By Rick Anderson
For The Daily World
Most viewers regard “Forbidden Planet” as a landmark film in the science fiction category. Others have called it an unintentionally funny campfest.
The acting is sometimes hokey and the special effects are certainly dated, but the film’s detractors are clearly in the minority. With a 98 percent approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, the 1956 sci-fi drama is widely considered, as critic Leonard Maltin put it, “one of the most intelligent and ambitious films of its genre.”
It is also a movie whose virtues are best appreciated on the big screen, and a rare chance to do so is coming up this weekend. “Forbidden Planet” will kick off the 7th Street Theatre’s fall Silver Screen Classics series Saturday and Sunday in Hoquiam.
If nothing else, this may be the only science-fiction movie with Shakespearean roots. The story is loosely based on William Shakespeare’s 1610 play “The Tempest.”
In the 23rd century, a starship commanded by J.J. Adams (played by Leslie Nielsen, in his screen debut), lands on the planet Altair in search of a group of scientists who disappeared there some 20 years earlier.
The crew finds only two survivors: the reclusive Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis), who are accompanied by their faithful robot, Robby. The other scientists, Morbius explains, were wiped out by unseen forces.
Since the attackers remain at large, Morbius insists that the crew return to Earth immediately. Adams is more reluctant, particularly after he falls in love with Altaira. Meanwhile, the monsters are gearing up for another confrontation.
Nearing the end of a long career, Pidgeon has enough of a theatrical manner to pull off his enigmatic role. Otherwise, this is not an actor’s movie.
Francis, a solid performer in such varied films as “Bad Day at Black Rock” and “Funny Girl,” has little to do here but gaze adoringly at Nielsen’s character.
Nielsen’s subsequent low-comedy image in “Airplane” and the “Police Squad” movies might undercut his attempts here to establish a stalwart, no-nonsense space commander. Surely, today’s audiences might reason, he can’t remain serious throughout “Forbidden Planet.” But he is serious — and it would be almost another 25 years before anyone dared call him Shirley.
Jack Kelly, who plays the ship’s rakish second-in-command, might have been a more charismatic leading man. (He later played television’s Bart Maverick, brother of James Garner’s Bret Maverick.)
The screenplay is similarly hit-and-miss — producing an intriguing plot, but spending too much time on scientific mumbo-jumbo. Robby the Robot, who can speak 187 languages, cook and even make dresses, is a lot of fun onscreen, but is underdeveloped. Executives of the MGM studio seemed to acknowledge that shortcoming by casting the robot (voiced by actor Marvin Miller) in later films and television programs.
Wisely, however, the filmmakers spent most of their then-lavish $1.9 million budget in technical areas. It shows.
The films’s deep-focus cinematography is impressive on television and even more striking on the big screen.
The Oscar-nominated special effects might seem primitive today, but were state-of-the-art in the mid-1950s. The filmmakers even recruited a top animator from Walt Disney Studios to assist with some of the sequences.
“Forbidden Planet” is remembered as one of the films (along with 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) that demonstrated that science fiction could appeal to a mass audience. It was one of the first big-budget sci-fi movies to be shot in color, and the first to be set entirely in space. It also was the obvious inspiration for television’s “Star Trek.”
If that isn’t enough, it’s also the closest Leslie Nielsen ever came to playing Shakespeare.
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“Forbidden Planet” will be shown Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the 7th Street Theatre, 313 Seventh St. in Hoquiam. Tickets are $6 and may be purchased in advance at City Center Drug, Crown Drug, Harbor Drug or www.7thstreettheatre.com.
