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At 50, Forbidden Planet a benchmark in film
EXERCISING THE IMAGINATION
On its 50th anniversary, Forbidden Planet is considered a benchmark film that launched a thousand spaceships
LOUIS B. PARKS, Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle | March 29, 2006
March 1956. Dwight Eisenhower was president. Psychoanalysis was topical. New technology meant fancy kitchen appliances or the Bomb. Space travel was science fiction. And most science-fiction films were cheap monster movies.
But not all. A half-century after its debut, Forbidden Planet is still a beloved science-fiction movie. It has a monster, of sorts, but this widescreen, big-budget production is into the excitement of exploration, humanity's self-destructive tendencies and wowing audiences with mind-expanding special effects.
True, those magnificent effects now look endearingly quaint. The stock characters and humor are heavy-handed. The social attitudes feel embarrassingly post-World War II. And the concepts have been endlessly copied.
But fans see Forbidden Planet as a teaser to science fiction glories to come.
"It's almost like a tool kit of SF films," says M. Keith Booker, author of Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture (Praeger, $49.95). "It has the high-tech space ship, it has the fancy robot, it has the mysterious monster. It served as a model for what SF could do."
Its foundation is a solid story based loosely on Shakespeare's The Tempest.
"You could respond to it on a very human basis," says Leslie Nielsen, who played a starship commander at age 29, decades before Airplane! made him a comedy star.
After 50 years, the film's core ideas about humanity's challenges and weaknesses remain relevant today.
"Science-fiction films were so involved with lots of screaming and 'Here comes another monster,' " says Anne Francis, the movie's leading — and only — lady. "We just wanted to make it serious."
It's the 23rd century. United Planets Cruiser C-57D visits a distant world colonized 20 years earlier. The crew, led by Commander Adams (Nielsen), finds one original colonist, Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his naive daughter Altaira and a robot valet named Robbie who looks like the Michelin man with antennae.
An unknown force killed the other colonists, but Morbius has discovered the ancient artifacts of the Krell, an advanced alien civilization that somehow destroyed itself. Morbius is determined to keep the space crew away from his discoveries. And from Altaira. But he finally shows them the vast alien underworld. The spacemen's curiosity puts them in the same self-created danger that destroyed the earlier colonists and the Krell.
"Forbidden Planet could have been the pilot film for Star Trek," Nielsen says, adding with a laugh, "And maybe it was."
Francis, as the lonely and lovely Altaira, remains innocently fetching in her then-daring minidresses. Robbie the Robot, who gets co-star billing and is arguably the movie's most popular character, retains his goofy charm.
The film's central theme — that technology can serve us but also doom us — still resonates.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry often credited Forbidden Planet for its influence on Star Trek, which debuted in 1966 and in turn had a huge impact on science-fiction movies.
"Roddenberry spoke with me about how he had lifted a number of things from ForbiddenPlanet," Francis says, "like the hologram and beam me up, Scottie."
While there were several serious and imaginative science-fiction films prior to Forbidden Planet, none had so convincingly detailed deep space travel and adventure.
"The '50s are famous for a proliferation of science-fiction movies, most of them intended to be cheap entertainment," Booker says. "Forbidden Planet had the highest budget (an estimated $1.9 million) to date of any science-fiction film. It has Technicolor and widescreen. It was a conscious effort to make a quality film. It had predecessors like The Day the Earth Stood Still, but Forbidden Planet is much more of an exploration of the artistic possibilities."
Like all science-fiction films, Forbidden Planet is a prisoner of its own time. Its future is a 1950s future, with vacuum tubes, post-war morality and an all-Anglo, all-male crew.
"With a blonde bombshell (Francis) in the picture, there could be no love affair between her and anybody who was not Caucasian," Nielsen says. "It would (have been) tough enough to even have her in the same room with a black man or a Chinese guy. Those things are all changed today."
Just as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, released one month earlier, played on America's fear of communism and forced conformity, Forbidden Planet played on the 1950s' conflicting views — love and fear — of technology.
Yet Forbidden Planet still works because it does what great science-fiction novels do: It allows imaginations to soar to a distant future, to a distant world, to an almost unimaginably vast civilization far removed from Earth and humanity. And it does it with wonderfully colorful special effects and a very un-'50s sense of optimism, joy and adventure.