Meteor (1979) Part 1
It Conquered the World*I Was a Teenage Werewolf*Invasion of the Saucer Men*The Amazing Colossal Man*How to Make a Monster*Earth vs. the Spider*Horrors of the Black Museum*A Bucket of Blood*Attack of the Giant Leeches*The Angry Red Planet*House of Usher*Night Tide*Pit and the Pendulum*Burn, Witch, Burn*Tales of Terror*Panic in the Year Zero*The Raven*Beach Party*X The Man with X-Ray Eyes*Dementia 13*The Last Man on Earth*Muscle Beach Party*The Masque of Red Death*How to Stuff a Wild Bikini*Frankenstein Conquers the World*What’s Up, Tiger Lily?*The Born Losers*The Trip*The Crimson Cult*Wild in the Streets*Witchfinder General*The Dunwich Horror*Count Yorga, Vampire*Cry of the Banshee*The Vampire Lovers*Blood and Lace*The Abominable Dr. Phibes*Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde*Raw Meat*Frogs*Wild in the Sky*Boxcar Bertha*Slaughter*Blacula*Black Caesar*The Mack*Coffy*Hell Up in Harlem*Sugar Hill*Foxy Brown*Savage Sisters*Macon County Line*Cooley High*Buck Town*The Land that Time Forgot*Friday Foster*The Town that Dreaded Sundown*The Food of the Gods*Squirm*At Earth’s Core*Monkey Hustle*The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane*The Incredible Melting Man*Mad Max*Love at First Bite*The Amityville Horror*
When AIP Films were proposed as a roundtable subject, I immediately and nonchalantly replied, “Yeah, sure.” It was, after all, a natural. AIP, the home of legendary skinflint producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, was a notorious crap factory. Moreover, the bulk of their best know product was ’50s drive-in sci-fiers, a subgenre right up my alley.
Then the time came to actually write a review, so I (belatedly, of course) hied myself over to the IMDB and called up a list of AIP productions. Only then did the folly of my blasé acquiescence crash down upon me. Without question, AIP had over the span of three decades churned out several truckloads of pure, unadulterated cinematic cheese. Sadly, though, little of it at all was, at least by the standards of this site, well, bad. I mean, we’re talking literally hundreds of titles here. Even so, as I worked my way through the list, all I could do was marvel (and increasingly panic) at the unexpected dearth of turds.
Now, I’m not arguing that the company released a skein of masterpieces. Indeed, it remains incontrovertible that the average AIP flick was a lowbrow quickie shot on the proverbial shoestring. Yet within the limitations imposed by these budgets (which did grow marginally bigger as the years passed), the roster of their movies was almost uniformly surprisingly decent, and often…dare I say it?…actually pretty good. Admittedly, I’m grading on a curve here, comparing their films to similar ones made by other such companies of the time. Even so, it’s hard to get away from the fact that AIP generally produced and/or distributed titles that were consistently above the norm.
This opinion, I admit, cuts against conventional wisdom. Few film companies cared less about artistic integrity and more about the bottom line than AIP. This was the company, after all, that created a system under which they a) first came up with a saleable title, b) followed up by creating lurid spec poster art for same, and only then, if these elements drew interest from theater owners, c) commissioned an actual script and went about making a movie. Let’s give credit where credit is due, however. The fact is, when you look at the way modern Hollywood works, these guys pioneered techniques that for better or for worse rule the roost today.
Even so, barring perhaps only his namesake Sam Katzman, arguably no one in the storied history of movies (an industry legendary for its fecund crop of flimflam men) put the ‘huck’ in huckster quite to the extent that Samuel Z. Arkoff did. With his eye beadily trained upon every last dime and his trademark stogie hanging from his mouth, Arkoff remains a veritable cartoon mascot for an entire breed of poverty row producers who came on the scene (and generally just as quickly left it) back in the day.
It thus seems on the face of things downright inexplicable that this crass, purely profit-driven individual was responsible for producing and/or distributing such a slew of consistently above average genre pictures. And all together, we’re talking about roughly 500 films over a span of nearly three decades.* Clearly, Arkoff and Nicholson were doing something right.
[*To be clear, the films AIP produced there those actually made under their auspices and direct financing. A larger number of films were those that they merely distributed; in other words, movies bought or brokered from filmmakers independent of AIP and then shepherded to theaters through their network of contacts.]
This tradition of unexpected quality began in the company’s earliest days, via their association with the young but equally parsimonious Roger Corman. Corman eventually became a decent director, although I wouldn’t call him much more than that. His true genius, and I use that word advisedly, was in locating and surrounding himself with people who were both extremely talented and willing to work their asses off for peanuts just because they really wanted to make movies. Working for Corman, both as a director and later as a producer, was akin to going through military boot camp. In either case, the only people who survived the process were the ones who were really motivated to be there. Dilatants and divas were quickly weeded out.
Corman’s eye for talent was legendary, and justly so. However, and in a somewhat counterintuitive manner, I think his movies were so consistently and atypically good precisely because he was so focused on the dollar. Corman would use the rattiest sets and costumes if it saved five bucks. On the other hand, he never minded making a film better if it were in ways that cost absolutely no money, such as good writing, a sly sense of humor or a stock company of decent actors.
As long as such niceties never, ever impacted his, shall we say, streamlined shooting schedules and *cough* somewhat modest budgets, he was fine with them. By so completely disparaging the notion of ‘production values’ as ultimately unimportant, in an odd way Corman was able to focus on getting smart and motivated people to go to work. From there he allowed the results to sort themselves out.
That’s why he could gather all his buddies together and whip out a whimsical minor masterpiece like the original Little Shop of Horrors in literally two days and for an insanely low $30,000. In doing so, they not only made a pretty good and quite funny film, but created a framework sturdy enough to support both an long running off-Broadway musical and a film adaptation of the latter that, with a $30,000,000 budget, cost one thousand times what Corman’s film did.*
[*Fittingly, there was another big difference between the two films. Corman's made money—indeed, with that budget, how could it not?—while the lush and to be fair extremely good musical lost millions.]
Unlike most filmmakers, it seemed entirely natural that Corman would give up being a director to become an Arkoff-like producer. Having hit his artistic peak with the AIP-produced Poe films, and then dabbled with directing for the big studios, there was nowhere else for him to go behind the camera. So he suited up and went where his real abilities lie, which involved squeezing every last nickel until it screamed for mercy.
If this sounds like an essay about Corman, that’s because that’s what I started with. My original intention was to find one actually bad movie Corman had made for AIP, and go with that. My intended subject was The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. I vaguely remembered this as pretty bad, mostly because as a period film about Vikings and sea monsters and such it actually depended on the sort of production values Corman usually spurned.
Instead, to my horror I found that although it indeed remains arguably the worst film Corman made for AIP. (On the other hand, Liz Kingsley makes a pretty compelling case that Corman’s worst was The Beast with a 1,000,000 Eyes.) Even so, by any fair standard it remains better than you’d expect. The cast wasn’t great, but presumably under Corman’s direction the acting was naturalistic, disallowing any humorously purple performances. Well, except in one case, but that was intentional.
Yes, the women were hilariously clean and had nice hair and teeth and make-up. But hell, that would have been true if this was a five million dollar Warner Bros. Production in Technicolor. Even some of the production work was surprisingly decent. There are some good matte paintings in there, and although sets and props (like the full-sized working Viking ship, the acquisition of which I suspect motivated the production in the first place) were probably hand-me-downs from more expensive movies, well, so what? They still looked pretty good.
Having made my way about half-way through the film and with little to show for it, I was forced to throw in the towel and move on. However, this just took me back to square one. Tentral problem remained: Could I find a really, genuinely bad AIP movie to dissect?
The answer was somewhat obvious. If the vast bulk of the movies produced by AIP were pretty good, and even more astoundingly, even the literally hundreds of additional movies merely distributed by AIP were as well, then the mostly likely place to find a loser was at the very beginning of the film’s history, and at the very end of it. As noted, Liz went with the former, picking two films (showoff!) that in fact appeared under the banner of ARC, the company that became AIP a short while later.
For myself, I traveled a quarter century down the line to 1979 and the film that pretty much literally put AIP out of business. Arkoff was running the show at this point, for AIP cofounder James H. Nicholson had passed away in 1972. I don’t know what persuaded him to do so, but Arkoff finally made the mistake that his protégé Roger Corman never did. He decided to challenge the major studios at their own game, and make big budget movies in hopes of big returns. In doing so, another showbiz legend would learn a lesson as old as the time: In the long run, the house always wins.
Note: I haven’t seen Armageddon, a film I imagine Meteor shares a lot of story elements with. The biggest difference between the two, though, is that one of them sucked and lost a ton of money, while the other one (reportedly) sucked but made a ton of money.
We begin, Jabootu bless ‘em, on a black card featuring the familiar circular AI logo. We then open the film proper in space, via a shot of a comet traveling in a stately fashion directly under a fixed camera position. This image is accompanied by the opening credits (Meteor being the comparatively rare film to cite Samuel Z. Arkoff’s name before Sean Connery’s) which themselves come streaking past our view. Thus the film manages to invoke both Star Wars and Superman: the Movie within its first half minute. The only way they could write a bigger check here would be if they superimposed Marlon Brando’s spectral lips up on the screen as he whispered “Rosebud…”
As the credits continue, our hopes for big time Disaster Movie greatness begin to fade. The genre thrived in the ’70s largely based on the thrill inherent to watching, in a de-glamorized aged, the aging stars of Hollywood’s glamour era die in interesting ways. In this way, the disaster movie was the more epic stepchild of a string of popular “old psycho woman” movies of the ’60s, which afforded rather down market work for former leading ladies such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead and Olivia de Havilland.
Although many such stars opted out of such undignified shenanigans (John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn), and others made appearance in such flicks but not in roles in which they themselves perished (Jimmy Stewart), many major stars went where the lucre was, especially from the genre’s main man, director/producer Irwin Allen. William Holden, Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Shelly Winters, Fred McMurray, Fred Astaire and many other all served as such fodder. (Gregory Peck didn’t join in, though, opting instead to die in the disaster movie-like horror flick The Omen.)
In Meteor, though, such old-school names are all but absent. Henry Fonda is here, playing the President of the United States, but he barely counts. Fonda played an actual part, and died an actual onscreen death, in Irwin Allen’s dizzy anti-classic The Swarm. However, he also made a quick buck by appearing in a hoard of junk during this period, including several similarly lame disaster movies. For a comparatively small sum, filmmakers were thus able add a very big name to the advertising associated with the films, even if Fonda’s highlighted name in the advertising materials promised a lot more than his actual presence generally delivered.
In films like City on Fire, Tentacles, Meteor and Rollercoaster (!), Fonda basically functioned as a very expensive day player. His scenes were usually so self-contained that he often didn’t even interact with the rest of the main cast. This allowed filmmakers to shoot his scenes in very quick order, often on one or two conjoined sets, and later intersperse those scenes throughout the film. As such, Fonda’s general role in these pictures was as an on-looker.
For his part, Connery was a pretty traditional choice of a big name but younger actor (Gene Hackman in Poseidon Adventure, George C. Scott in The Hindenburg, Richard Harrison in Cassandra Crossing, Newman and McQueen in Towering Inferno, Michael Caine in The Swarm, etc.) who played the respective movie’s more involved lead character. The older folk, as noted, tended to be sacrificed, but these guys generally made it through.
Even Connery didn’t count as a Paul Newman or anything. Connery continued to ride the good will generated by his having played the most iconic James Bond, even if he himself increasingly came to disdain the role. However, since abandoning the part (for the most part) after 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever, it’s amazing how few really major films there are in Connery’s filmography. While there aren’t a lot of Zardozes, there aren’t a whole bunch of The Man Who Would Be Kings, either. So Connery was still a big name, and a definite headliner, but not necessarily a very top rank, A-list star.
And after Connery, the rest of Meteor’s ’star’ cast proves pretty weak tea. The next name to appear is that of the ill-fated Natalie Wood. Ms. Wood herself had once been one of Hollywood’s brightest. She started as a busy, much beloved and eminently adorable child star in movies like 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street. Orson Welles once played opposite her when she was but seven. Decades later Welles described her as having been “so good, she was terrifying.”
Unlike most of her child peers, Ms. Wood beat the odds and made a markedly successful transition to adult acting work. At the tender age of 16 she starred opposite James Dean in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause. Six years later she landed her most iconic role as Maria in the incredibly popular Best Picture winner West Side Story. By the age of 25, Ms. Wood had already been thrice nominated for acting Oscars.
By 1979, though, the bloom was definitely off the rose. Ms. Wood continued to be fairly popular throughout the ’60s, but in the ’70s more or less entered semi-retirement. Indeed, previous to Meteor she had appeared in only one theatrical film during the previous ten years, and that was the enjoyable but minor private eye pastiche Peeper (1975) opposite Michael Caine. Other than that she spent the decade doing a smattering of television work. In other words, Ms. Wood’s name on the marquee was not exactly likely to draw in the kids who made Jaws and Star Wars huge hits.
Even so, the period immediately following Meteor indicates Ms. Wood was ready for regular film work again. In 1980 she starred in The Last Married Couple in America, a romantic comedy opposite George Segal. She then began work on a fairly high profile sci-fi picture called Brainstorm opposite Christopher Walken. Indeed, she had two more projects lined up after that. Brainstorm, however, sadly proved her last movie.
In the midst of production on that picture in 1981, Ms. Wood died in a horrible drowning accident. She was 43. This left the makers of the largely, but not entirely, completed Brainstorm in a fix. It was a couple of years before they managed to shape what footage they had into a quickly aborted release.
Back to the credits. So basically we open with Sam Arkoff, move rapidly up the ladder to Sean Connery, followed by the still well-known Natalie Wood. And then flying past the camera come the names of…Karl Malden and Brian Keith. These are not monikers that likely induced gasps of excitement from theater crowds. Both men had done film work, but by this point were basically known as TV actors. However, we do get a credit noting said thespians are appearing “in a Sandy Howard/Garbriel Katzka Sir Run Run Shaw Presentation.” So there’s that working for us.
Hilariously, if fittingly, given Arkoff’s history, we then move on to an Unseen Narrator (he sounds like he’s imitating Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s opening spiel from 1953’s The War of the Worlds) declaiming stuff about comets over shots of stars and galaxies and such. These include a shot of a huge fireball blossoming right in the middle of space, although I’m not exactly sure how that would work. In any case, this opening thus evokes nearly every cheapie sci-fi flick of the ’50s. Not how I’d start my hugely budgeted ’70s epic, but there you go.
“At first comets terrified Man,” the Narrator explains. “He thought they were signals of impending catastrophe.” And for movie ticket buyers in 1979, these omens proved entirely correct. (Thank you, ladies and germs! I’m here all week.)
Eventually, however, Man—so the Narrator informs us—became comfortable with these celestial visitors. Then we cut to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Narrator draws our particular attention to the massive Orpheus, “20 miles in diameter, and undisturbed for countless generations. Until now….” And, cue music blare and title card.
Following this, we then get a weird animated image of a racing yacht seemingly sailing across the starscape. This transitions to a shot of a real boat sailing upon normal waters. Further names appear over shots of this craft plying the briny deep, and these mostly continue to be TV actors: Martin Landau, Richard Dysart, Joseph Campanella. I mention this because there used to be a much bigger ‘caste’ difference—ha ha!—between TV and movie actors than there is now.
There are a few actual film actors mixed in there as well. Well known Brit character actor Trevor Howard (“as Sir Michael Hughes”) is on hand to class up the joint a little. And the last such credit, naturally, reads “and HENRY FONDA as The President.” Even so, hardcore b-movie fans might want to peel an eye for brief appearances by Bibi Besch and Sybil Danning (as “Swiss Girl Skier”). Sadly, however, this elite audience demographic wasn’t robust enough back in the day to ensure the film a profit.
Anyway, the yacht is being steered by none other than scientist Dr. Paul Bradley (Sean Connery). However, his hopes for racing glory are cut short when his craft is intercepted by a Coast Guard patrol. “We’ve got orders from NASA” (!) a fellow explains via megaphone. Who knew NASA had such authority over the Coast Guard? NASA’s orders are to grab Bradley and get him on a “special flight to Houston.” Bradley proves a surly cuss, but after the cutter threatens to cut across his bow he angrily heaves to.
This, a card informs us (using the jagged font employed for the movie’s title), occurs on “Monday.” And so the traditional Time Element is started. Bradley later asks a Coast Guard guy if he really would have cut in front of his bow. The fellow replies that he would have, and Bradley snarls, “Then I would have rammed you!” (!!!) The guy calmly replies, “And gone straight to the bottom, sir.” Bradley reacts to this statement by thrusting his head out the window of his departing car and assuming an irate “Why, you!” expression. This struck me as an odd reaction. You’d have to think that in any ramming contest, a racing yacht would probably lose to a Coast Guard patrol boat.
Cut to NASA HQ in Houston. Bradley enters an office and banters with a secretary, which may be a wink at his scenes with Moneypenny in the Bond films. However, his sour disposition returns when he sees his own packed travel bag sitting in a nearby chair. A quick line soon establishes (and I must admit I actually groaned when I heard this) that the bag was provided on request by…wait for it…Bradley’s inevitable Estranged Wife, Helen.
The apparently permanently piqued Bradley then enters the inner office of NASA official Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden), a man he once worked for. (As I detailed in my 10.5 review, “Everyone is connected.”) Also on hand is General Easton (Joe Campanella). Sherwood attempts to placate the ornery Bradley with a tale told in flashback form.
Recently, a rogue comet (the one seen at the beginning of the film) was detected heading towards the previously cited asteroid field. Luckily, a manned Mars probe was on hand. Sherwood diverted it from its planned mission to place itself in viewing distance of Orpheus and report on the comet’s doings. Standing by in the NASA Control Room during all this is Gen. Easton, as his son just happens to be commanding the probe. (Everyone is connected.)
You don’t exactly have to be Nostradamus to figure out that comet hits Orpheus and blasts in into smaller, but still sizable, chunks. One particular fragment, naturally, takes out the probe in a welter of truly bad special effects. Given the film’s budget they must have spent a batch of money on the f/x work. Even so, audiences fresh from Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind could not have reacted to the sequence’s comically inept matte and composite shots with overmuch kindness.*
“Help! Our spacecraft is being destroyed by a meteoroid! And this is exactly what such a thing would look like!”
[*On the other hand, the physical model work is pretty elaborate—this being before practical CGI—and the spacecraft are really meant to look logically designed rather than 'cool.' The fact remains, though, that some of the matte shots are just hideous.]
The destruction of the Probe isn’t the half of it. One giant chunk of Orpheus, along with several large ’splinters,’ survived. These, naturally enough, are now on a direct collision course with Earth.
For his part, Easton bears up to the tale with the expected stiff upper lip. I have to admit, I found myself amusedly mulling the possibility that Sherwood had Easton on hand to negate Bradley’s apparently natural surliness. It’s surely bad form to bitch about stuff when you’re sitting opposite a man who a few days earlier had listened to his son being pulverized to space dust.
Anyway, there’s to be a meeting in Washington with the Secretary of State (Richard Dysart) and various bigwigs. Bradley angrily refers to Project Hercules, and Sherwood agrees, saying that this is why he wants Bradley to attend the meeting too. He reluctantly agrees, and Sherwood explains how all the arrangements for his flight and lodging have already been made. “Why don’t you stick a broom up my ass?” Bradley snarls as he leaves. “I could sweep the carpet on the way out!” That’s not up there with Connery’s classic threat from Just Cause, “I’m going to play your ass like a banjo,” but it’s pretty good.
We cut to Bradley arriving at his hotel room, which sports a typically hideous ’70s paisley bedspread. Inside he finds a note from Helen, and sighing, calls her. Here we learn that she is played by Bibi Besch and not Natalie Wood, so apparently reconciliation is not in the cards. They chat, you know, like folks do, and we learn that she obviously still has feelings for him, and that they have kids, and anyway get to know them as people, so that we care. Man, I’m so invested in these characters now I could spit.
By the way, as it turns out, this is Besch’s only scene. So, you know, why even bother?
In a tiresomely arty shot, we transition from the room’s abstract, spaceship-like light fixture to the armed space platform Hercules. Bradley pictures this in his head (I guess), and also Orpheus as it tumbles through space. The musical score booms over these images, thus allowing us to figure out that they’re exciting.
The next morning we get a card reading “Tuesday,” or five days before Orpheus will collide with the Earth. Bradley drives through Washington for the aforementioned meeting. However, when he arrives at the designated room, he learns that he is meeting solely with Sherwood. This scene is pretty pointless, except that it allows the two to yell at each other a lot—it’s called ‘dramatic tension,’ folks—while they also lay out Bradley’s backstory for audience enlightenment.
Sam Arkoff reads over the box office reports for Meteor’s opening weekend.
Bradley, we learn, left NASA five years ago. He had worked on Hercules, a highly secret space platform armed with nuclear missiles. Said warheads were intended to protect Earth from exactly the threat that Orpheus now poses. Not to shock the hell out of you, but Hercules was *gasp* co-opted by military Neanderthals and is now instead pointing its missiles at the Russkies. Naturally, Bradley was shocked and outraged by this eee-vil misuse of his project, and he resigned.
The solution seems simple enough: Reorient Hercules and fire its missiles at the approaching Orpheus. The problem is the U.S. has never revealed Hercules’ existence,* since it violates every nuclear arms treaty the government has every signed. Rather than expose the government to International derision and ridicule, many would rather take the chance that Orpheus will miss the Earth and just fly on past.
[*Really? The U.S. built a gigantic space platform, one orbiting the planet, and loaded with a dozen nuclear missiles, and nobody ever noticed?]
Cut to Mother Russia, where the film reveals its entirely predictable and ham-fisted moral equivalency. For here we meet Bradley’s counterpart, Dr. Alex Dubov, although as played by Brian Keith he is inevitably a big, friendly Russian bear of a man. You can begin the clock now on how long it takes for him to call somebody “tovarich” and be seen swigging vodka.
Dubov is himself explaining the facts about Orpheus to his own collection of humorless government drones. By the way, if you’re wondering if they are walking around outside in the snow while wearing big fur hats, well, yes. Yes, they are. “It would take our friend up there two seconds to turn half of Russia into one huge Siberia,” Dubov asserts. Bonus points for Keith, by the way, for actually performing his role in Russian. He was already fluent in the language, which no doubt helped him get cast here.
Dubov proves that Scientific Integrity knows no borders when he suggests to his colleagues that they try to contact NASA. Meanwhile, his government minder is informing his fellows that such contact must be prevented until the Chairman makes a decision. At this point we cut to the aforementioned meeting in Washington. Exactly like Dubov’s minders, the Secretary of State is ordering that no one reach out to the Soviets until the President says to do so. See, there’s really no difference between their politicians and military and ours. Nor in the scientists, either, who are predictably the only ones enlightened enough to actually place a premium on, you know, saving the Earth.
This facet of things starts getting beat to death at this point. Among those in attendance is the man who seized Hercules in the first place, General Adlon. The film makes a half-hearted stab to avoid casting Adlon as an outright villain, by having Sherwood earlier describe him as “a good man, technically, but he’s two dimensional.” (??)
Any such nuance is immediately belayed, however, when we actually meet Adlon. He is played by Martin Landau going full tilt boogie with his trademark Creepy Spaz routine. Moreover, he is made to spout a completely ridiculous position, which is that they can’t reveal Hercules’ existence because then the international community would call us liars just because, you know, we’ve been lying.
In contrast to Adlon’s mendacity, Bradley is all Righteous Fury and Sherwood all Reason & Humanity. After this little bit of Kabuki theater plays out, the Secretary breaks up the meeting and leaves to consult with the President. Bradley and Sherwood head over to a nearby bar where they await the President’s decision. A regular bar because, you know, except for being smarter than everyone else in the room they’re just average joes.
In any case, the cat’s out of the bag. The bar’s TV is showing a BBC report detailing how British astronomers have caught sight of the approaching Orpheus. Gee, who would have thought anyone would notice that? The reporter explains what a dire threat Orpheus may pose, but the crowd yells for the bartender to switch over to a football game. I guess Bradley and Sherwood really are smarter than everyone else in the room.
Sherwood begins this boring anecdote about how he snuck his son to get emergency medical care in order to get around his fretful wife’s objections. In the end, despite her fears (“she can’t stand the thought of an operation”), she was glad. Apparently this is Sherwood’s way of telling Bradley that, if it comes to it, he will (somehow) sneak Bradley into Hercules Control so that he can use it against Orpheus. This idea is so retarded that the script doesn’t go in that direction, but please, how the hell would that work?
Sherwood gets a call, and he and Bradley leave to confer with The President (Henry Fonda), along with the Secretary of State and Gen. Adlon. Being the sort of movie this is, they never bother giving Fonda’s character a name, because, you know, he’s just The President. Fonda thus actually interacts with some of the main cast members here, which is more than he does in a lot of other films he made at the time. Even so, I suspect his scenes were again designed to be shot in as short a time period as possible.
“You’re paying me in cash, right? No checks. That was the deal!”
I can only wonder what Fonda thought about the whole Hercules angle. He had fifteen years earlier used a lot of his personal muscle to get Fail-Safe (1964) made, in which he played a President facing a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union.* Unsurprisingly, this was a big message piece about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Given this, you have to think it didn’t exactly please him to now play the President in a movie about using nuclear arms to save the Earth. I think this more than anything else shows that Fonda was all about the paychecks at this point in his career.
[*It was to Fonda's misfortune that Fail-Safe hit theaters nine months after Stanley Kubrick's nearly identically plotted black comedy Dr. Strangelove came out. Indeed, both films were released by Columbia Studios, which seems pretty stupid. In any case, Fonda's entirely earnest film couldn't hope to compete against Kubrick's darkly comic sensibility, one that somehow seemed a much more appropriate approach to the issue at hand.]
Sadly, there’s more bad news. Even the somewhat smaller Orpheus is still too massive to be destroyed by Hercules’ missiles. Sherwood asks The President to confirm that the Soviets their own secret weapons platform, and of course they do. The only way to destroy the meteor is to use the missiles from both platforms in conjunction. After all, otherwise we in the audience wouldn’t learn a lesson about how people have got to work together to save this crazy old world of ours. (Of course, currently there is no more Soviet Union, so I guess we’d be screwed.)
The President listens to the facts and, to the displeasure of Gen. Adlon, agrees to use Hercules. He moreover puts Bradley in charge of the operation, thus exactly paralleling how Michael Caine’s scientist is given authority over suspicious military man Richard Widmark in The Swarm. We cut to a press conference. The President reveals Hercules’ existence, but under the guise of it being solely designed to destroy dangerous meteors.*
[*This movie must have driven scientifically minded nerds nuts. First of all, before a meteor enters a planet's atmosphere, it's technically a meteoroid. However, meteoroids are by definition fairly small. Given Orpheus' gigantic size, the proper designation should still be asteroid, but I guess they didn't think that made as good of a movie title. Still, the word 'meteor' continues to be so misused throughout the film.]
Cut to the Kremlin, where Soviet muckamucks are also watching the conference. In an attempt to force their hands, The President reveals that the Soviets also have built their own entirely peaceful armed space platform. He announces he will be asking them to join with the U.S. to deal with the current problem. Following the conference The Chairman turns to his underlings, including Dr. Dubov. “The Americans have elected an alchemist,” The Chairman observes. “He can turn hypocrisy into diplomacy.”
He explains that they will pursue discussions on the matter, but cautions that these are to remain only discussions. Dubov, of course, is as jaundiced about such thinking as Bradley and Sherwood on the other side. Then, as The Chairman predicted, the Hotline immediately rings with a call from The President.
“Wednesday” We cut to a shot of New York, which naturally includes the now creepy (especially in context of this film) World Trade Towers. Bradley and Sherwood arrive in the lobby of the fabulous AT&T Building. It turns out that the nation’s most super-secretest and important emergency response center is located directly below. Bradley is askance upon hearing this, but Sherwood proffers the notion (if not in so many words) that putting it under our busiest [and hence most likely to be attacked] city is so moronic that it’s brilliant. You see this sort of thinking in movies all the time, and hopefully it’s mainly confined to them. Moreover, since they’re now planning to reveal the entire set-up to a team of Soviets, well, I hope they have a spare one somewhere.
As you’d assume, we’re talking a big underground control center here, of that sort that must have felt like home to Connery after all those Bond movies. They meet with Adlon, who’s still kind of bitchy. He immediately complains about the idea of letting the Russians into their most top-secret emergency control center,* which naturally the film treats purely as an indication of his sadly limited, two-dimensional thinking. I notice, though, that the Soviets aren’t throwing open the doors of their main command center.
“And it was only after we’d constructed all this that we were like, ‘Dude, we totally forgot to save any money for the special effects stuff!‘”
[*The same thing happens when Peter Sellers' President invites the Russian ambassador into The War Room in Dr. Strangelove. One reason that movie remains so relevant today is that despite having similar complaints lodged by a forthrightly buffoonish counterpart to Adlon, said ambassador does in fact spend his time trying to take spy pictures of the set-up, even in the face of an imminent nuclear holocaust that threatens to destroy both countries. Needless to say, such a jaundiced view of things will not be on display here.]
In the Center, Bradley gets a video call from Sir Michael (Trevor Howard), presumably the Brit astronomer who somehow managed to notice Orpheus barreling towards the planet. Connery asks for an update on the asteroid’s progress, I guess because we don’t have any observatories here in the United States. Sir Michael informs him that some smaller but still devastating splinters of the original Orpheus will hit in 24 hours, with the main asteroid still set to hit in three days.
That evening the Russian delegation arrives in Washington, lead by Dubov and his pert interpreter, Tatiana Nikolaevna Donskaya (Natalie Wood, natch). Because, you know, that’s the sort of name those wacky Russians have. And so, a mere thirty-six minutes into the picture, we finally meet our female lead. Sherwood is on hand to greet them, and presumably to take them to New York.
”He said he knew who we were by our huge fur hats.”
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