When Worlds Don’t Collide

THE GOLDEN BAT begins with the title character posing dynamically against graphic backgrounds while his catchy theme tune plays. Within moments of this, a young student called Akira, peering through his wee telescope detects that “Planet Icarus” is on a collision course with earth. He reports this to the nearby observatory but is poo-pooed. His evening continues on this depressing course as he is immediately kidnapped on the observatory steps by shadowy men in black with an equally shadowy (and very cool) black car. They take him to an underground mountain laboratory where a group of noble scientists are working to avert the planetary collision with the aid of a new laser, but just then they get an alert that the team hunting for the special mineral needed for the laser lens are in trouble — they fly to the remote island from whence the SOS issued in their own Thunderbirds-type flying saucer, but find their mineral team incinerated. Also, the island is an outcrop of Atlantis! And then a big drill-shaped spacecraft with EYES comes out of the sea, captained by a furry with a prosthesis, firing death-blasts at them, and there’s an earthquake!

At this point we’re ELEVEN MINUTES into THE GOLDEN BAT, a Japanese superhero scifi movie. What’s weird is that the title character isn’t in the movie yet, apart from the opening credits. Everything else has happened, and we even seem to have a full cast of protagonists, enough that we could kill a few and still feel sunny about things.

Less has happened half an hour into BATTLE OF THE WORLDS, the same movie but released five years earlier and in Itaiy. A planet, this time called “the Outsider”, is drifting inexorably towards Earth and our heroes, divided between a rather lovely island observatory and a space base on Mars, are deeply concerned. Antonio Margheriti, working with what looks oddly like an actual budget, moves things around elegantly and even shows imagination… time is spent with characters staring anxiously at a perfectly ordinary sky, which assumes ominous, poetic qualities, enhanced by Mario Migliardi’s beepity-boop score.

We meet a romantic duo of attractive, post-synched scientists — she’s called Eve, so naturally he’s called Fred. It’s just that kind of movie.

Lead scientist is Claude Rains, very irascible — you would be too — essentially reprising his poor showing as Professor Challenger in the Irwin Allen LOST WORLD of the previous year. The following year he’d do LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, proving that not everything is always downhill. This is as bad as I’ve ever seen Claude, but he’s still light years ahead of his dubbed co-stars, and at least the script by Ennio de Concini, credited as Vassilij Petrov (!) who also worked on DIVORCE: ITALIAN STYLE and UN MALEDETTO IMBROGLIO has tried to give him a character to play. Someone called George Higgins III has translated the dialogue, but Claude is noticeably acting in a vacuum, more so than the guys in spacesuits in actual space.

BATTLE OF THE WORLDS was originally titled IL PIANETA DEGLI UOMINI SPENTI — Google Translate offers up THE PLANET OF DULL MEN as the literal translation, which means the title is referring not to Icarus but to Earth, portrayed in this movie as a world of dunces plus one Claude.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, forward in 1966, the Golden Bat finally makes his appearance in a sarcophagus that slides out of a wall in an Atlantean shrine. Revived by Professor Pearl’s granddaughter Emily who applies the prescribed drop of water to his shiny jumpsuit, he jumps up and zaps a number of the bad guys, promising to return whenever the granddaughter needs him. It’s not quite clear who he is, other than maybe the world’s first superhero — his first comic strip appearances predate Batman and Superman. He has a cape, boots, gloves, he fights evildoers, he flies, he’s definitely a superhero. True, his face is a rubber skull mask, but Ghost Rider’s face is literally a flaming skull so we can’t wallow in easy cultural superiority here.

Amusingly, sometimes when he flies about, the Golden Bat turns into an actual action figure on wires, transforming back into a living breathing humanoid through the miracle of match cutting on action.

“I want to be included in one of those buttons. But only because you’re there,” says another romantic interest character (not Eve) back in Italy. People are always saying things like that in this film.

Claude Rains’ performance is growing on me. He’s a magnificent actor fed garbage dialogue and surrounded by mannequins who don’t understand a word he’s saying. And he’s been ordered to strike the one note, irascible/arrogant, throughout. but he triumphs. He does seem to be having some trouble either with his breathing or his memory on the longer speeches, maybe both, but he’s not as tragic a sight as Basil Rathbone in QUEEN OF BLOOD, poor bastard. He can still do it.

I like how his character putters about in his greenhouse with his dog for most of the flick, chalking equations on plant-pots.

Not like Nazo, the evil genius space tyrant of GOLDEN BAT, who looks like a lost member of the Banana Splits and says things like “Did you see what their space laser can do? We can’t conquer the universe with that around.” True, the subtitles might not be fully capturing Nazo’s villainy here, making him sound peevish rather than dominating. Now we meet Nazo’s three henchpeople, Keloid, who is scarred, Jackal, who seems to be a werewolf, and Piranha, who is a sexy girl — the scariest thing of all.

“Gyroscopes at maximum!” yells a frantic Italian astronaut as the earth rockets do battle with the Outsider’s flying saucer fleet. The dogfight consists of rockets and saucers sailing past the camera at random angles while earthlings, watching on their big 16 inch monitor back home, provide a helpful commentary.

Keloid, Jackal and Piranha and their ninja-type troops can all become invisible, which they do at random but never when it would actually confer an advantage, since that would rob us of the pleasure of seeing their evildoing, and Jackal’s cure furry jumpsuit.

I always like the western characters in Japanese fantasy films, who seem to be played by whoever they can find. Professor Pearl is some old retiree, gamely trotting through the mystifying action, but he’s been dubbed by some kind of Toshiro Mifune impersonator so this huge voice comes roaring out of his wizened frame. He’s a thespian TARDIS, bigger on the inside.

The Outsider’s malign influence on the Earth causes an outbreak of stock footage — a solar eclipse, mucky lava, burning buildings, big waves. Meanwhile Icarus cannot be destroyed until it passes the moon and comes in range of the fancy space laser. A flying saucer is shot down and Claude gets to run tests on its sinister central tube.

Watching these films simultaneously like Thomas Jerome Newton may not be paying either of them the minimal respect they deserve but I’m quite enjoying it.

During his second big brawl scene, Golden Bat leaps about kicking and thumping enemy ninjas and walloping them with his “golden baton”, all while laughing maniacally. Saving the Earth shouldn’t be this hilarious to him. I don’t requite Batman levels of grim-visagedness, but a modicum of sobriety shouldn’t be too much to ask from a costumed hero.

Also, though his spangly wrestling costume is aces with me, the decision to emphasise his skeletal qualities by building a set of “ribs” into his costume does make him look a bit like a novelty condom.

On board the flying drillbit, Professor Pearl is tortured by a pushbutton device — Jackal jabs the buttons and puffs of smoke blossom from the old codger’s anatomy. It feels unkind to laugh at an old guy being tortured, but… I did.

Everyone is well into the spirit of this thing, even Prof Roundeye, but the guy playing Keloid is a truly horrible actor. There are right and wrong ways of doing even this kind of nonsense. His hammy moron laugh is a quickly overplayed hand.

The ever-irascible Claude Rains has discovered he can confuse the flying saucers by playing loud Clanger noises at them, so naturally he does. The male model playing the male lead is another amusing miscombination of voice actor and face/body actor, resulting in a performance seventeen times more enthusiastic than a man speaking with his own voice could ever get. I mean, maybe if he was Pavarotti or something…

“You have studied the planet’s surface,” Claude lectures the world government heads, who appear to him on his chunky collection of telly screens, “but you have not torn open its bowels, which spewed forth the discs that I destroyed!” Pretty graphic stuff for 1966.

Back in 1961, Piranha turns herself into a doppelganger of the innocent Naomi, and Keloid impersonates the occidental professor — which is good because we won’t have to see Keloid act for a while. I’m quite up for seeing the prof try to mimic that performance, though. Ineptitude on top of ineptitude, or, as Douglas Sirk put it, “Trash + craziness = ART.”

YES

After some very odd special effects, Claude Rains touches down on the Outsider and tears open its bowels, metaphorically speaking, to reveal — a series of tubes. Jacques Tati has got the extruder malfunctioning again.

The villainous Nazo (Nazi) hates humans and wants to be the only living creature, which begs the question of what his underlings or underthings hope to get out of following him. Piranha gets disintegrated for failure. Tough break, getting disintegrated, but it must sting even more coming from a dude dressed like a refugee from 70s kids’ show Rainbow. I can never decide whether his terry-cloth romper suit is his SKIN, in which case he’s nude, or some kind of all-over covering snug around the ears.

BATTLE OF THE WORLDS gets quite emotional as Claude opts to stay on the soon-to-be-destroyed Outsider, which turns out to be a ghost planet, a Noah’s ark from another world whose inhabitants died in transit and whose automated flying saucers carry on futilely trying to exterminate populations to make lebensraum for the extraterrestrial settlers, who’ll never be able to settle.

Locating the Outsider’s electronic brain, Claude is ecstatic, but the Earth nukes are on their way. “And what importance does life have, young fellow… if to live… means not to know.”

KA;BOOM!

And meanwhile, in Japan five years later, KA-BOOM! Icarus, falling to Earth (never name a stray planet Icarus, it WILL do this) destroys the moon. Nazo’s big drill-bit burrows up right in the middle of Tokyo. The Golden Bat’s pet bat, captured by Nazo, escapes, and summons the costumed creep crimefighter.

This being a Japanese effort, bursts of nastiness erupt without warning — the adorable Emily gets whacked unconscious, and innocent scientists are hurled from the drill-bit, though mercifully they turn into tiny dolls in mid-plummet, which may act as a form of anaesthetic against the moment of dread impact.

Director Hajime Satô keeps trying fun stuff, Perhaps sensing that his fight choreography is sub-par, he goes hand-held as the Golden Bat invades the heroes’ flying “supercar”, captured by baddies, and this helps a lot. Bat does still seem to be having way too good a time clobbering the faceless minions. Something very painful-sounding happens to Jackal just below the edge of frame, and furry guy is out of the picture.

Oh, and I hadn’t noticed, but the supermasculine scientist in the fetching white jumper is Sonny Chiba. He’s good — recognizably more authoritative than most of his co-stars. We’re not allowed to know who’s inside The Golden Bat’s ribbed catsuit.

The Golden Bat disables the drill-bit by crashing supercar into it. Now Nazo is trapped in a doomed world — Chiba and the young guy from the beginning who the script has mostly forgotten enter the drill to steal back their space laser and destroy Icarus. In fact, Nazo is now strongly motivated to destroy Icarus himself, since it’s too late to stop the planetary collision, but the script rushes past this realisation.

The drill’s lopsided position now allows Satô freedom to indulge in Deutsch tilts galore.

“He had an equation instead of a heart,” says one cloddish astronaut of the late Claude Rains. And Margheriti cuts to Gideon, the prof’s loveable pooch, scratching at the glass of his greenhouse den, an Argos waiting patiently for a little wrinkly Ulysses who will never return…

Another costumed punch-up. The subtitles persistently call the Golden Bat “the Golden Ninja,” despite the fact that in Japanese his name is “Ôgon batto” and we can HEAR this. Remember how the BBC retitled the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because somebody judged that the word “ninja” was too violent? The lamest thing ever. This is that process in reverse, but still pretty lame.

Bat’s signature move is to ram the spherical tip of his baton into an opponent’s solar plexus. Nasty.

The gibbering Keloid runs away from what should be his big fight, like Count Rugen in THE PRINCESS BRIDE, and looks set to fall on some retractable floor-spikes, like Klytus in FLASH GORDON. Sic semper second bananas. In the end he opts for the cheaper option of just falling out of frame.

Nazo’s claw flies off his wrist and attacks Bat, another clew that Lorenzo Semple Jr may have been forced to watch this while writing FLASH GORDON. He probably regarded it as a knock-off of his own TV Batman, and therefore fair game for pillaging, not realising that Ôgon batto predates Bruce Wayne.

Golden Bat/Ninja/Condom straight-up murders Nazo by throwing his baton through the guy’s head, which causes him to EXPLODE, naturally. What you may be getting from all this is that although THE GOLDEN BAT is more energetic than BATTLE OF THE WORLDS, it has less of poetry in its soul.

Sonny Chiba lasers Icarus out of existence and everybody cheers, I’d have liked Icarus to survive and replace the moon. I mean, now we have no moon. That is the obverse of a poetic outcome. Still, I like the shots of the empty sky, a special effect that involves no special effects.

The Golden Bat flies off into the wild monochrome yonder, with little Emily running after him shouting “Sayonara!” It’s not as good as SHANE. Bat looks back over his matte-lined shoulder to wave at her, an impossible thing to achieve physically with any conviction, and rather ruins any poignancy by laughing like a lunatic in an echo chamber. FINIS.

We seem to be set for a mess of sequels, not the case at all with BATTLE OF THE WORLDS, but in fact Ôgon batto’s next appearance was as a Saturday morning cartoon, but at least they were able to thriftily recycle his kick-ass theme tune:

The Margheriti movie suffered from nasty jump-cuts done perhaps to facilitate dubbing new dialogue, but should probably best be watched in English to get what can be got from Claude Rains’ desperate zest. Perhaps folding the movies together like this is the best way to appreciate them, and an actual fan-edit might yield satisfaction. Throw in WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE for the better VFX shots and you’d be on your way to a good movie. In fact, combining the resulting farrgo with every other planetary collision affair from Abel Gance’s LA FIN DU MONDE on might make a delightful project for somebody or other (not me).

Rocketing to Earth

Mike Hodges tells me that Larry “Buster” Crabbe was quick to condemn his 1980 FLASH GORDON. “He couldn’t quite bring himself to say this great American hero might be GAY! Hey Ho!”

If not gay, then certainly camp.

Join Larry “Buster” Crabbe and his chums for the final episode of the 1936 series!

We open, more or less, with the ceiling falling in on our heroes after they descend through a convenient trapdoor to escape aerial bombardment. The whole “Trapped in the Turret” thing is rather a misnomer as they never go upstairs. “Trapped in the Basement” would be closer to the truth, but they’re never trapped either: immediately downstairs from the “turret-which-is-played-by-a-cave” next to the “Lake of Rocks” which is just a desert, they find a corridor leading to the dungeon which allows them to rescue Prince Barin who is being escorted there. They belatedly realise that it wasn’t Barin who had been bombarding them.

Oh, and King Vultan has been injured. He’s covered in plaster and looks quite woebegone. Covering someone in plaster will have this effect, but it turns out if they’re wearing big rigid fake wings the effect is enhanced.

Fiona, having skipped most of the episodes, is amused all over by Princess Aura’s way of aiming her knockers at people. “She said, bustily.”

There is toing and froing. Or “to-ing and fro-ing” I guess since the previous iteration looks like it should rhyme with “boing.” It having been established that anyone can just barge into Ming’s throne room whenever they feel like it, our heroes do so. They also encamp in Ming’s laboratory and Zarkov electrifies the door to keep intruders out. Ming is so ineffectual, in other words, his abductees can make themselves more secure IN HIS HOUSE than he can himself. Zarkov, previously dejected by his wrecked invisibility machine, is briefly triumphant about his electric wood, until Ming outsmarts him by shutting the power off. Outsmarted by a tinpot dictator who uses common sense: there’s something to be dejected about.

Speaking of tin pots, here come the Lion Men in their “gyro-ships,” pronounced by Charles “Baldy” Ming Ming with a hard G and Frank “Knobbly Knees” Shannon with a soft one. This time, I feel Zarkov has the right idea, despite Ming being the native speaker.

“It must be hell in there,” says Fiona, gazing upon the wobbly, twirly, smoky and buzzing craft. Thun, standing at the controls as if operating a Moviola, somehow seems to have a view that isn’t constantly panning 360, which would admittedly be irritating.

At 9: there’s another of those delightful moments when a line of dialogue is yelled in by an off-camera director or AD: “It’s Thun, and his Lion Men!” Truly hilarious. The first two words have been loosely synched to “Larry “Buster” Crabbe’s lip movements, the rest play over a wide shot of rampaging cat-dudes. The voice is inept and very camp. It’s exactly the way I imagine the voice of the AD on Mankiewicz’s JULIUS CAESAR when he famously shouted “Now here comes Julius!”

There is a huge, uncoordinated fight, resembling the slapstick donnybrook at the end of HELP! Just a bunch of random shoving and falling over. In this fashion is Ming finally vanquished.

Defeated, Ming runs — RUNS! — “Max Von Sydow was far too dignified to go flapping about like that,” argues Fiona — to the only other standing set or location of any use, the tunnel leading to the recently exploded fire dragon. The smirking High Priest, who puts me in mind of comedian Joe Melia, watches him go, and, in a literal puff of smoke, Ming just vanishes.

This seems pretty weak, but I can’t recall being disappointed by it as a kid. One can even argue that the abstraction of it — transparently a means to preserve the possibility of Ming returning, Fu Manchu-style (“Mongo shall hear of me again”) — has a certain grandeur. Middleton plays it as if it’s Shakespeare, helped by the fact that there’s no dialogue to remind you that it’s not Shakespeare.

I’m then reminded that Von Sydow does a similar fade-out in the Mike Hodges version, and that as a kid I DID feel a pang of disappointment — there’s a huge build-up to Flash flying towards Ming’s palace, setting up the expectation that he’s going to do something pretty dramatic when he gets there. But no — he just crashes into it. This, of course, is perfect — Sam “Not Buster” Jones’ dim-witted Flash isn’t going to save the day in any other way than by direct collision. And it ends with “THE END?”

I’ve read numerous accounts of how the big finish of STAR WARS — boring pageantry with stirring march music — is derived from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, but it’s clearly derived from right here, where it’s done quicker and cheaper. Pomp and reduced circumstances. FG being Lucas’ stated inspiration, and in fact the film he would have made had Dino De Laurentiis granted him the rights.

What’s left of the ’36 outing is diminuendo with the emphasis on DIM. Flash, Zarkov and Dale depart leaving Aura enthroned, to govern Mongo with the scheming and vacillation wisdom she has demonstrated in the previous twelve episodes, but the smirking High Priest plants a bar-bell bomb in the rocketship. Then, for no reason, he confesses this, still smirking, which allows Barin and co to alert the earth-chums. They open the door and chuck the bomb out. No biggie.

Fiona is convinced that actor Theodore “Smirky” Lorch is spoofing the whole thing with his scare-quotes “performance” but he was a former silent movie actor (Chingachgook in the Clarence Brown-Maurice Tourneur LAST OF THE MOHICANS) whose talking career was all bit-parts and serials, mostly in fact bit-parts IN serials, so I see no reason to assume he’s driven by anything other than delusions of competence.

Then there’s an unsuccessful attempt to inject drama into the flight back to terra firma and stock footage. Finally, in their native skies at last, Flash and Dale stare wonderingly into each others’ eyes (they could hardly stare into their own) in a doomed search for meaning or intelligent life, while Zarkov smiles creepily upon them, a father substitute in unsettling shorts.

THE END?

Trapped in the Turret

“Trapped in the Turret” is a wonderfully lame title for the penultimate episode of FLASH GORDON. Some sense of escalation, of final doom to be averted, is presumably desirable at this point, but instead we have a description of an inconvenience.

I looked up the actor who plays “Commander Torch,” Ming’s earthbound (or mongobound) flying monkey. Earl Askam seems, in his armour and with his kidney-bean torso, like an actor who would play an unsympathetic cop in a Laurel & Hardy short, if Edgar Kennedy was preoccupied. Instead, of course, he was a B-western fixture. He died just a few years after making this, from a Bing Crosby-anticipating golf course heart attack, while playing fellow western star Kermit Maynard. Earl was also a trained opera singer, a talent I wish this serial had exploited.

Flash rushes to Dale’s aid, and his differently-shaped stunt double has an enjoyable rollabout with the playful tiger fearsome tigron, as Dale and her stunt double take turns watching in terror. Ming, in turn, watches on Zoom.

The closeups of Larry “Buster” Crabbe wrestling a stuffed cat corpse are tastefully interpolated — the trick is inherently obvious, but never becomes comically obvious the way it is in many more expensive productions. Flash uses his main talent — strangling — no doubt acquired on the polo field — to subdue the ravenous taxidermy exhibit.

“The sacred tigron has been killed!” gasps the Indian temple maiden. Flash Gordon, visiting district iconoclast, strikes again. Mongo will be an entirely profane planet by the time he’s got through strangling everything.

Prince Barin converts Aura to the cause by pointing out that arranging for Dale’s devouring is unlikely to win Flash’s love. “I shall intercede with my father the emperor,” she says, which depending on your reading is either bragging (my son, the lawyer) or exposition above and beyond the call of duty (it’s a big building with doctors in it, but that’s not important right now).

The wide shot of Ming’s palace is really lovely, even if it does have a big hair growing out of it in the frame I’ve selected.

Commander Torch (is he backed up by Sergeant Screwdriver, Corporal Sliderule and Private Flyspray?) belatedly remembers he has a firearm and subdues Vultan and Zarkov, aiming directly at the pretty flower on Frank “knobbly knees” Shannon’s onesie. Ming demands that Flash be found, “visible or not.” At which point, Flash and chums enter the throne room. And Ming STILL doesn’t look happy. He and Zarkov really ought to be friends, they have so much in common: both seem depressed and sullen about their lot in life , the clothes they have to wear, the words they’re expected to say.

Ming is immediately held hostage, his armed guards somehow powerless against Barin’s sword and Flash’s disapproving attitude. Aura, whose character arc resembles a crazy straw, has not only joined the forces of good, she’s SETTLED — accepting passively the meaty love of Barin. Ming promises the earthfolks can return to their “sphere” — but he does it while making Mr Burns-type evil finger movements. We discover he has a henchman called “Officer Ego.”

One is used to these stories being tales of foreign intervention, so the willingness of all concerned to leave Ming in charge, with no guarantee he won’t threaten the earth again, is baffling.

I’m struck by the fact that I found Vultan to be a fun character when I was a kid, whereas it’s now abundantly clear that he’s as dangerous as Ming, crazier by far, and has the mind of a three-year-old. Mike Hodges told me that he saw his FG as a satire on American interventionism, with the bounding idiot Flash (shades of Lang’s Siegfried) smashing the state without understanding anything that’s going on. I suggested there should have been a sequel where Mongo falls to pieces without its dictator, like a post-Tito Yugoslavia. He chuckled.

The non-interventionist Flash we see here, obeying some unstated Prime Directive issued to polo players on the off-chance of interplanetary entanglements, perhaps echoes American foreign policy circa 1936, explaining that late entry into WWII, whereas 1980 Flash is consistent with a new era.

The earthfolks and their buddies load “power units” onto Zarkov’s rocket, intent on visiting Vultan’s city for no clear reason. Commander Torch and his bitches watch warily.

First mention of the turret! “I am to meet the others at the turret-house, by the lake of rocks,” says Barin. I very much want to see this “lake of rocks.” I wonder if it’s a sacred lake of rocks? Or just regular.

Due to popular demand, director Frederick Stephani shows us the iguanas again. They watch Zarkov’s rocketship buzz overhead, licking their dry lips, and it is amusing to speculate what they might be thinking. Perhaps they are anticipating their appearance in an 80s surrealist cigarette commercial. Perhaps they are looking back on their acquaintanceship with that nice Mr. Darwin. One opens his maw to give throat to a fearsome cock-crow — apparently in valediction to the departing earthpeople. So long. It’s been emotional.

See you later, iguana.

Arriving at the turret-house, Flash, Dale, Aura, Vultan and Zarkov notice a rocketship bearing down on them. Like Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST they stand for ages, dopily staring at it, too embarrassed to run or duck until its lethal intentions become completely unambiguous. It’s very human.

“It must be Prince Barin’s ship,” says Flash the optimist.

BOOM! It fires on them.

“Why should Prince Barin do that?” asks Zarkov, not rhetorically — he’s legit terrified at this new development. Friends have become enemies, enemies friends! Chaos!

“I don’t know!” says Aura, just as baffled. Nobody has the power to think during this scene. It’s scary. They’re trapped — and they’re not even IN the turret! they are trapped in a brainless limbo: the Sea of Rockheads. Five characters without the initiative to even search for an author. Stiff, hopeless illustrations of the doctrine of predetermination, they must now trap themselves in the turret to fulfill a chapter title not of their own choosing. But, when you think about it, isn’t that the plight of every one of us? Isn’t every one of us forced to trap themselves in a turret to fulfill a chapter title not of our own choosing?

The inside of the turret door looks very much like Bronson Caves. Explosion! Explosion-like wipe to closing title card! Next week, the chapter title Flash and his chums will be rigidly fulfilling will be —