ALL SCI-FI

[JKB-1]

Just to alert you all that this sci-fi-ish movie, starring will be on Turner Classic Movies on August 1st. If there is still a TCM app, it used to hold movies on their schedule for another week -- well, the movies they had online rights to, I'm pretty sure the company has all rights to this film sewn up, so it may even be on the Max service semi-permanently. I have also seen it posted to Youtube.

Hedy Lamarr plays a woman who is told by her astrologer that she will meet the proverbial tall, dark, stranger, with whom she is fated to fall in love. This is disconcerting to her husband, played by William Powell; doubly so because he is an astronomer, and has no use for astrology.

Okay, so far, maybe science-adjacent. But here's the kicker: he has discovered a comet is going to hit the Moon! This is merely a complication to the main plot, putting Powell on a schedule he can't set aside when the new, handsome, Air Raid Warden comes to talk to Lamarr about her habit of saying goodnight to her husband by standing in a lighted window he can see in a private telescope at the observatory. It also allows stretching for a metaphor comparing the terrestrial interloper to the celestial one. (Hey! That means that, despite what the advertising would lead you to believe, the title refers to third-billed James Craig!) But then, about 50 minutes in, it happens! There's a viewing party at the observatory, Powell gives a brief lecture to the invited guests, and projects the telescopic image on a screen, and then he's free to try to keep his own world from disintegrating.

So, how did they show it, and how well did they show it?

My first guess would be that they used CGI, Cartoon Graphics, Inserted. I may go into my doubts later, but that still seems the easiest way.

As they show it, the Moon is not full, and the comet is approaching from the unlit side. This conveniently allows the tail to point away from the Sun and also point away from its direction of motion. It begins to light up the dark side, most obviously directly under it. Then it hits. I'm not so sure how well a comet would light up the Moon, and sometime before it hits the dark side of the Moon it would pass into the shadow, or umbra, and go dark itself. I guess I can allow artistic liscenc. At worst I can tell myself that it's not cometlight hitting the Moon, but the cloud of material around the head of the comet, and the impacts are heating the material to incandescence. A friend suggested that the tail still in sunlight may help illuminate the head when it goes into shadow, but I'm not so sure; maybe if Kip Thorne runs a supercomputer simulation for the remake.

I suspect the movie made no great splash in 1944, and, after 1945, its Air Raids and jokes about rationing and hoarding would be as dated as jokes about a '30s speakeasy. Only when a channel devoted to showing old films finds itself with 24 hours a day to fill would this have been brought out of storage. It's a cute enough story, and if I were rewriting it, I see a psychological point that could be brought out, but would an audience expect the comet part of the story to be accompanied by fears of it missing the Moon and hitting the Earth? I can definitely see the War Department telling the newspapers and the astronomer (offscreen) that the comet is definitely hitting the Moon and nowhere else, understand? Today, have our news sources cried wolf so often that we could glide over it with a few crank headlines?
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That does not compute...
at least, I am not going to bother to compute it.

[Gord Green]

Great review! Thank you.

I've never seen it, but I'll tivo it and check it out.
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There comes a time, thief, when gold loses its lustre, and the gems cease to sparkle, and the throne room becomes a prison; and all that is left is a father's love for his child.