Today is Walter Pidgeon’s day in this month long celebration of classic actors, the annual Summer Under the Stars here on TCM. One of the movies on the slate tonight is the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet, starring the day’s star, Pidgeon, as well as Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, and Richard Anderson, later of The Six Million Dollar Man fame. I’ve written about Forbidden Planet a few times before as it’s a personal favorite of mine. This time, I’d like to cover some ideas about it, and movie monsters in general, specifically filtered through the lens of one Bosley Crowther, the legendary film critic for The New York Times, in his article, Monsters Again, published on May 6, 1956. I would like to go on the record that I think Crowther was an excellent critic who is unfairly maligned much of the time. That doesn’t mean I don’t have disagreements with him, and Monsters Again is no exception, but in general, we agree more than not. Let’s begin.
Crowther opens the piece with a sweeping endorsement of the joy of monster movies:
“It would be a hard man who could find it within his heart to condemn, with an absolute blanket indictment, the so-called monster films. Monsters of one sort and another, both bestial and human, have been sending chills of delicious dread and wholesome horror chasing along the spines of impressionable movie audiences almost since the movies began.”
He changes course a bit in the next paragraph, throwing in a bit of intellectual snobbery in the form of “[a]s for the intellectual level indicated by a taste for same, we would choose to withhold an opinion.” But it doesn’t last long as he makes the true conflict of the piece known, which could be summed up as “monsters can be great and should be but lately they kind of stink.” At least he thought so.
To Crowther, the great monsters were not only deserving of recognition in their own right but compared to the heady dramatic work of other films. In one of the greatest lines ever penned about monsters, he writes, “a really first-class monster, such as Boris Karloff’s get of Frankenstein or Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera or Hunchback of Notre Dame, is entitled to as much respect and deference as Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.” Damn! And let me just say, I agree.
Okay, but he wasn’t satisfied with the monster movies he was seeing in 1955 and 56. Godzilla left him cold and he felt the monster was “a brutish, senseless creature, lacking even the wistful longing of King Kong” and felt that the idea of the monster as a metaphor for the evil or hatred born of the nuclear war didn’t really work because nothing in the movie “indicate[s] such calculation. Godzilla was simply meant to scare people.” It’s true, Godzilla is a different animal, literally in this case, than King Kong. And the movie has more in common with the monster attack movies like Them! than Kong but that’s the appeal. The giant ants in Them! also lack the “wistful longing” of Kong and who cares? I watch King Kong for the adventure, the effects, and, yes, for King Kong’s great character. I watch Godzilla and Them! because I want to see nature run amok. Sometimes a monster movie’s greatest gift is simply awe.
He also finds the sequels to The Creature from the Black Lagoon quite “dull.” Referring to “Universal’s old fish-face’s” third outing, The Creature Walks Among Us, he states that the creature “fails as dismally as he did the first time to arouse our excitement or regard.” Despite the creature having a kind of wistful longing, Crowther isn’t impressed. The thing is, I’m not really impressed either by the third one but I liked and still like the first one quite a bit so I can’t agree that the first time around he failed dismally. At the same time, I also agree, generally speaking, that I like the first movie more than I think it’s any good. That is, yes, I like it, no, I don’t think it’s a great one.
Now Crowther leads us into the point of all this: “But we must say the monster outlook brightens with the new picture at the Globe… Forbidden Planet. For the creature in this straight science fiction is not only highly fanciful, but it is also what so many monsters should be: It is wholly invisible.” I don’t know if every monster should be invisible but the sentiment behind that statement is one touted by many horror fans over the years, myself included, that the imagination can produce more anxiety in the viewer than actually seeing something on the screen. From The Cat People all the way up to The Blair Witch Project, some very successful horror movies have succeeded based on concealing the evil lurking at their core.
Of course, the monster is revealed in Forbidden Planet, briefly and extremely effectively in an attack on the saucer where it walks into an electrical barrier and has its outline drawn in electrical arcs. But this only serves to make the ending even more effective once it is invisible again and pursuing our heroes deep down into the bowels of the planet’s ancient ruins and technology. We can’t see it anymore but we know what it looks like and now, without seeing it, it seems even more frightening.
Crowther finishes up by stating that “Forbidden Planet is the liveliest and funniest science-fiction film that we’ve had the unqualified pleasure of enjoying since Destination Moon.” I’d have to place Forbidden Planet near the top of great sci-fi films of the fifties so I’m naturally in agreement with Crowther. More importantly, I’ve always told people that monster was one of the greats, pop-psychology “Id” babble or not, and it’s good to see Bosley Crowther on my side. That menacing invisible beast tears men limb from limb and gets stronger with every day. As a kid, it truly scared me. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. If you have, take some time to enjoy the monster… again.