating itself during the test flight.

Fans of non-stop, pulse-pounding action will want to book a different cinematic flight, but those who go along for the ride will enjoy a great cast at the peak of their games, Oscar-nominated black and white widescreen photography courtesy of Milton Krasner, an evocative music score by Jerry Goldsmith, and a haunting, character-driven story.

McBane is not very appreciative of Savage's rendition of "Blue Moon" as
they fly over the Himalayas.

Where to find it: A very good copy is currently streaming on YouTube (but hurry, that flight could be canceled at any time, and affordable DVD copies are hard to find).

Lost in the Twilight Zone: Lesser Known Episodes, Part One

The Twilight Zone has been a staple of TV New Year’s marathons for as long as I can remember. To kick off 2019, Decades TV hosted a TZ ultra marathon, spanning 5 days starting with New Year’s Eve.

Having been a fan since childhood, I’ve seen the popular episodes multiple times. Last year, after discovering that Netflix had most of the show’s run (excepting season 4, when the show went to hour-long episodes), I started revisiting episodes I hadn’t seen in ages. I scanned the capsule descriptions and then played the ones that didn’t ring a bell or were only dimly remembered. (Amazon Prime also includes seasons 1-3 and 5.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find one that I don’t ever remember seeing, or even reading about (more on that later). It wasn’t exactly on par with finding a celebrated lost film in the attic, but it was gratifying nonetheless.

The other thing that jumped out at me as I perused the seasons was how much of the show reflected the cold war/space age anxieties of the time. The late 1950s through the early ‘60s saw the rise of the mighty hydrogen bomb, ballistic missiles, Soviet space triumphs, and in reaction, hysteria in the media and duck and cover drills in schools.

For the creator of one of the most beloved TV shows of all time, Rod Serling was an odd duck. He was a chain-smoking intellectual and inheritor of Beat generation sensibilities. He created great fantasy, but it wasn’t escapist fantasy. It’s a testimony to the times that a show that was often so downbeat, anti-materialistic, anti-technology and ultimately pessimistic about humanity’s survival could make such a successful run on a major American TV network.

The bleakest of nightmares, nuclear annihilation, kept popping up time and again. Some of the show’s fondly remembered episodes like “Time Enough at Last” and “Two” dealt with post-apocalyptic themes. Others, like “Third from the Sun” and “The Shelter” featured anxious, sometimes paranoid protagonists caught in the run-up to nuclear armageddon. Whatever else it was, this was certainly not a show for children.

Perhaps not surprisingly, another theme emerged in multiple episodes: a reaction against modern life and technology and a longing for simpler times. Sometimes, protagonists traveled back in time, or to an alternate, gentler universe (“Walking Distance,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “Static,” “The Bewitchin’ Pool”). Sometimes, they tried throwing monkey wrenches into the remorseless technology that was grinding them up (“A Thing About Machines,” “From Agnes with Love,” “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”). While some baby boomers might look back at the Eisenhower years of the 1950s as a golden age of calm and stability, for many living back then it was a fraught, fearful time, one to escape from rather than embrace.

But it’s largely not for the somber, socially-conscious “message” episodes that the Twilight Zone is remembered today. The most (in)famous, best loved episodes are mostly message-free, instead emphasizing dark, disturbing settings, eccentric characters and clever twist endings. Episodes like “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” “To Serve Man,” and “It’s a Good Life” are still entertaining and bingeable to this day, and will be for years to come.

Like me, you may have seen these celebrated episodes many times. In digging around the Netflix TZ collection, I found quite a few others that, while maybe not on most people’s “best of” lists, still entertain while exemplifying the show’s dark, weird imagination. For this and follow-up posts, I’ve picked a few lesser known episodes that are typically strange and “high concept,” and deserve a look from fans who may have gorged themselves on the highly popular “classic” episodes. If you’re in the mood for a binge, any or all of these might be a good start for wandering around in the murkier shadows of the Twilight Zone.

“And When the Sky Was Opened” (1959)

This first season episode, written by Rod Serling and based on a short story by Richard Matheson, is a very good example of the show’s uncanny mix of fantasy and science fiction, and of its vague anti-technology leanings. An experimental rocket plane has crash landed after having mysteriously disappeared from radar and communication links for a portion of its flight into space. Incredibly, two surviving crew members, Lt. Colonel Forbes (Rod Taylor) and Major Gart (Jim Hutton), can’t seem to agree on how many men there were on the flight.

Col. Forbes (Rod Taylor) has an existential crisis as a concerned
Major Gart (Jim Hutton) looks on from his hospital bed.

A very spooked Forbes insists that a Colonel Harrington (Charles Aidman) was with them as well, while Gart (bedridden with injuries from the crash), is just as adamant that it was only the two of them. While all the evidence supports Gart’s story, Forbes remembers celebrating the mission with Harrington at a local bar. But the celebration turned sour when Harrington began to act strangely, dropping his beer on the floor, and muttering cryptically that “I shouldn't be here, … none of us should be here! It's as if... we shouldn't have come back from that flight at all.”

The episode’s set-up is reminiscent of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), with Klaatu’s warning to humanity to refrain from contaminating space with its aggression and nuclear weapons, or be destroyed. Other sci-fi movies of the era -- Roger Corman’s War of the Satellites (1958) among them -- took up the theme of aliens hostile to humanity’s tentative attempts to conquer space. “And When the Sky Was Opened” is far more mystical in its play on the theme. Forget nuclear weapons -- the mere attempt to travel beyond earth’s atmosphere seems to be a transgression that has awakened forces stranger and more powerful than could ever be imagined.

Rod Taylor is particularly good as Lt. Colonel Forbes, who, back on earth, travels from vague disquiet, to sanity-doubting anxiousness, to existential despair over the course of the half hour. The Australian actor had done a fair amount of television and smaller roles in a few big movies (Giant, Raintree County) leading up to the Twilight Zone role. He also played a time-traveling astronaut stranded on a far-future earth in 1956’s World Without End. In 1960 he time traveled again in his best known role (at least to sci-fi fans) as H.G. Wells in George Pal’s The Time Machine.

With its emphasis on men trapped by forces they cannot see or understand, “And When the Sky was Opened” is emblematic of the whole series, which used fantasy and judicious (and often minimal) special effects to examine its characters’ humanity. It still sends a little shiver down my spine, and is one of my favorite episodes of the series.

“Elegy” (1960)

This episode, penned by Charles Beaumont and starring Cecil Kellaway and Jeff Morrow, is one that I “discovered” last year, having no memory of ever having seen it as a kid or as an adult in the show’s many reruns. This too features a trio of astronauts caught up in a strange mystery that they struggle to understand.

After narrowly avoiding a meteor storm and getting lost in space, the crew of an interplanetary geological expedition manage to land on a large asteroid hundreds of millions of miles from earth. With no fuel left and no communication with earth, the three realize that this will be their permanent home. To their delight, the ship’s instruments indicate breathable air and gravity identical to earth’s.

When they disembark to explore, they’re startled to find an environment almost identical to earth, complete with vegetation, trees, streams, farmhouses and a town seemingly lifted out of early 20th century America and plopped down on the asteroid. Stranger still, the town is populated with people (and dogs) who seem to the touch to be alive, but are frozen in place like waxwork statues.

One eerie tableaux that they stop to gawk at is an old-fashioned town hall crammed with exuberant, yet frozen supporters bearing signs and banners celebrating their new mayor, who, also frozen, is waving to them from the top of a staircase. Thoroughly mystified, they trade theories about what could be going on, from traveling back in time/space, to aliens setting up earth-like conditions to make them feel more at home (a la The Martian Chronicles), to encountering a civilization for whom time has slowed down to a crawl compared to the earthmen. One by one, they dismiss the theories.

The trio of spooked astronauts (Don Dubbins, Jeff Morrow and Kevin Hagen)
are wondering what sucked all the life out of the party.

When they do finally meet a living, breathing inhabitant in the form of a gregarious old man (Kellaway), the explanation is mind-blowingly strange.

“Elegy” writer Charles Beaumont was an enormous contributor to and influence on the Twilight Zone, penning twenty-two episodes through the series’ six year run. (I will be looking at a couple more of his contributions in future posts.) His episodes were some of the more imaginative and less preachy of the series. Some were just plain macabre, and some darkly humorous. “Elegy” fits into the latter category, especially with the Kellaway character, whose folksy geniality masks a very surprising purpose (and a very menacing one as far as the astronauts are concerned).

There are some social messages in “Elegy,” but they complement rather than detract from the script’s weird atmosphere. One is the absurd lengths to which the fabulously wealthy will go to celebrate themselves. The other, more overarching one is voiced by the old man: “And while there are men, there can be no peace.”

Beaumont wrote quite a few television scripts in the ‘50s and ‘60s, including such series as One Step Beyond, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Thriller. He also wrote adaptations for some of the more interesting horror films of the early ‘60s, including several of Roger Corman’s Poe-inspired films (Premature Burial, 1962; The Haunted Palace, 1963; and The Masque of the Red Death, 1964), as well as for the very creepy and underrated Burn, Witch, Burn (1962). Tragically, Beaumont died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 38.

“Elegy’s” other gift to fans of B sci-fi movies are the recognizable faces of Kellaway and Jeff Morrow as one of the astronauts. Kellaway will forever be remembered as the endearing Prof. Elson in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Jeff Morrow lent his staid, serious demeanor to such ‘50s sci-fi classics as This Island Earth (1955), The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), Kronos (1957), and the unintentionally hilarious The Giant Claw (1957).

So how did I manage to miss this episode for all those years? It's not as if it's one of the handful of TZ "lost" episodes that didn't make it into syndication packages for legal reasons. I can't shake the uncanny feeling that in true Twilight Zone fashion, "Elegy" just blinked into existence the moment I clicked on the Netflix episode menu. Whatever the explanation, I’m glad I discovered it after all this time.

Next in Part 2, more Charles Beaumont weirdness from season two.

Breaking the Space-Time Barrier

World Without End (1956)

I have a confession to make-- I have a weakness for "classic" sci-fi with wise-cracking astronauts piloting needle-nosed spaceships to the Moon, Mars or other planets and discovering lost civilizations while battling various and sundry mutant creatures along the way. I'm talking about Rocketship X-M (1950), which won the movie version of the space race when it was rushed into distribution 3 weeks ahead of Destination Moon (1950), becoming America's first "realistic" depiction of manned space flight to hit the theaters. I'm talking about Flight to Mars (1951), Queen of Outer Space (1958), and It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958).  I'm talking about far-out voyages to planets of every size and description:  Angry Red Planet (1959), The Phantom Planet (1961), and Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962). I'm even talking about stinky lunar cheese like Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Missile to the Moon (1958) and 12 to The Moon (1960).  And then of course there's the big daddy of them all, the greatest space opera of all time by the biggest, grandest studio in history: Forbidden Planet (MGM, 1956).

These films grabbed the headlines of the day -- broken sound barriers, satellite launches, rocketplanes flying to the edge of space --  and propelled them out of earth orbit into new frontiers of great, imaginative adventure. For a kid like myself born at the beginning of the space age, this was irresistible stuff-- it was one thing to read about rockets, spacemen, and bug-eyed monsters, and something else again to see it on the big screen (often in glorious cinemascope and technicolor). Adults might worry about rockets delivering atomic warheads, but space age kids saw them as the ticket to brave new worlds and civilizations. (Now, decades later, the bloom is definitely off the space rose, with only one shuttle flight left to go and some serious questions about whether a dithering, debt-ridden U.S. will abandon manned space flight altogether.)

If you were to pick one sci-fi flick to represent the era in a time capsule, you could hardly do better than World Without End. It packs just about every space opera / sci-fi element you can imagine into its crisp 80 minute running time: a gleaming, silvery-sleek spaceship; time travel; astronauts in military fatigues and bomber jackets; atomic war; an advanced underground civilization; alluring babes in revealing outfits; giant spiders; one-eyed humanoid mutants… all in glorious, colorful Cinemascope.

In the year 1957, America's first ambitious manned space flight is an orbital reconnaissance mission to Mars -- no cautious sub-orbital flights to start things off for this fictional America! The mission is headed by the distinguished Dr. Eldon Galbraithe (Nelson Leigh). John Borden (Hugh Marlowe), Herbert Ellis (Rod Taylor), and Henry 'Hank' Jaffe (Christopher Dark) round out the crew. As they fire the ship's engines to take them out of Mars' orbit and head home, Galbraithe makes a comment about Mars "sliding off into the distance." Borden wryly responds that "it'll be there when we come back." Suddenly and without warning, the ship hits some kind of field disturbance-- the ship and crew are battered around as it accelerates out of control, seemingly engulfed by fire. Gauges and dials spin wildly, and then the crew blacks out. When they wake up, they discover that they've landed on a rocky, snow-covered plateau (see the clip below). The acceleration gauge broke at the max readout of 100 miles per second-- Jaffe, the navigator, wonders if they weren't going even faster (maybe somewhere in the ballpark of 186,282 miles per second?)

Wherever they are, gravity feels about the same as earth's, and they discover to their delight that there's plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. They grab supplies and weapons and head out to explore their new environs. Fortunately, it's only a short hike (very, very short) from the cold, arctic-like place where they crash-landed to a temperate area with trees and other flora (the transition is so abrupt it almost looks like a continuity error). However, the fauna is another story. In the space of only several minutes they're set upon by German Shepherd-sized spiders (unconvincing rubber props), and their camp attacked by disfigured, primitive humanoids dressed in animal skins and howling like dogs.  In defending themselves, they kill one of the humanoids ("mutates" according to Doc Galbraithe), and observe that the ugly cuss seems to have been born with only one eye. The place seems so earth-like, and yet, the earth they left didn't have giant spiders and mutated cavemen…

Attack of the giant rubber spider

They soon come upon a graveyard with a very interesting headstone indicating the grave's occupant died in the year 2068. These being very educated, scientifically trained men, they quickly put two and two together. Galbraithe recalls talking to another scientist shortly before the mission about Einstein's theory of relativity and time dilation. The ship's instruments indicated they were going over 100 miles per second before they broke. Galbraithe points out that they could have been going 10 or even 100 times that speed. His reluctant conclusion: "While we were blacked out for what seemed like minutes to us, the slow centuries were passing on earth."

The crew doesn't have too long to mull over what's happened before they're attacked again by the relentless mutants. Escaping into a cave, they discover a smooth metal door in one of the cave walls. Before you can say "exponential time displacement," they're standing in what looks like a modernistic office reception area, complete with potted plants. Jaffe discovers a lens behind one of the plants-- "Hey, we're being spied on!" he exclaims. A disembodied voice warns them not to touch anything. What's a poor, confused space-time traveler to think?

It seems they've discovered the last bastion of civilized man in post-atomic war earth-- an intricate underground city populated by gentle, almost anemic men in silvery tunics and skullcaps, and beautiful, lively women in low-cut mini-dresses. Jackpot! They meet with the underground city's council (all men of course), and learn of the atomic war in 2188 that killed off most of humanity and left a world full of surface-dwelling mutants and underground-dwelling "normals." Now, in the year 2508, civilized man has harnessed the heat of the earth's core for energy and learned how to recycle metals (a veritable environmentalist's dream).

So, considering the 20th century men's predicament, what's there to complain about? Jaffe, the only member of the crew to leave behind a wife and son, is hopeful that the tunnel people can help them figure out how to reverse the time displacement that's stranded them in the future. Borden is skeptical: "They have no guts." It appears the tunnel-city isn't much of a paradise after all. Much is made of how listless and bloodless the men are. Galbraithe tries to convince the council that the radiation levels are low and the surface is livable, but the council is uninterested. He can't even get a single volunteer to hike with them back to the ship to salvage supplies. Disappointed, he tells the others: "Underground life seems to have drained all the courage out of these people… safe and comfortable, that seems to be all life means to them!" Jaffe reports that the few children he's seen are weak and listless. "Safe and comfortable" may well spell the doom of civilized man.

World Without End shows its cold-war heart and soul in the conflicts between the 20th and 26th century men. The one villain among the tunnel dwellers, the treacherous Mories (Booth Colman), just happens to be the most passionate pacifist. He tries to turn the council against the 20th century interlopers, decrying their weapons and their crude ways (not to mention the way they look at the women). "We're sick of weapons and war!" he declares. He tries to get Galbraithe & company booted out of town by killing one of the council members and pinning it on them. But the plot is exposed and Mories himself is driven out to the surface, to be quickly dispatched by yowling mutants. Clearly, if the world is to be remade in the image of the good ol' U.S. of A., then Mories and his pinko, pacifist kind must go.

Assorted mutants gather to watch the final battle

And remade it is. With the help of the chastened tunnel people, our heroes fashion a space-age bazooka, and literally carve out the new world with well-placed shots that scatter most of the mutants to the four winds. In the coup-de-grace, manly Borden challenges the cruel mutant chief, the one-eyed Naga, to a fight for supremacy. He prevails by staying on Naga's blind side. In this primitive culture, whoever defeats the leader becomes the leader. The film ends with what looks like a documentary on the Peace Corps, as the 20th century protagonists help the natives build a new community on the surface, and teach the now revitalized children English in an open-air school.

Writer-Director Edward Bernds worked his way from radio in the 1920s, to sound work on early "talkies," to directing shorts, to finally directing features in the early 1950s. His other sci-fi credits include Space Master X-7 (1958), Queen of Outer Space (1958), Return of the Fly (1959), and another time-travel epic, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962; the best feature-length Stooges effort by far).

Hugh Marlowe lent his square-jawed presence to a couple of other '50s sci-fi classics: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).

World was Aussie Rod Taylor's first substantive role in a feature film. Rod has had steady work ever since, doing drama and comedy with equal aplomb. His notable sci-fi and suspense credits include The Time Machine (1960) and Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Most recently, he played Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009).

In an interview with Tom Weaver, veteran film and stage actor Booth Colman confessed that his memory was somewhat hazy about the production:

I can't remember very much about it: It was a quickie, it was done in eight or ten days I would say. The Australian actor, Rod Taylor-- I think it was his first job here. He subsequently went over to MGM. And the director, Edward Bernds, was a very nice man. I saw the picture recently because someone gave me a tape of it, and... it's just a quick job of the day. I'm sure it did very well, I'm sure they made a lot of money on it. The actors didn't [laughs]!  (I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers, McFarland, 2001)

World is a somewhat schlocky, yet energetic and entertaining cold war / atomic / space age artifact. Its worst moments aren't so much the poorly-realized special effects (the lifeless rubber spider is just plain bad even for the era), as much as the long stretches of cold-war propaganda dialog and some perfunctory, cringe-inducing romantic scenes between the lusty astronauts and the scantily clad tunnel women. Its best moment comes in the cemetery, when it becomes clear to the men that they've been marooned in time on an utterly alien earth.

World Without End is available on a "double feature" Warner Home Video DVD along with Satellite in the Sky (1956). The restored print is just beautiful.


"We've unleashed the power of the atom... and now this!"