Fred Wilcox's Forbidden Planet (1956)

Screened with:
Chuck Jones' "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century" (1953)

Your Humble Commentator remembers being ten years old, some time ago, sitting at home on summer Sunday afternoons in his basement watching classic sci-fi B-movies on his family’s black and white TV: Them, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man. All great; all part of his current video collection. But the best of them all? That would be Fred Wilcox’s 1950s space epic Forbidden Planet. Perhaps that’s because the screenplay was taken from a script by some guy named Will Shakespeare.

Wait, you think, Shakespeare never had robots or spaceships or Anne Francis in a really short skirt in any of his plays! Well, no. But Forbidden Planet falls into a category that Shakespeare-on-Film critics call an “unfaithful pop culture adaptation.” That means it dumps Shakespeare’s language, borrows the plot of one of his plays and reuses it in a genre film more in keeping with the tastes of modern film-goers. Hence Taming of the Shrew can become a teen sex comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You or Macbeth can become a foul-mouthed mafia flick like Men of Respect or Hamlet can become an animated morality tale like The Lion King. (Yes it is. Yes it IS.)

So what? Watching this 1956 film you’ll probably notice more parallels to the not-too-distant cultural happening known as Star Trek than the vague allusions to Prospero (Morbius), Miranda (Altaira), Ferdinand (Commander Adams), and Caliban (Robby the Robot). And reveling in the B-movie effects and cheesy ray guns and flying saucer vision of space travel and terrifying monster will no doubt drive out any thoughts of Forbidden Planet as a cultural lens through which we can reflect on Shakespeare and Captain Kirk at the same time. Yet what we have here is a movie that aspires to the same cultural greatness – an entertaining, swashbuckling tale that rises above the common B-movie fare by singing a captivating song not of the aforementioned accoutrements of Eisenhower-era sci-fi films but of the more complex elements of human frailty and pride. Will you hear it? Good, for “the hour’s now come; the very minute bids thee ope thine ear. Obey and be attentive.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser