Must-See Sci-fi

Book 0: Turner Classic Movies

by Sloan De Forest, Roger Corman

Genres: Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

Spanning nine decades and branded by the most trusted authority on film, Turner Classic Movies: Must-See Sci-Fi showcases 50 of the most shocking, weird, wonderful, and mind-bending movies ever made. From A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Arrival (2016), science fiction cinema has produced a body of classics with a broader range of styles, stories, and subject matter than perhaps any other film genre. They are movies that embed themselves in the depths of the mind, coloring our view of day-to-day reality and probably fueling a few dreams (and nightmares) along the way. In Turner Classic Movies: Must-See Sci-Fi, fifty unforgettable films are profiled, including beloved favorites like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Fantastic Voyage (1966), groundbreaking shockers like Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979), and lesser-known landmarks like Things to Come (1936) and Solaris (1972). Illustrated by astounding color and black-and-white images, the book presents the best of this mind-bending genre, detailing through insightful commentary and behind-the-scenes stories why each film remains essential viewing. A perfect gift for any film buff or sci-fi fanatic!

Release date: May 1, 2018

Publisher: Running Press Adult

Print pages: 264

Sample

1902

DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER: GEORGES MÉLIÈS SCREENPLAY: GEORGES MÉLIÈS, BASED ON THE NOVELS FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON BY JULES VERNE AND THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON BY H. G. WELLS STARRING: VICTOR ANDRÉ (ASTRONOMER), BLEUETTE BERNON (LADY IN THE MOON), BRUNNET (ASTRONOMER), JEANNE D’ALCY (SECRETARY), HENRI DELANNOY (ROCKET CAPTAIN), GEORGES MÉLIÈS (PROFESSOR BARBENFOUILLIS/THE MOON)

A team of astronomers boards a rocket to the moon, where they encounter a tribe of hostile aliens.

Méliès as the man in the moon

Female Marines prepare the rocket for its launch.

It is appropriate that the first artist to creatively manipulate time and space on film was the first filmmaker to take the movies into outer space. Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, or Le voyage dans la lune, was not the first film to feature science-fiction elements, but it was the first true sci-fi film. And it was an overwhelming success. In its day, A Trip to the Moon was the equivalent of a big-budget Hollywood epic, packed with elaborate special effects in glorious hand-painted colors. At around fifteen minutes (and at a cost of 10,000 francs), it was much lengthier and more elaborate than anything moviegoers had seen.

Méliès, a former illusionist, instantly saw the magical possibilities of motion pictures. He opened his Paris movie studio in 1897, and began shooting films using his signature camera tricks, such as mid-shot replacements and multiple exposures. In 1898, he made A Trip to the Moon’s precursor, a three-minute short called The Astronomer’s Dream, in which a stargazer leaps into the mouth of an animated man in the moon. Four years later, Méliès would retool this moon concept to make his most iconic film, one that remains popular entertainment well over a century after its release. Only this time, the moon would be played by a human face—the face of Georges Méliès himself.

Certain silent-film images have the power to remain emblazoned in our mind’s eye, transcending the bounds of language or time. Like the gun being pointed straight at the camera in The Great Train Robbery (1903), or Charlie Chaplin’s distinct Little Tramp walk, the rocket landing in the eye of the moon’s face in A Trip to the Moon is a universally recognized symbol of early cinema. But there are other memorable visions in the film: A troupe of chorus girls prepares the rocket to be blasted from a canon. A lunar goddess sprinkles snow over a crew of astronomers as they sleep. A race of Selenites inhabits a bizarre subterranean moon-world filled with mushrooms. Each scene abounds with imagination and energy, with flights of fancy that only a magician could create.

Georges Méliès

In the wake of Méliès’s moon epic, other films that dealt with sci-fi themes (many of them now lost) began dotting the motion-picture landscape. A Message from Mars appeared in New Zealand in 1903; Les invisibles was a 1906 invisible-man story from Méliès’s rival, Gaston Velle; Thomas Edison’s studio produced A Trip to Mars in 1910. None captured the public’s imagination quite like A Trip to the Moon, the granddaddy of cinematic sci-fi. Méliès himself produced a follow-up film, The Voyage Across the Impossible (1904), a similar story about a group of scientists who travel to the sun on a magic railway car.

Méliès not only conceived, directed, produced, and edited his films, but acted in them and even painted the backdrops by hand. But by 1912, other directors were making more sophisticated films by refining techniques he had pioneered, and he was left behind. In the 1920s, Méliès and his wife opened a toy shop in the Montparnasse train station, a real-life scenario that inspired Brian Selznick’s fictional children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Martin Scorsese, who directed the 2011 movie adaptation, Hugo, was first exposed to Méliès’s work at age thirteen, when he attended a screening of Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Before the feature, Scorsese recalled, “They showed A Trip to the Moon in its entirety. The audience applauded, laughed at the moment when the rocket struck the eye of the moon.” The image stayed with the director his whole life.

Bleuette Bernon watches over the astronomers as they sleep on the moon.

Behind the scenes at Georges Méliès’s studio

Believed lost for nearly a century, the color version of A Trip to the Moon was found in 1993. In 2011, the film was restored and given a new score by the band Air. With its contemporary music and bold colors, the restoration is a surreal journey back to the early twentieth century, when the first manned craft to land on the moon was still sixty-seven years away. Back then, one man envisioned it all. “It is absolutely necessary to create the impossible,” Méliès once said, “then to photograph it so that it can be seen.” By launching his rocket to the moon, Georges Méliès launched the art form of science fiction in the movies.

There were no commercial motion-picture cameras available in France at the turn of the century, so Méliès built his own camera out of a film projector.

Jeanne d’Alcy, an actress who had a small role in A Trip to the Moon, married Georges Méliès in 1925.

When the rocket returns to Earth and plummets to the ocean floor, the underwater effects were startlingly realistic for their day. Méliès shot the scene through a tank filled with water and real fish, and painted the backdrops in carefully selected shades of gray and black so they would register on the primitive film stock.

KEEP WATCHING

THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE (1904)

DESTINATION MOON (1950)

1927

DIRECTOR: FRITZ LANG PRODUCER: ERICH POMMER SCREENPLAY: THEA VON HARBOU, FROM HER NOVEL STARRING: ALFRED ABEL (JOH FREDERSEN), GUSTAV FRÖHLICH (FREDER), BRIGITTE HELM (MARIA), RUDOLF KLEIN-ROGGE (C. A. ROTWANG), FRITZ RASP (THE THIN MAN), THEODOR LOOS (JOSAPHAT), ERWIN BISWANGER (11811), HEINRICH GEORGE (GROT)

The son of an oppressive future society’s ruler joins a working-class revolt incited by a mad scientist’s seductive robot.

Brigitte Helm as the robot and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as her inventor, Rotwang

Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis is more than a landmark silent movie. It is cinema’s first science-fiction epic. Though a financial failure on its initial release, the film’s innovative special effects and awe-inspiring imagery impacted popular culture like an earthquake. Nearly a century later, aftershocks can still be felt. An ambitious spectacle contrasting an opulent city of tomorrow with its dark underbelly of enslaved factory workers, Metropolis has echoed through the decades across the pantheon of sci-fi, from Just Imagine (1930) to Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

Lang, an Austrian filmmaker schooled in the shadowy style of German Expressionism, found the inspiration for Metropolis on his first voyage to the United States in 1924. Struck by the view of the Manhattan skyline from the harbor, Lang immediately envisioned a futuristic film. “I saw the buildings, like a vertical curtain, opalescent and very light, filling the back of the stage, hanging from a sinister sky in order to dazzle, to diffuse, to hypnotize,” he remembered. Lang’s wife, writer Thea von Harbou, penned a novel based on this vision—a melodramatic mélange of social commentary, romance, Gothic horror, biblical themes, ancient sorcery, and space-age technology originally titled Metropolis: Fate of a Human Race in the Year 2000. Von Harbou scripted the adaptation and collaborated with Lang on the production, even discovering actor Gustav Fröhlich among the extras and casting him in the lead role of Freder.

The pampered son of Metropolis’s ruler Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), Freder spends his days cavorting in sun-drenched gardens until he meets working-class beauty Maria, played by nineteen-year-old Brigitte Helm in her first acting role. Maria opens Freder’s eyes to the plight of the masses who toil day and night, operating the Moloch Machine that keeps the city running yet produces nothing. The film’s theme, which Lang summarized as “the enormous progress of technology in future times,” is brought vividly to life in its sets: colossal skyscrapers, vast highways, and ultra-modern interiors outfitted with video-phones and cutting-edge gadgetry.

Brigitte Helm

The Moloch Machine

Fritz Lang directs Gustav Fröhlich.

Shot over a grueling two-year period and populated with 26,000 male extras, 11,000 females, and 750 children, the production was the biggest (and most expensive) ever mounted in Germany. In its extravagance, Metropolis harkens back to grand-scale silent epics such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), but with two new additions: science fiction and special effects. Lang and von Harbou established the modern mad-scientist archetype with the wild-eyed Rotwang (played by von Harbou’s ex-husband, Rudolf Klein-Rogge), whose shock of white hair and mechanized hand would inspire a range of cinematic spin-offs from the title character in Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Doc Brown in Back to the Future (1985). Rotwang’s often-emulated laboratory—bubbling and buzzing with electrical equipment—is used to create a lifelike robot in the image of Maria. Alluring and dangerous, the Maria-android would become a science-fiction icon, her distinctive metal inner-structure informing the look of cinematic descendants C-3PO and RoboCop. The film’s ingenious optical tricks were achieved by stop-motion, superimposition, and a technique called the “Schüfftan process,” in which mirrors were used to combine models with live action.

Critics were awestruck by the effects, but less impressed by what one Berlin reviewer described as “an absurd plot bursting at the seams with themes and motifs.” Even Lang was not especially fond of Metropolis, later dismissing it as “silly and stupid.” But the public was enraptured. The prescient allegory of a future in which technology reigns supreme and human beings are irrelevant still haunts us; the mesmerizing visuals have embedded themselves firmly in our culture. There simply never had been—and probably never will be—anything else quite like it.

Shortly after its premiere, German distributor Ufa withdrew the film and began making cuts. For the American release, Paramount hired playwright Channing Pollock to pare the story down even further. For seventy-five years, the epic was incomplete—lacking over an hour of footage believed to be lost—until discoveries in 2002 and 2008 finally resulted in a near-complete restoration of Lang’s original vision. The final twist in the saga may be the revelation that the more missing scenes are found, the less the film resembles pure science fiction. As Star Wars (1977) would fifty years later, Metropolis uses sci-fi as a means to explore philosophy, theology, and age-old conflicts between good and evil. The hodgepodge of themes and genres—exactly what the critics didn’t like in 1927—is what keeps the film fresh and full of surprises today.

The original version of the screenplay ended with Freder and Maria boarding a rocket ship and blasting off into space. Lang and von Harbou cut this from the story, but used it as the basis for their follow-up sci-fi, Woman in the Moon (1929).

Confined inside a heavy, stifling armor for her scenes as the robot, Brigitte Helm “had to suffer severely under the strain,” recalled costar Klein-Rogge. The cast and crew used to tease Helm by placing coins inside her metallic costume as if she were a machine. She collected the money and used it to buy chocolates.

At once frightening and beautiful, Rotwang’s “Maschinenmensch” is wired to the real Maria and endowed with her physical likeness by a mysterious process. Rings of light rise and fall around the robot as a network of internal organs glimmer to life inside her body. To achieve the effect, the same piece of negative was exposed nearly thirty times as layers of separate elements were added.

KEEP WATCHING

WOMAN IN THE MOON (1929)

THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997)

1931

DIRECTOR: JAMES WHALE PRODUCER: CARL LAEMMLE JR. SCREENPLAY: GARRETT FORT AND FRANCIS EDWARD FARAGOH, ADAPTED FROM THE PLAY BY PEGGY WEBLING AND BASED ON THE NOVEL BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY STARRING: COLIN CLIVE (HENRY FRANKENSTEIN), MAE CLARKE (ELIZABETH), JOHN BOLES (VICTOR MORITZ), BORIS KARLOFF (THE MONSTER), EDWARD VAN SLOAN (DOCTOR WALDMAN), FREDERICK KERR (BARON FRANKENSTEIN), DWIGHT FRYE (FRITZ)

By piecing together parts from dead bodies, scientist Henry Frankenstein creates a living monster with an abnormal brain.

Originally published in 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has captured the public’s imagination for two hundred years. Though Shelley’s novel has been adapted countless times over two centuries, James Whale’s Frankenstein remains the definitive cinematic version, enduring as a groundbreaking crossover of both sci-fi and horror. As stylish and disturbing today as it was in 1931, Frankenstein is an example of 1930s studio-system artistry at its finest.

Mary Shelley gave birth to a science-fiction archetype with her tale of a young scientist creating life from the dead. After playwright Peggy Webling modernized the novel for her 1930 London stage play, Universal bought the film rights for its Dracula (1931) star, Bela Lugosi. Director Robert Florey shot a long-lost screen test of Lugosi as the monster, but neither Lugosi nor the studio was happy with the results. Lugosi dropped out and producer Carl Laemmle Jr. switched directors, assigning Frankenstein to James Whale, who had crafted the precode melodrama Waterloo Bridge (1931) with subtlety and sophistication. Whale jumped at the chance to, as he put it, “dabble in the macabre.”

Boris Karloff

His imagination sparked by German expressionist films like The Golem (1920), the director employed extreme camera angles and Gothic settings to cast a dark spell over the audience. Frankenstein, a complex story suffused with philosophical and moral themes, is streamlined by Whale, its essence distilled to the shocking story of a man who builds a monster. The film’s lack of background scoring, a detriment to some early talkies, works in Whale’s favor. Many of the most powerful scenes involve little dialogue and no music: the elevation of the platform as the creature is brought to life in a thunderstorm; our first terrifying look at the monster’s sunken face; the woodcutter silently carrying his daughter’s lifeless body through the town streets.

Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein and Dwight Frye as Fritz bring the monster to life.

Director James Whale poses with a stand-in for Karloff.

Boris Karloff and Marilyn Harris as Little Maria.

U.K. export Whale not only brought his striking dramatic flair to the production, he brought two English actors who would forever be associated with the roles they created: Boris Karloff and Colin Clive. Karloff was a struggling forty-three-year-old bit player when Whale spotted him in the Universal commissary. With his deep-set, melancholy eyes; exceptional skill at pantomime; and a dental bridge that could be removed to form a hollow indentation in his cheek, Karloff—aided by Jack Pierce’s remarkable makeup—embodied Frankenstein’s creature so ideally that all subsequent characterizations owe him a debt. The squared-off forehead, the electrodes on either side of the neck, the too-short sleeves and weighted boots—none of these existed until Karloff’. . .