Release Year: 1956
Country: United States
Starring:Hugh Marlowe, Nancy Gates, Nelson Leigh, Rod Taylor, Shirley Patterson, Lisa Montell, Christopher Dark, Booth Colman, Everett Glass, Stanley Fraser.
Writer: Edward Bernds
Director: Edward Bernds
Cinematographer: Ellsworth Fredricks
Music: Leith Stevens
Producer: Richard Heermance
Availability: Buy it from Amazon

Scott and I spend a lot of time, perhaps too much time, waxing poetic about the golden cliches of yesteryear that seem to have disappeared from everywhere except for Univision. Grown men dressed in those little sailor boy outfits holding oversized lollipops. Quicksand gags. So many lost greats.

One of my favorite forgotten cinematic trends is the scientist of everything. Back in the 1950s, these guys were everywhere, and they were usually played by John Agar. Anyone familiar with old sci-fi films knows these guys. They are identified as “professor” but it’s never really clear what exactly they are professors of. At any given moment, they will prove themselves geniuses in the realms of physics, history, chemistry, geology, geography, aerospace engineering, paleontology — you name it and these guys will show off their knowledge of it, usually at the belittlement of their clueless sidekick scientist, who is more than likely being played by Hugh Beaumont.

The scientist who knows everything and his sidekick who knows so little you wonder how he became a scientist were almost as common as the stern spaceship captain and his goofball mechanic sidekick named Corky or Dewy or something. They’re like those novelty educational figures who appear wearing the college graduation gown and cap, waving a baton and calling themselves “Professor Ebeneezer J. Knowsalot, professor of knowledgology.” Who did educators think these Dr. Demento looking crackpots were going to inspire?

Apparently, there really are, or were, these know-it-all adventuring scientists. After he moved to Atlanta for a spell, Scott sent me a clipping from the Atlanta newspaper want ads. It simply said, “Wanted: Scientist” and had a phone number to call.

The best thing about the scientists of everything is that aside from being smart about all things ever, they were also ass-kicking heroes who were as handy with the fisticuffs as they were with a slide rule. They were out climbing mountains and repelling into bottomless caverns, where they would encounter strange new civilizations and proceed to kick the shit out of them. Hell, Agar and Beaumont conquered all the mole people with just the two of them and a flashlight. You don’t see Steven Hawking doing that.

Sadly, the ass-kicking scientist of everything seems to have gone the way of good, or at least entertainingly bad, science fiction in general. So we have to look to the past to marvel at these ruggedly handsome geniuses. And one of the best places to look is the 1956 sci-fi b-movie classic World Without End. It’s an action-packed low-budget blend of HG Wells’ Time Machine and the Charlton Heston over-acting masterpiece Planet of the Apes, which of course it predates by many a year.

World Without End seems to get ignored by a lot of people, or simply overshadowed by better known sci-fi films like This Island Earth and Forbidden Planet, which is a shame because it’s a fun film. Not a work of pure genius and ambition, but still worth watching. Here’s a brief description of the film from the E! Network website: “World Without End, 1956, Scifi and Fantasy. Michael Gough narrates this classic documentary about the people of Thailand and the people of Mexico.”

And here’s what the movie is actually about …

A ship full of scientists exceed the speed of light, probably as a result of a goofy mechanic named Corky getting his Yankees cap caught in the warp engine, catapulting them thousands of years into the future. They land on what they think is Earth, or what would be in Star Trek terms “the human homeworld,” only it doesn’t look like the Earth they left. Everything is all barren. The cities are gone, and in their place are various bits of scenery from Ponderosa. And there’s these damn cavemen all over the place, grunting and waving clubs and throwing rocks. You know, caveman stuff.

Because the leader of the bunch is one of those super-smart professors of everything, he quickly figures out that they have warped through the space-time continuum and landed on Earth thousands of years into its future, apparently after some sort of cataclysm has wiped out all the population without a protective, Robin Williams-esque pelt of bodyhair. So already these guys have figured out in five minutes what it took Chuck Heston the entire movie to figure out. Unfortunately, none of them drop to their knees and scream “You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!!!”

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Incidentally, you should scream that out as often as possible, even if it’s not entirely appropriate. It’s even cooler if you drop to your knees and pound the ground with your fists while shouting, and it’s cooler still if you are wearing a loin cloth at the time. Also, whenever you see a Mel Gibson movie, no matter what the movie is, every time Mel opens his mouth to say something, yell “Give me back my son!!!” You will be the hit of the movie theater.

Our intrepid gang of astronauts, in what is perhaps a salute to The Time Machine, includes actor Rod Taylor, who played the lead role in the famous 1960 film adaptation of the story. I know what you’re thinking. How could they know? I mean, World Without End was released in ’56, and The Time Machine didn’t come out for another four years. How could they know they were paying tribute to the HG Wells classic by casting the very man who would eventually star in the most celebrated cinematic version of that story? Well, obviously, that’s time travel for ya.

In between shooting cavemen, hiking, and talking about repairing their ships — they are, after all, not just brilliant physicists, astronauts, pilots, and marksmen, but are also skilled mechanics and engineers who can fashion a spaceship out of materials commonly found in prehistoric times — they manage to stumble upon a secret cave with futuristic sliding doors. After proceeding into the cave, they discover the last civilized inhabitants of planet Earth. They are all old men and sexy young women. Hmmm, sounds like L. Ron Hubbard was right after all.

Once again, the survivors (who, in an even eerier foreshadowing of future films about the future, look and act a lot like those underground humans in Beneath the Planet of the Apes), prove that although many things may survive three thousand years into the future, male fashion sense is not among them. They all wear tight hoods and sparkly robes. Of course, proving yet another retro-future adage, female fashion has actually improved, advancing to the state where they all wear shiny hot pants or little togas.

The scientists also learn that the cavemen are in fact mutated humans who have gone back to the primitive ways of homo robustus. Our heroes get a mute slave girl assigned to them, and immediately Rod Taylor starts putting the moves on her in that charming 1950s macho way, back when you could impress a woman by slapping her on the ass and walking around wearing nothing but a towel. I must say, though, that Rod has one thing right. The servant girl Deena, played by Lisa Montell, is one of the most astoundingly beautiful women to ever grace a screen. Maybe it’s just my prejudice in favor of short girls with shirt dark hair and a little meat on them. But hey, can me and Rod Taylor both be wrong? I think not.

I would have liked to see a movie about Rod Taylor and Nick Adams, who made a name for himself calling people “baby!” in various Japanese monster movies through the 1960s, just cruising around slapping women on the ass and then dazzling them with an impish grin and vast knowledge of science, taking time out from their wooing ways only long enough to beat down some uppity space aliens. Man alive, would that ever be a cool movie. Maybe through the magic of digital technology and computer effects, it will one day happen.

The scientists from the past soon discover that the men of this underground world are impotent pansies. The women, in turn, are all hot over these studly, verile spacemen from the past with their sculpted 1950s haircuts and manly chests. This is, of course, an age old literary tradition. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the best examples of the conceit of modern man that we can basically travel to any point in history and kick some ass with our knowledge and/or strapping bods. And pretty much the crux of every John Agar “explorin’ scientists” movie was that we would discover a new civilization and show them what backwards, cowardly losers they are when up against the might of modern man. Or prehistoric man, as the case is in this movie. But not so prehistoric as to be prehistoric as those cavemen types up on the surface.

Rod and the boys are disappointed in their wimpy descendents, and urge them to get up off their sparkly robe wearing asses and take back the surface lest the whole of humanity die out as a result of their cowardly ways. The men of the future ho and hum while the women flock to the 20th Century bad-asses. Just think, if scientists from the 1970s instead of the 1950s had gone, it would have been Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, and cast of 3,2,1 Contact instead of Rod Taylor and other muscular examples of 20th Century toughness. That wouldn’t have gone too well, so I guess we’re lucky we got all our time traveling out of the way back when scientists could still kick ass.

It’d be sort of like if we sent our middle aged heroes in the future. In the 1950s and 1960s, that would have been the Rat Pack. Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Pete Lawford … if we did that for the current crop, it’d be Tom Hanks and Jim Belushi. Ugh. How are they gonna woo the women of the future? Well, if we’re lucky, maybe we can make our famous TV chefs travel through time. That way, at least we’d be represented by Emeril Lugassi and the Iron Chefs. Hey, that sounds like a surf guitar group. Or maybe we could send Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter.” If we could send Emeril, the Iron Chefs, and Steve Irwin to the future, I think we’d be represented pretty well.

Rod, lucky dog that he is, eventually cracks the lovely enigma that is Deena and discovers that she’s not mute at all. And in fact, she used to live among the cave people and was considered by them to be a hideously deformed freak of nature. Har har har! Oh, the sweet irony of it all. They cast her out of the Quest for Fire club, but the underground pansies adopted her and let her move on to a lucrative life of folding sheets. They all decide to forget these wuss old men, who regard confrontational nature as the reason the world ended in the first place, and make a bunch of guns. Luckily, they all know how to craft handguns and rifles out of raw unrefined ores.

The plan? Kick some caveman ass! Man, if I had a dollar for every time I had to do that…

I guess they also plan on establishing some sort of above-ground colony that will apparently be populated primarily by the eventual offspring of Rod and Deena. Oh well, we could do worse, I guess. It could be Eddie Deezen and Tina Yothers. In order to conquer the mutant cave people, we must of course beat the hell out of their leader, thus proving that not only are we superior to the men of the future, but we are also superior to the men of the past. Hell yeah!

Naturally, by the time the big fight is over, we’ve whupped a little mutant booty and shown the whimpering underground men to be cool and tough and try to satisfy their ladies a little more, thus saving humanity for generations to come.

Obviously, World Without End is not the paramount of sci-fi sophistication, but it’s exciting and actually manages to break a little new ground thematically. For instance, the women of the future are tougher and more alive than their male counterparts, and they can handle themselves better in a fight. Of course, when 20th Century Man steps onto the scene, the women are back to their knuckle-biting fall down and scream routine while Hugh Marlowe and Rod Taylor stride forth to save them. But they fare batter and fall down a lot less than, say, the woman in This Island Earth, who actually fell down like three times while walking slowly away from a mutant on a perfectly flat, stable floor. She’d run about two steps, fall, get up, fall. What the hell was wrong with that woman? Oh well, the best part about that movie was that the Metaluna mutants wore trousers.

Despite that small victory for womankind, if you can call it a victory, World Without End is filled with the usual great white American superiority of the 1950s, and it teaches us that if we want to survive in the future and be able to slap Lisa Montell’s butt, we must not forget our vitality. We must learn, advance our knowledge, but we must not allow ourselves to become apathetic when surrounded by our sliding doors and future stuff. We gotta remember to kick a little ass every now and then, and risk having our own asses kicked.

While World Without End may not be the most eloquent delivery of this message, it’s still one I ultimately agree with. Like you, I am part of this here “internet society,” and I watch thousands upon thousands of people forsake doing things in real life in favor of just looking it up on the web. You know, no matter what the ads say, reading a webpage about Thailand is not the same as actually going there. World Without End’s message is actually one of learning to bridge the worlds of technology, philosophy, and physicality, making them all work in conjunction with one another, and that’s a noble goal.

It is, of course, basically a retelling of everything HG Wells told us before, right down to the weakling utopians who would rather die out than find the courage or take the risk to take a stand against the brutish mutants. Yeah yeah, Eloi versus Morlock. But retelling The Time Machine is still a lot more interesting than going, “Wait a minute, what about a modern-day adaptation of Romeo and Juliet?”

Technically, World Without End does a pretty good job of disguising its rather low budget. The sets were from older sci-fi films, but this was the first time they were actually seen in color, and one thing the film manages to do well is take advantage of color. Everything is colorful, almost hallucinogenic in its appearance.

In the great scheme of things, Forbidden Planet is still probably the coolest of the 50s sci-fi films, if for no other reason than it’s completely weird musical score, but World Without End is a two-fisted action-packed little brother that may not be as respectable or ambitious, but just might be more fun.