— RANKING: 98 —
HIGHWAY IN THE SKY: The world’s first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing science-fiction musical also contained a tender romance threatened by the anti-individualism of a technological future. Here, LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan) and J-21 (John Garrick) momentarily escape the crowd. Courtesy: Fox Film Corp.
CREDITS
Fox Film Corporation; David Butler, dir.; Butler, Buddy G. DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson, scr.; Brown, DeSylva, Henderson, pro.; Hugo Friedhofer, Arthur Kay, mus.; Ernest Palmer, cin.; Irene Morra, ed.; Stephen Goosson, Ralph Hammeras, set design; Alice O’Neill, Dolly Tree, Sophie Wachner, costumes; Joseph E. Aiken, special sound effects; Seymour Felix, choreographer; 113 min.; B&W; 1.20:1
CAST
El Brendel (Single O); Maureen O’Sullivan (LN-18); John Garrick (J-21); Marjorie White (D-6); Frank Albertson (RT-42); Hobart Bosworth (Z-4); Kenneth Thomson (MT-3); Mischa Auer (B-36); Ivan Linow (Loko/Boko); Joyzelle Joyner (Loo Loo/Boo Boo); Wilfred Lucas (X-10); George Irving (Head of Marriage Tribunal); J. M. Kerrigan (Traffic Policeman).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
There is one secret, the greatest of all, that remains a mystery: Mars!
THE SCIENTIST Z-4
BACKGROUND
Impressed by the success of Fritz Lang’s science-fiction epics, executives at Fox Film green-lighted a script featuring a combination of Lang’s two premises: a city of the future, which dominates the first half of the film, and a trip into outer space, the second. With the advent of sound, most in-production projects were rethought to include this suddenly popular element, particularly music. Anyone who had enjoyed production success on the New York stage was invited to relocate to the West Coast and become a producer. Buddy DeSylva (1895–1950) and his then-partners Lew Brown (1893–1958) and Ray Henderson (1896–1970), who together had come up with the Tin Pan Alley musical Good News (1927), were no exceptions. They recreated this project for film, adding vaudeville-style gag lines and endless songs.
THE PLOT
In the year 1980, J-21 meets his lover LN-18 on the sly. The monolithic Marriage Tribunal has decreed that, as a socialite, she should marry MT-3, a better catch owing to his supposed accomplishments in big business. A mysterious emissary of Z-4 contacts J-21. Z-4, a supposedly mad scientist who has constructed a rocket to launch toward Mars, needs a daring volunteer willing to accept the risk, and J-21 realizes that such an achievement would allow him a rebuttal at his final hearing as to his worthiness as a mate for LN-18. During the star journey, J-21 and his friend RT-42 are accompanied by an unlikely stowaway: Single O, who only recently was “raised from the dead” by an experimental process. On the Red Planet, the trio encounters a world of doppelgangers, every Martian contending with his or her evil twin.
THE FILM
Just Imagine has always been recalled as a critical and commercial flop. It was neither: the New York Times hailed this bizarre concoction as “highly imaginative,” and box-office intake proved so strong that the film swiftly recouped its then-immense $1.5 million budget. The vision forwarded here, while borrowing liberally from Lang, brought to the American public such disorienting and far-reaching concepts as 250-story skyscrapers interconnected by highways in the sky, immense TV screens and sight-as-well-as-sound phones, pills replacing liquor for instant highs, test-tube babies, and gravity neutralizers for rocket science development. The film also borrowed from that era’s pulp fiction publications, as well as from Méliès’s flickers, ancient societies led by Amazon women in exotic costumes—that is, heavenly bodies existing on Heavenly Bodies. Such revered works as George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), as well as virtually every movie included in this volume, owe a huge debt to this bold experiment. The claim that Just Imagine is hopelessly corny can be countered by the argument that here we find high camp long before Susan Sontag adjectivized that term in the mid-sixties to describe such guilty pleasures from Hollywood’s fabled past.
THEME
Just Imagine explores the idea of nostalgia. Director Butler opens the piece with authentic footage of New York in the 1880s, recalling that in those good ol’ days, people were attempting to travel in vehicles that moved faster and to inhabit buildings that reached higher. Still, from the perspective of contemporary 1930, when Just Imagine was released, the late nineteenth century appears to have been a gentler era. Such a prologue sets into motion a projection of the future in which the fast-paced 1930s, when considered from the perspective of a half-century later, constituted a far more relaxed moment in our social history. Nostalgia, then, has less to do with the realities of any one era than with the point of view from which it is observed.
TRIVIA
The Academy Awards honored Stephen Goosson and Ralph Hammeras, the conceptual talents of Just Imagine, with a joint nomination for best art direction. As a result of his pioneering work here, Goosson was tapped by Frank Capra to create the ethereal art design for the 1937 fantasy film Lost Horizon. Hammeras, who had already worked on the silent The Lost World (1925), would in time become Walt Disney’s special effects photographer of choice for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). The Academy Award nomination marked the first time that Hollywood openly acknowledged the potential for high-quality work within the emergent sci-fi genre. The photographing of dazzling constructions for Just Imagine, achieved via glass pictures and intricate miniatures, was the work of an uncredited Willis H. O’Brien. At the time, O’Brien was straddling his two greatest successes, The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933)—both towering fantasy films that, owing to a lack of any sci-fi genre elements, could not be included in this volume.
During the Depression, sci-fi films would mostly constitute cliffhangers such as Buck Rogers (1939), produced at Universal. Fox Film Corporation allowed the avatars of such serials to borrow heavily from Just Imagine, in terms of both stock footage clips and use of props. The rocket ship, as well as the heroes’ handguns, are present in the three Flash Gordon chapter plays discussed later in this book. Also, the image of space maidens dancing suggestively around the statue of a primitive god would be used to round out a pagan celebration at Emperor Ming’s pleasure palace in Flash Gordon. And the ornate scientist’s lab, conceived and designed by Kenneth Strickfaden, would be borrowed by Universal, becoming a staple of their horror films, including the various Frankenstein franchise features.
Just Imagine may be the first sound-era American film to include a gay reference. The dialogue and the manner in which the actors were directed to say key lines imply that the relationship between the hero and his roommate, despite their apparent interest in pretty girls, is greater and deeper than casual friendship. Shortly after landing on Mars, El Brendel’s character develops an intense interest in a muscular warrior and, despite the presence of a female ruler, insists that “he’s the real ‘queen’ around here!”