The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) — It's a Vlad, Vlad, Vlad, Vlad world

Ah, the good old days of the Cold War. Even though the planet's two most powerful adversaries threatened to bring everyone to nuclear annihilation, from our perspective today those sure look like simpler, purer times. At least it's difficult to imagine today's international tensions being lampooned by a dozen familiar character actors in a middlebrow comedy about enemy soldiers accidentally stranded in an apple-pie American town.

Then again, already this summer we had those strange few weeks in the news, something about deep-cover Russian spies out to make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel in suburban humdrum America. Of course, the news cycle boosted the made-for-reality-TV cuteness of Anna Chapman (rather, "Anna Chapman"), who's now back in Mother Russia where her Clairol Girl features accompanied her inherent ugliness in a hero's welcome. Still, if Firefly/Serenity's Jewel Staite plays her in the inevitable TV movie, maybe a greater international good has been served.

Meanwhile, the self-replicating crazy-makers drill their wells even deeper by telling us that foreign Islamist terrorists are sneaking into Real America by collaborating with Mexican drug cartels, as if we're being urged to imagine Blofeld and SPECTRE teaming up with Al Pacino's Tony Montana, probably with a bit of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for extra excitement.

And jeez, Edith, we just watched, eyes rolling, the Breitbart-Sherrod controversy. Because the universe has a keen sense of irony, that little imbroglio arrived gasoline-hosed by the Fox News Birth(ers) of a Nation Power Hour during recognition of To Kill a Mockingbird's 50th anniversary. Plus, hordes of invading American Muslims, like dirty Commies in the days of yore, apparently need to be refudiated here in the land of the free. Oh, and look — it's becoming clear that Vietnam more and more shares a big, porous border with Afghanistan (see History, doomed to repeat it).

I wonder: Will the big take-away from the year 2010 be how often we've looked back to the 1960s and sighed heavily? The times they are rewindin'? Perhaps we can find comfort in the apostle Paul, who was there too and once wrote:

Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland,
But I think it's all overdone.
Exaggerating this and exaggerating that,
They don't have no fun.

These are, as Shakespeare might put it, tragical-comical-historical times, and you can decide for yourself what order those words should come in.

It can be instructive, or at least perspective-adjusting, or maybe just amusing, to let movies take us back in time a few decades to see that the more things change, the more some people, well, not so much. (Yeah, I know: I similarly hobbyhorsed Mockingbird and Blazing Saddles recently too. I'm like a dog with a bone that way.)

Therein lies my urge to revisit 1966's The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.

This is one I caught on Sunday afternoon TV quite often as a '70s kid, and even then I knew I was watching something from some vague "before" time. Still, I remember finding it humorous and fun. Every time I see Alan Arkin in anything, which isn't often enough these days, I flash back to enjoying him first here in the role that made the erstwhile Second City alum and Broadway actor a movie star. Indeed, Arkin, as the hapless lieutenant charged with getting his beached crewmates back home safe and sound — and spouting authentic Russian learned for the film — is worth the viewing all by himself. And back then, with my nascent critical eye, I could tell that this was a well-made piece of funny business; at least in my memories it has maintained a good-looking, A-list production gloss.

But does it hold up today, 44 years later? Like two others from 1966 I've written about here, Our Man Flint and Fantastic Voyage, the answer is a qualified yes, though this one — in its spoofing of stepping-on-rakes paranoia and "there be foreigners!" saber-rattling — is more tuned to the phobias of our times.



After a Soviet submarine runs aground near a Norman Rockwell New England coastal village, nine sailors (led by Arkin) venture ashore ("we are of course Norwegians") to quietly borrow a motor boat for a tug back to sea.

Naturally, it isn't long before misunderstandings on both sides escalate the incident and the "Russian invasion" boils over to potential cataclysm.

The running hither-and-thither townspeople include a vacationing New York writer (Carl Reiner in the longest sustained Jimmy Stewart impression on record) and his wife Eva Marie Saint. Young Sheldon Collins plays their son Pete as the same trigger-happy little shit be played in the following year's The President's Analyst.

Giving the film a balancing world-weary deadpan is Brian Keith as the straight-faced police chief. His placid existence receives an unwelcome kick from Paul Ford (The Music Man) as the VFW hawk out to secure the borders and defeat the invading Red legions. Assisting him is Jonathan Winters as, pretty much, Jonathan Winters. Theodore Bikel appears briefly as the Russian captain.

And it wouldn't be Hollywood without a syrupy romance between the Pretty American Girl (Andrea Dromm) and the Handsome Good-Hearted Russian Lad (John Phillip Law), with both actors making their Hollywood debuts.

Comely, sunny-haired Dromm caught my attention back in the day, looking for all the world like a Beach Boys song given form and flesh. I knew her best from TV reruns of her other 1966 role: "Yeoman Smith" in the second pilot episode of Star Trek. She spoke only one line ("The name's Smith, sir"), but she looked mighty cute there on the Enterprise bridge. I've read that Dromm was offered a choice between an ongoing role in the still-unproven TV series and a lead part in this big Hollywood movie. Choosing the movie was the obvious best move at the time, though she has said that if she'd known what an enduring hit Star Trek would become, she might have chosen differently. As it is, you probably don't have to Google hard to find Yeoman Smith fanfic steaming up pixels somewhere.

At 6'5" with a blue-eyed boyishness, it's only natural that Law went on to become a mid-list movie and TV sex symbol. Genre-film cognoscenti salute his presence in Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik! ('68), as the blind guardian angel Pygar kinking it up with Jane Fonda in Barbarella (also '68), as Snoopy's arch nemesis the Red Baron in Roger Corman's Von Richtofen and Brown ('70), and as the stout-hearted sailor-adventurer confronting nifty Ray Harryhausen creations in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad ('73).

Their romance is the vessel from which the movie's Make Love, Not War oils are poured, as in the sugary charm of their Capulet-Montague seaside dialogue:

Alexei: "In Union of Soviet, when I am only young boy, many are saying, Americanski are bad people, they will attack Russia. So all mistrust American. But I think that I do not mistrust American... not really sinceriously. I wish not to hate... anybody! [He chucks a stone into the sea] This make good reason to you, Alison Palmer?"

Alison: "Well, of course it does. It doesn't make sense to hate people. It's such a waste of time."

Beyond Arkin's performance, what saves The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming from being just a cloying, farcical fossil is a clever screenplay by William Rose (The Ladykillers, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) and director Norman Jewison's steady hand on the tiller.

The even-handed script parades no simplistic evil empires or Old Glory platitudes. Instead it mines the nervousness and paranoia on both sides, and the climax comes with townsfolk and submariners literally staring down each other's gun barrels — a tidy little metaphor for the Cold War. The crisis' contrived resolution may leave you either wiping a tear or rolling your eyes (as if those are mutually exclusive), with World War III narrowly averted by good ol' hands-across-the-water pluck.

Pub Trivia Contest points: Rose based his screenplay on a 1961 novel, The Off-Islanders, written by Nathaniel Benchley. Later, Nathaniel's son Peter found his own way in life by writing the novel Jaws, which Steven Spielberg turned into another little look-what-showed-up-on-the-beach movie you might have heard of.

It's easy to see why The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was welcomed as a warm and affirming counterpoint to its darker cinematic cousins such as Fail-Safe. It skewers hawkish reactionism and mob militancy, and its sympathetic portrayal of the beached Russians — not to mention the panicky buffoonery of the Americans — probably gave the more rabid Commie-haters conniptions.

It was popular in its day and praised by contemporary critics, with Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Arkin), Editing (future director Hal Ashby), and Adapted Screenplay. It won the Golden Globes for Best Musical/Comedy and Best Actor (Arkin), with noms for Best Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer (both Arkin and Law).

Although it's frozen in amber now, it remains an amusing (if dated and overlong) slice of the 1960s. To Boomers above a certain age it's a fondly remembered piece of fluffy nostalgia. For everyone else it's an entertaining-enough time portal to another epoch. DVD film-fest this one with Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove for a snapshot of how a previous generation's fears played out in popular culture.

In 44 years, what comedies will they be making about us and our time? I have some ideas....

Music: The Red Elvises, "Tchaikovsky"
Near at hand: An origami globe built from intersecting Hearts suit playing cards.

'Our Man Flint' (1966) & 'In Like Flint' (1967) — double-naught spoofs

My recent post about The President's Analyst gave me a jones for more James Coburn, and for days I was unable to shake it. Succumbing, I looked at the DVD shelves here and was surprised by how many Coburnpalooza opportunities I have available: The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Charade, The Americanization of Emily, and others. All great and worthy gotta-haves for a movie buff, to be sure. I just hadn't noticed before how well Mr. Coburn and his Cheshire Cat teeth are represented in co-starring positions in my Movie Room.

Given that I was looking toward revisiting Coburn in a front-and-center starring role (my hand hovered over Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, but I have to preset my head for Peckinpah), and given that The President's Analyst shares a dry martini shaker with the spy-movie parodies of its era, my Coburnmania choices were obvious: Our Man Flint and In Like Flint — two lesser films compared to those others, but a pair that benefit mightily by headlining Coburn in a star-making role that shows off his flair for charismatic humor as well as tough-guy cool. They're a twin set of James Bond spoofs that still manage to guilty-pleasure me (well, one of them does at least) while offering no pretense of being, say, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, or Charade, or even Young Guns II.

By the time of the fourth Bond film, 1965's Thunderball, the 007 spy craze had exploded across pop culture, spattering the walls with poison blow-dart ink pens and steely-eyed, ultra-virile heroes. Perhaps the Cold War fantasy adventures of "real men" ruggedly vanquishing godless Commies and other evil empires, all while bedding improbably beautiful women, were a meat-eating guy's antacid against the discomforting reflux from real global tensions — not to mention home-grown indigestion embodied by the Beatles, antiwar protests, and the Women's Movement.

Plus, utilizing the Cold War for entertainment sure simplified things for moviegoers and TV-watchers. Head-throbbingly complex geopolitical currents were reduced to sprightly three-act action dramas that could be wrapped up before the closing credits rolled. Guns, gadgets, and girls were the primary colors of the comic-book spy universe.

Certainly there were serious-minded Bond imitators, such as the Harry Palmer series starring Michael Caine. But someone was bound to play the genre for laughs, and in short order the Bond spoofs outnumbered the Bond movies themselves. In fact, the '67 film version of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit the screen (with all the elegance of a paintball tournament) as a clowned-up comedy nearly 40 years before Daniel Craig got a case of the Vespers. Cocktail crooner Dean Martin starred in four mixed efforts featuring soused secret agent Matt Helm.

Even the women were allowed to flash their double-Os, such as Raquel Welch in 1967's Fathom ("the world's most uncovered undercover agent," natch) and Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise ('66). Fresh-faced Andrea Dromm (The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming) starred as a secret agent and danced "the Shark" alongside Troy Donahue in 1967's Come Spy With Me, but the movie bombed so thoroughly it has yet to appear on home video.

On TV, The Beverly Hillbillies' Jethro Bodine figured that being a "double-naught spy"  guaranteed a life of "all that fightin' and lovin'," whee-doggie.

Then as now, a Hollywood trend didn't end until it was well past tired, and titles such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, both starring our beloved Vincent Price plus his army of lethal fembots, made sure that we all tired quite thoroughly.

More recently (2006 and 2009) we get the two French "OSS 117" spy-film spoofs directed by Michel Hazanavicius and starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. These critical and box office successes drip with exacting 1950s-'60s period "look and feel" and float on Sean Connery look-alike Dujardin's natural charm as a clueless James Bond-Inspector Clouseau hybrid. Together Hazanavicius, Dujardin, and Bejo went on to international acclaim with 2011's The Artist.

The best of the spy-spoof bunch was 1966's Our Man Flint, a pop lampoon that remains a hyper-kitschy and entertaining time capsule. It helped make Coburn a full-fledged star as a Bond surrogate played so straight you could shave with him. Terrific with this dry, crackling material, Coburn is Derek Flint, ultra-secret agent called in to assist ZOWIE (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage). Silly it is, yet this tongue-way-in-cheek action-comedy garnered favorable reviews and became Fox's third highest grossing film of the year.



Our Man Flint made a shrewd move by sticking to the Bond template. The brilliant and resourceful Flint works alone (although in this case as a playboy free agent rather than as a government company man), follows each clue to the next level, employs superhuman physical and mental prowess, beds gorgeous gals, gets captured, and prevents world domination in an orgy of destruction at the evildoers' secret volcano island. However, instead of being a bozo-nosed vaudeville like the Austin Powers movies, Our Man Flint out-Bonds the Bond films by respectfully retooling the familiar Bond elements and then turning the knob to 11.

Our hero, having just returned from teaching ballet at Moscow's Bolshoi, is called into service. ZOWIE agents have been killed while seeking the mysterious masterminds behind GALAXY, an organization controlling the world's weather and deploying natural disasters to hold humanity hostage. Their aim: a scientifically regimented utopian new world order (one that might actually be wonderfully beneficial if you can get past the whole Mad Scientist Dictatorial Domination thing).

While tracking down the lab-coated bad guys and enforcing The American Way, Flint performs impromptu surgery, stops his heart for prolonged periods, repeatedly annoys his flustered boss (Lee J. Cobb, Broadway's original Willy Loman) with his undisciplined ways, invents a Zippo lighter with 82 functions ("83 if you want to light a cigar"), traces a poison through a bouillabaisse recipe served in only one spot on Earth, jump-starts a man's heart via a lightbulb socket, wisecracks with British Agent "Triple-O Eight" (a Sean Connery lookalike, and SPECTRE gets a name-check), judo-chops gangs of bad guys, avoids disintegration in an electrofragmentizer, and finds his four live-in lovelies ensnared and brainwashed within GALAXY's Dr. Evil-like volcano H.Q.

Supported by Jerry Goldmsith's groovy musical score (really, it's marvelous), Flint does it all while keeping his tailored suits spotless, his demeanor cool, and his women satisfied.

There's little that approaches suspense here, mind you, something even the lesser Bond films managed to generate to some degree. In that regard you can rightly charge that Flint is too cool and competent for the narrative's own good; on the other hand, is worrying whether our comic-strip hero can overcome a sticky predicament the point of the Flint films to any degree?

Comparisons between Flint's pastiche heroics and the Austin Powers series are obvious. (Mike Myers frequently acknowledges the debt in the films.) However, Our Man Flint and its sequel, In Like Flint, are exaggerated burlesques of their own time and the pop superspy tropes that flourished then. Therefore, we can more accurately compare the Flint flicks with Scream or similar sendups of contemporary conventions and clichés that had grown so familiar to audiences that laughter was the only response left.

And guys, you may want to think twice about watching Our Man Flint with a wife or girlfriend. As part of their broad comedic approach, both Flint films unashamedly parade coprolitic sexual attitudes that would make even Mr. Powers wince.

By their nature, '60s spy movies unzipped a phallocentric revolt against the era's "sexual revolution." Our Man Flint is giddy and harmless while still being sexist in ways that no one could get away with today. Flint's sybaritic lifestyle includes a Playboy-ideal Manhattan penthouse staffed by a quartet of pliant babes who, it's clear, exist to provide him with anything he desires. The sexy villainess (Gila Golan, Miss Israel 1961) likewise falls into his arms and bedsheets within minutes.

The film's final third is an adolescent male Disneyland of bikini-clad centerfold models brainwashed to be smiling, willing "pleasure units" who "offer their bodies for the good of GALAXY." Although played for good clean "Yeah, baby!" fun, the scenes of Joe Blow henchmen queuing up to enjoy the sexual-slavery "pleasure units" like Happy Meals should leave even Maxim readers squirming.

Another raise of an eyebrow is occasioned when, as the supervillains' volcano lair self-destructs, we watch Flint and company cheer as hundreds of uncondemned people, including a crowd-scene's worth of those "pleasure units" we just saw, are blown to smithereens. The surprise crematorium for all those apparently disposable Happy Meals is greeted with the thrill of a Fourth of July fireworks display. The tone of comic camp keeps the moment from being consumed by any chance we'll think about its implications too hard (or at all), and yet, upon reflection ... yeesh.

The gender-sexual snark appears again in the sequel. Indeed, it's the very dough this lumpy pastry is baked from, and it's a big reason In Like Flint doesn't wash down quite as well.

"Women running the world? [laugh] You can't be serious!" That line, exclaimed with righteous derision by our hero, pretty much summarizes the plot and purpose of In Like Flint, which tries to top its predecessor by sending sardonic übermensch Derek Flint to Moscow, outer space, and the Isle of Uppity Brassiere Models. Instead it comes across as a flabby mix of the Batman TV series and a third-tier men's magazine.

In the New York Times, the headline above Bosley Crowther's review read, "Durable Hero Defeated by Deficient Script - Usual Bevy of Beauties Doesn't Help Much." After that the review itself can only be redundant.

In his review at the time, Roger Ebert's sigh was audible:

"The sexiest thing in the new Derek Flint misadventure, "In Like Flint," is Flint's cigaret lighter, which is supposed to know 82 tricks but actually delivers only five, of which one is the not extraordinary ability to clip Lee J. Cobb's moustache."

The plot has something to do with a space laboratory, a duplicate of the U.S. President, Lee J. Cobb in drag and not looking happy about it, a cryonics chamber, and a cosmetics firm fronting for an all-female organization (based in the Virgin Islands, oy) out to overthrow global male authority by (again) brainwashing women, this time via salon hairdryers.

(I hereby apply the label "Womanchurian Candidate" to the trope of brainwashing women for nefarious purposes. Ian Fleming's 1963 Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, made a plot device out of brainwashing women with allergy medications, turning them into biological warfare delivery mechanisms.)



In Like Flint has its amusing moments, some fun action and sci-fi elements, and once again Coburn is appealing as the smirking superspy-scientist-athlete-adventurer who's now also a dolphin language expert, matador, and international ballet master. And of course he's still the irresistable "free love" representative whose mastery includes all women most guys only fantasize about.

Still, trying to connect the plot dots is a pointless exercise, especially after Flint confronts the empowered "ladies" and wins them to his side by telling them that they're being a bunch of silly-billies who shouldn't worry their pretty little heads so.

The fade-out sees Flint beginning an orbital three-way with two lovely cosmonaughties.

The best thing in this he-male mother-goosery is Jerry Goldsmith's sticks-in-your-head musical score that spoofs period flavorings. And as with Our Man Flint, the theatrical poster art by Bob Peak is a target acquisition for collectors.



In Our Man Flint the gender attitudes add to the fluffy fun when viewed in their anthropological context. Here they're just smug and condescending.

The Flint films tell us that beautiful "liberated" women with upright breasts and Space Age blonde hairdos are either disposable "pleasure units" or, if they're smart and assertive, castrating queen bees who really need (and want) a man's leadership; Derek Flint is naturally that man.

In Like Flint makes hand-waving gestures toward equality by giving Flint a superfluous "I don't compete with women" line and by showing the diabolical dames incapacitating squads of military men by batting their eyelashes and pressing their bikini'd flesh.

All the same, the clear message is that these little darlings who've merely tired of dish-pan hands should remember their place and not threaten the Natural Order of Things.

But it's all done as a comedy so wheeee it's okay.

Simply as a movie In Like Flint is further kneecapped by sloppy pacing, shoddy production values, and Lee J. Cobb looking like he's planning to make a stern call to his agent.

One of the poster treatments added this —

— which strikes me as, at best, an optimistic assessment of its target audience.

Directing it was 60-year-old Gordon Douglas. I'll step out on a limb here and suggest that Douglas might have been of the wrong generation to direct a film as "mod" as In Like Flint, compounding any issues we might attribute to the script.

Douglas' career was hardly distinguished, but it was interesting. His tenure reveals remarkable Hollywood staying power, starting as a teenager with Hal Roach and Our Gang shorts (first as a bit-part kid actor, later as a director), and building a résumé that included RKO serials such as Dick Tracy, the first and best of the 1950s Giant Bug movies, Them! (which yielded this favorite movie image), Laurel and Hardy's Saps at Sea, Bob Hope's Call Me Bwana, Frank Sinatra's The Detective, Sidney Poitier's They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, and Elvis Presley's Follow That Dream.


Derek Flint (sort of) appeared onscreen one last time in Our Man Flint: Dead on Target, a 1976 pilot for a would-be Fox TV series starring Ray Danton. It watered down the "spy fun" premise and stunted the Flint character, and it is unwatchably awful. I'm not kidding: it's repellent even as a kitsch artifact. There's no "so bad it's good" here. Every regrettable thing you remember or have heard about the '70s — the hair, the clothes, the on-the-cheap look of the very worst TV that made it on the air — is on display, freighted further by terrible dialogue and acting that would make paper bags feel secure. For the curious, it's available on DVD as part of the three-disc Ultimate Flint Collection, if you can find it. If you do, I challenge you to sit through Dead on Target.

More interesting is Flintlock, an unproduced teleplay by none other than Harlan Ellison. It was a would-be pilot for a proposed 1972 TV series. You can find it reproduced in Ellison's retrospective collection, The Essential Ellison. Ellison's script also revises the character and tone quite a bit, and I don't think it altogether works dramatically (and potential directors must have scowled at seeing their camera directions provided for them in detail), but at least it's the most literate and potentially intriguing approach to the Derek Flint character.

Music: Arvo Pärt, Alina
Near at hand: A program from last Saturday's 2010 Science Fiction Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Fantastic Voyage (1966) — Navel maneuvers; or, Sailing your inner lava lamp

Word on the street is that James Cameron's long-chatted-about remake of Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 science fiction movie memorable for its colorful Day-Glo innerspace-scapes and Raquel Welch vacuum-sealed in white rubber, finally has a designated director — Shawn Levy — and screenwriter — Shane Salerno (Armageddon, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem; ummm...). Of course it's currently expected to be shot in 3-D using the technologies Cameron spearheaded for Avatar.

Now, I was no goggle-eyed fan of Avatar, nor a teeth-clenched detractor. And 3-D so far feels like a marketing strategy that will go down better when its gloss fades and it's employed for more than its own sake. But I've been saying for years that Fantastic Voyage is ideal remake fodder with today's techniques, and, yeah, such a remake may justify the whole 3-D revival with the ideal marriage of technique and subject. I'm just surprised that it has taken this long for the green light to pop on.

Cameron would be my "go to" producer for the project given his fondness for scale and scope, not to mention his (rare and welcome) scientific interests and propensities. Levy strikes me as a director capable of giving the otherworldly premise and trippy imagery a necessary realistic, you-are-there grounding.

For an easy dozen reasons the 1966 screenplay requires a start-to-finish contemporary upgrade, and Salerno may be an okay writer for the task, I don't know. (While, yes, Cameron does have a track record of short-shrifting the writing dimension in his movies, I'll hope for the best here. Still, AvP: Requiem, really? Mr. Cameron, sir, call me, please.)

[Update: It's reported that Cameron has signed up Laeta Kalogridis to write a new draft.]

So this one has me jazzed, I have to say. Of course it helps that I hold a fondness for the original. Because of the remake news, I took a  break yesterday to pull the DVD off the shelf and give it a nostalgic spin. And right off the bat, the DVD's audio commentary track — delivered by Jeff Bond, an editor of the late, lamented Cinefantastique/CFQ magazine (the Cahiers du cinéma for genre fanatics)  — knows who this disc's most enthusiastic audience will be: "Like most of you," he begins, "I grew up watching this movie on television."

He's right. For a certain generation — the one that remembers entire years before Star Wars premiered and was content with merely one short-lived Star Trek series in reruns — TV in the 1970s meant scanning the weekend afternoon schedules across all four channels for a reliable repeat of some special-effects favorite: a Ray Harryhausen creature feature if we were really lucky, or some vintage War of the Worlds action.

High on the short list of faves was Fantastic Voyage, with its cool futuristic submarine miniaturized to microscopic size and pushed through the tip of a hypodermic needle into a human bloodstream. Instead of an unconvincing classroom illustration, our own human interior was revealed, like a Jacques Cousteau travelogue, in screen-filling vistas of surreal canals and chambers filled with floating psychedelia and the amorphous Jell-O colors of a Jimi Hendrix concert.

Here was a "smart" sci-fi adventure worth tuning in again and again. Where else could we pass through a cavernous human heart, see laser beams zap wall-sized brain tissue, fear attacks from giant white-blood-cell blob-monsters, or (especially) experience Raquel Welch needing someone to rip all those killer antibodies from her form-fitting white wetsuit? Everywhere, adolescent males such as yours truly justified repeated viewings of Fantastic Voyage as part of our necessary education in biology, although the nature of the arterio-venous fistula was just the cover story.

Played with steadfast seriousness, the straight-line story itself is just incidental. Strip away the sci-fi visuals and "reticular fibers" lingo, and what you have is a routine plot about a crack team of specialists brought together to beat the clock in a wartime commando raid. It's The Pons of Navarone, or The Spy Who Came in from the Acute Viral Nasopharyngitis.

The film begins as a taut, almost noirish, international Cold War thriller, all black sedans speeding through the night and an attempted assassination of a defecting scientist. (The enemies are only presumably Soviet bloc communists; they're identified simply as "the Other Side" in a way that makes you hear the capital letters.) The assassination fails, but the scientist is critically wounded, which is bad news for Our Side because only he knows the secret to prolonging miniaturization beyond 60 minutes.

The threatening blood clot in his brain is ill-suited for conventional surgery, so a special agent (square-jawed haircut Stephen Boyd) is recruited to join a crew assigned to enter the scientist's body aboard the subcellular cruiser Proteus. It's his job to keep a steely eye on the crew: the easy-going captain played by William Redfield, Donald Pleasence as twitchy Dr. Michaels, and Ms. Welch (then a contract player for Fox) as the devoted assistant to Arthur Kennedy's pious scientist.

Kennedy is given to solemn philosophical navel-sailing about the infinitude of the human soul, and the script peppers its rather drab dialogue with wide-eyed ponderings about Man's place betwixt outer and inner space:

Dr. Duval: "Yet all the suns that light the corridors of the universe shine dim before the blazing of a single thought—"
Grant: "—proclaiming in incandescent glory the myriad mind of Man."
Dr. Michaels: "Very poetic, gentlemen. Let me know when we pass the soul."
Dr. Duval: "The soul? The finite mind cannot comprehend infinity, and the soul, which comes from God, is infinite."

So naturally you spot the eventual saboteur with the first hint of atheism.

Outside the body, Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell represent the military by smoking stogies, chugging coffee, and grimly counting down the 60-minute clock that marks the moment when the micronauts start expanding back to normal size whether or not they've completed their mission. O'Brien's agitated General Carter comes close to quoting the bit in Airplane! — "I picked a bad week to give up smoking / stop drinking coffee / stop sniffing glue" — 14 years early.

The New Yorker's Brendan Gill, in his light-hearted positive review of the movie — "I can recommend it safely to every member of the family, provided every member of the family is either a brain surgeon or a scuba diver" — said of Raquel Welch:

"As far as I know this is Miss Welch's first featured appearance in a movie here, but such are the wonders of publicity that she is already a prominent figure in the entertainment world. As for her acting, she keeps her shoulders well back and speaks her lines with great distinction, as I recall my grandmother doing when she recited 'Old Ironsides.'" 

Gill followed that by noting the screenplay's "show of wit" and director Richard Fleischer's "brisk direction."

What we missed on TV, but get back in the current DVD, is how much we lost by not seeing Fantastic Voyage in its full original CinemaScope dimensions. The most expensive science-fiction film to that time, Fantastic Voyage gave movie-goers a vividly realized "head trip" two years before 2001: A Space Odyssey expanded more than just their consciousness.

Fleischer (who also directed such action notables as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Tora! Tora! Tora!) did a fine job with the difficult task of shooting such a technically daunting script. And yes, technically Fantastic Voyage is impressive. Doubly so when you remember that it all had to be created with inventive practical techniques, elaborate miniature sets and models, and wire-work "flying" scenes long before CGI would make it all as easy as drag-and-drop. (The film took home two Oscars, one for Special Visual Effects and another for Art Direction.)

What's less successful is the human component. Boyd, Kennedy, Pleasence, Welch, and the rest play types rather than characters. Their passages ooohing and aaahing about the miracles of the human body are nice, but you hear the screenwriters in them, not the nominal individuals on the screen.

Maybe that's because otherwise Fantastic Voyage represents its era well by wearing its subtext on its sleeve: instead of people, it was technology that was just about ready to solve any problem, put Americans on the moon, and make Arthur O'Connell's cigars safe enough to smoke inside top-secret military miniaturization labs.

The screenplay, predictably and understandably, ignores an internal logic problem of elephant-in-the-room proportions: What happens to the mass of a human being, never mind a submarine full of them, when concentrated to the size of a microbe? The question is so fundamental that it all but erases the "sci" half of the sci-fi equation, categorizing the story as outright fantasy instead. (Like Star Wars from the [shudder] "midichlorians" point of view.)

When I was a teenager I gobbled up Isaac Asimov's novelization of the film like so much Sugar Pops. I remember my then-favorite author/scientist/explainer going to considerable pains to rationalize the "missing mass" question. After all, one 170-pound man, for instance, reduced to the size of a bacterium will still be a 170-pound bacterium, one that's not going anywhere except maybe through the floor, never mind propelling up someone's bloodstream into a brain. Then when you add the combined tonnage of the ship and equipment and your fellow bacterionauts....

So here's my ever-lovin' geek hero Isaac Asimov trying to make it all sound plausible by throwing in the typical handwavium of "hyperspace" and other dimensions where the mass of ship+crew gets sidelined away from our universe's gravity and laws of physics. Not that that made sense either, but give him points for the Hail Mary pass. I imagine stuffy ol' Dr. Asimov gnashing his teeth until sparks fly into his typewriter, setting the pages afire. In his 1987 novel, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, he got a chance to rework the premise, this time adding a two-way "miniaturization field" surrounding the ship and manipulations of quantum mechanics' Planck constant, essentially making the story work by rejiggering the universe.

If we can ignore the absurdities at its core, the movie carries us along with a stirring sense of wonder through those strange new worlds just under our skin. It's only a coincidence that Fantastic Voyage opened in New York City just one day before Star Trek premiered on NBC, though it's a telling one. Both premieres marked an age that was all about where no man had gone before. (Even Fantastic Voyage's original on-screen text prologue used those words.) Whether that meant the wonders of the human body, the depths of space, or Raquel Welch's wetsuit, it was all pretty fantastic.

It's a pleasure to report that Fantastic Voyage still holds up pretty well today, and Fox's 2007 "Cinema Classics Collection" disc brings us a good-looking (not great-looking) print and transfer in the original CinemaScope 2.35:1, enhanced for widescreen viewing. Colors are vivid, definition is sharp, and the source is clean enough with only minor specks, scratches, and grain here and there. Modern DVD resolution is not always a friend to pre-CGI special effects, so expect to spot some wires flying the crewmembers among the colorful tissues and globs.

The English audio options are DD 1.0 monaural and a Dolby Digital stereo surround mix that's effective enough and not overdone.

This edition adds a surprising number of extras to the previous bare-bones release. First off is the audio commentary by Bond, mentioned above. Billed as "film/music historian," Bond is a dry speaker, but dishes up quality details on the film's production, with predictable emphasis on the ingenious means used to create the visual effects. In the scene where all the male crewmembers frantically grab the antibodies off Raquel Welch, we learn that director Fleischer kept calling for retakes because the guys were too darn gentlemenly in avoiding Ms. Welch's breasts and other ticklish parts.

Bond's other area of expertise is Leonard Rosenman's moody score, which he explicates further in a separate commentary track for the isolated score. On that one, Bond (who writes about film music for the Hollywood Reporter) is joined by Jon Burlingame (Variety's film music writer, he also teaches film music history at USC), and moderator Nick Redham (documentary and music producer). It was Rosenman's sharp idea to give the film no music at all until the moment the submarine crew enter the bloodstream, so for 38 minutes their commentary track covers Rosenman and film music generally, then stops when the Proteus goes hypodermic and the isolated score begins.

Richard Edlund, Craig Barron, and other modern special-effects masters laud the film's visuals in a new and well-made 18-minute featurette, Lava Lamps and Celluloid: A Tribute to the Visual Effects of Fantastic Voyage.

Other extras include storyboards (including a storyboard-to-film comparison for the whirlpool scene), shots of original props, galleries of production art and posters, an interactive pressbook, and the charmingly overheated theatrical trailer (the video near the top of this post) and TV spots, such as the one below.

Music: John Lee Hooker, Live at the Cafe Au Go-Go
Near at hand: a Russian science fiction magazine that reprinted my story "Mustard Seed."