Hammer Films actually took the trouble of clearing the rights to a number of
classic Universal monsters, but the one they never got around to adapting was
the Invisible Man. The 1958 Invisible Man TV series is sort of the
closest thing to a Hammer Invisible Man, even though it isn’t gothic, or even
horror. Instead, it placed an invisible scientist (the good guy for a change)
in a Cold War espionage context, but it regularly co-starred familiar Hammer
players, like Michael Ripper and Thorley Walters. Even the voice of the
Invisible Man, Tim Turner, had a Hammer connection as the future narrator of The
Mummy’s Shroud. The half-hour format was way too short for the genre, but
it is still fun to watch an Invisible Man battle Communists, especially
villainous Anton Diffring and Andre Morell in two of the better episodes (which
release in yet another DVD-set this Tuesday).
“The
Prize” (S2 E4, directed by Quentin Lawrence and written by Ian Stuart Black)
was freshly ripped from the headlines, taking transparent inspiration from the
Nobel Prize that was awarded to Boris Pasternak, before the Soviets browbeat him
into declining it, just less than a year before the episode originally aired. In
this case, it is dissident author Tania Roskov (played by Swedish thesp Mai Zetterling)
who intended to accept a Nobel-like prize in Europe, but was intercepted by the
sadistic secret police officer Gunzi at the border.
You
know who else is picking up an award for science at the Nobel-like gala? That’s
right, invisible Dr. Peter Brady. Sure, he is still working on reversing the
invisibility process, but he achieved something pretty amazing. Distressed by
Roskov’s plight, Brady decides to sneak into the unnamed but presumably Baltic
nation to rescue her.
Sure, there were creepy aliens inside those tin cans, but before Next Gen gave
us the Borg, nothing better represented our fears of technology’s dehumanizing influence
than the Daleks. Fortunately, Doctor Who was there to stop their ambitions for
galactic domination, even when he wasn’t strictly speaking Gallifreyan.
Evidently, the two mid-1960s Doctor Who movies have been somehow retconned into
the extended universe, but they have always been considered canonically suspect,
since their Doctor is an Earthling who actually calls himself “Dr. Who.” On the
plus side, he was played by Peter Cushing and he reliably foiled the Daleks.
Both Amicus Doctor Who films air tonight on TCM, but the second, Gordon Flemyng’s
Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. is by far the superior film.
After
saving a foreign planet from the Daleks in the first film, the Doctor touches
down in Swinging Sixties London just long enough to pick up police constable
Tom Campbell after he is knocked cold by a gang of armed robbers. When he comes
too, the Tardis has traveled forward to the year 2150, which much to the Doctor’s
distress, Earth has been temporarily been conquered by the very same Daleks.
It
takes some doing, but the Doctor’s niece Louise and his granddaughter Susan convince
the copper they really have traveled forward in time. Of course, the metal megalomaniacal
Daleks are quite persuasive. Unfortunately, the travelers become barricaded
from the Tardis during a scouting trip, forcing them to take refuge with the
underground human resistance. After the Doctor and Campbell are captured and
escape, the time-travelers will be forced by circumstances to split up, but all
roads seem to lead to a mysterious mine, where the Daleks are implementing their
evil planetary scheme.
The
first Peter Cushing Doctor Who (Doctors Who and the Daleks) movie is
jokier and skews much younger as a result. However, the visual impact of bombed
out London in Earth 2150 is quite striking. Clearly, the look of the post-apocalyptic
city was inspired by scenes of destruction wrought by the Blitz during the
Battle of London, memories of which would have still been vivid for many
viewers in 1966.
The
narrative is also more effectively structured, breaking apart the Doctor and
his companions. The paring of the protective Wyler, a crusty old resistance activist,
with young Susan is especially effective. Ironically, this is something of a case
of necessity being the mother of invention, since illness forced Cushing to
curtail his work on Earth 2150.
