Bud Brewster
Galactic Fleet Admiral (site admin)
Joined: 14 Dec 2013
Posts: 17115
Location: North Carolina
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 Posted: Sun Mar 27, 2022 9:46 am Post subject: FEATURED THREADS for 3-27-22 |
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Three fine movies get the deluxe treatment, post-wise, from yours truly — including a discussion of the deleted sex scene from It Came from Beneath the Sea! 
Oops, that was a typo. I meant "the sexy scene that was not deleted . . . " 
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Four Sided Triangle (1953)
The picture quality of this YouTube video is excellent! 
________________ Four Sided Triangle (1953)
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I think BoG underrates this one. Bulldogtrekker and I watched a download of it several years ago, and we were especially impressed with the laboratory scenes.
And the leading lady is VERY attractive. 
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It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Yet another well-written review from the late Andrew Bogdan (Bogmeister)!
I wish Andrew was still with us so I could point out a few statements he made that I don't quite agree with.
For example —
| Bogmeister wrote: | | It's never clear that our atomic weapons actually caused this beast, besides just disturbing it from its deep water existence, though they keep referring to it as radioactive (stay away from it — it's radioactive! forget that it can crush an elephant with one tentacle). |
The movie does in fact explain that the octopus was not made larger by atomic radiation, and that science acknowledges the possibility of large deep-sea creatures . . . although the size of this creature is made super-large for the film.
As for the radiation, the only time they even mention it is when the submarine detects it in the first scene, and when the two scientist explain that the octopus' radiation was no danger, it just tended to ward off the creature's food supply.
| Bogmeister wrote: | | The movie begins almost like a documentary on our latest submarines in the first minute, but soon everything shifts, due to a low budget, to dramatizing things via suggestion. Crewmen pretend to be jolted inside the fake interior of the sub, much like the crew on the Star Trek sixties show pretending that their ship has tilted. |
Actually, there was no "fake interior of the sub". All those scenes were filmed inside a real submarine. Here's what Wikipedia says.
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To keep shooting costs low, director Robert Gordon shot inside an actual submarine, both above and under water, using handheld cameras.
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| Bogmeister wrote: | | There are slow spots in-between the beast's appearances and the almost-love-triangle of the 3 main characters is typical ham-handed stoic Americana of the '50s — rather hackneyed considering they should all concentrate more on the problem at hand. |
The quote Carl Dehham from King Kong, "If this picture had love interests it would gross twice as much!"
If the plot had kept the characters' attention strictly on the octopus throughout the movie, it wouldn't have been as much fun! Besides, that scene on the beach is damned sexy, the one where Kenneth Toby wraps his arms around Faith Domergue and let's her wet body in a bathing suit slide slooooowly down his, and then Faith acts like she's having an . . . well, like she's feeling really good! * [/size]
And just for the record, there's definitely no love triangle between the three main characters, either.
Donald Curtis' character makes a point in several scenes of defining his relationship with Faith as being strictly friends-and-colleagues. In fact, I love the way he happily encourages Faith to be more feminine and less aloof with Kenneth, and he encourages Kenneth to be more aggressive!
Mr. Curtis must have liked playing the role that way because IMDB his this trivia item.
~ Donald Curtis cited this film as his personal favorite among the films he starred in.
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Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)
IMDB has 10 trivia items for this movie. Here’s a few of the ones I found the most interesting, in the blue text. 
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~ With cooperation from the US Air Force and Texas Air National Guard, producer Robert Clarke filmed at Fort Worth's Carswell Air Force Base and the abandoned Marine Corps Air Station at Eagle Mountain Lake. The badly deteriorated buildings were used to show that the air base from which he took off was in ruins.
Note from me: The simple act of using one active base and one inactive weed-grown base as the same base separated by 64 years worked like a charm.
~ The was shot at the same time as Edgar G. Ulmer's The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). The combined shooting time for the double feature was only two weeks. This film was also meant to cash in the popularity of George Pal's The Time Machine (1960).
Note from me: The Amazing Transparent Man is actually a pretty good movie, so I'm mighty impressed that these two films were completed so quickly! However, that makes this next trivia item all the more tragic. 
~ This film and another Robert Clarke / Edgar G. Ulmer production, The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), which was shot at the same time and in the same location, were originally to be distributed by a company called Pacific International.
Shortly after the films were completed, Pacific International went bankrupt, and producer Clarke lost all the money he had put into it. The films were put up for auction by the film lab that processed them in order to recoup its costs.
Both films were bought by American-International Pictures for a fraction of their cost, and upon release they made the company quite a bit of money. Except for his salary as an actor for two weeks' work, Clarke never saw a dime from the films.
Note from me: It saddens me to think that a film which shows this much intelligence and imagination (on such a modest budget) was not allowed to earn back the investment its producers made. Mr. Clark certainly deserved a much better fate than the one he got.
~ Screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce appears briefly as one of the mutants escaping from the jail cell in the underground citadel.
Note from me: Mr. Pierce has several sci-fi screenplays to his credit, including The Cosmic Man. As for his brief appearance on screen in this movie, I'm pretty sure Mr. Pierce volunteered for that uncredited role when he heard that the mutants were going to tackle the girls in miniskirts and then wrestle around on the floor!
~ Vladimir Sokoloff, who played "The Supreme" in this movie, played "the old man" in "The Magnificent 7" which was also released in 1960. Although he played a Mexican in "The Magnificent 7," he was actually from Russia and his Russian accent can be heard in "Beyond The Time Barrier."
Note from me: Mr. Sokoloff's appearance in The Magnificent Seven is a key moment in the story. He inspires the peon's to stand up to the banditos, a crucial plot element.
This next item is of from the Wikipedia article.
~ Clarke chose Darlene Tompkins over several contenders for the mute and psychic Trirene, including Yvette Mimieux (who appeared in The Time Machine) and Leslie Parrish.
Note from me: The Time Machine was released a month after this movie, so it's possible that Yvette Mimieux might not have appeared in the George Pal movie if she'd been involved in this one. Then again, this movie was shot in just ten days, so she probably could have done both movies quite easily!
Leslie Parrish was absolutely gorgeous in Lil' Abner (one year earlier), but I doubt that either she or Yvette could have played Trirene better than Darlene. (* sigh * )
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958) |
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