Bedazzled (1967) — Giving the devil his due

In a couple of weeks Elizabeth and I will be in London. The circumstances behind the trip caught us by surprise. We weren't planning to go to London until, well, things happened and suddenly we had tickets on British Air. (Portland, New York, and San Francisco are now also on our pleasure/business calendar between now and November. Elizabeth is jetting off to L.A. tomorrow evening. It's a whirlwind, I tell you.)

As I mentioned here, on our itinerary is the current production of Dr. Faustus at Shakespeare's Globe. Of course, me being the guy I am, that guaranteed that I'd reach to the DVD shelves to pull out another British take on the Faust legend: Bedazzled from 1967. This cheeky comedy infused the centuries-old story with the spirit of Swinging London plus impudent pokes at religion, politics, and pop culture itself.

Any conversation about the so-called British Invasion of the 1960s tends to focus on the new pop and rock music that tsunamied over American popular culture mid-decade. But riding that wave also came new styles of envelope-pushing comedy.

This brash, cocksure postwar generation of young Oxbridge-educated comics modernized the British tradition of satire with sharp verbal wit, straight-faced or absurdist approaches to outrageous material, and gimlet-eyed sarcasm toward the previous generation's institutions. Political figures, religion, the upper classes, "high" and "low" culture/society/art — all were now open targets for unapologetic lampooning.

In the early '60s, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, with Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, led this New Wave satire movement in Beyond the Fringe, a stage revue that began at the Edinburgh Festival and then went on to acclaim in London and on Broadway. Cook and Moore furthered their comedy partnership — "Pete and Dud" — on British television, most notably in their hit BBC series Not Only...But Also.

With this success in their pockets, they pitched a film to Twentieth Century Fox, a mod spin on the Faust legend, with Moore as the woebegon schmuck who sells his soul to Peter Cook's dry, wry horned one.

As luck would have it, they already had an enthusiastic fan in director Stanley Donen, whose creds included Charade and Two for the Road, as well as top-drawer movie musicals in the 1950s: On the Town, Funny Face, and Singin' in the Rain. Donen asked to work with Cook and Moore, and in 1967 — the year of Sgt. Pepper and The Who smashing their kit at Monterey — the duo's best film, Bedazzled, opened their distinctive brand of humor to new audiences, with hopes toward going really big in the huge new U.S. market.



As timid, tongue-tied Wimpy's short-order cook Stanley Moon (a role that leaves me aching that he never co-starred with Rowan Atkinson), Moore pines for an aloof waitress, Margaret Spencer, played by veteran comic actor Eleanor Bron. So unrequited is his love and so deep his anguish that this hapless hash-slinger opts to hang himself from his tiny flat's water pipe. His goodbye note leaves Margaret his collection of moths.

He fails at that too, of course, although he does attract the attention of Mr. George Spiggot (Cook), a dapper swell who knows more about Stanley than anyone else cares to. Spiggot reveals himself to be none other than the Unholy One, evil incarnate himself.

Stanley: "I thought you were called Lucifer."
George: "I know. 'The Bringer of the Light' it used to be. Sounded a bit poofy to me."

It turns out that rather than sitting on a throne of skulls in his fiery infernal kingdom, the devil makes his God-appointed, workaday living as the proprietor of a grubby London nightclub and business office staffed by the Seven Deadly Sins. "What terrible sins I have working for me," he says of the riffraff Anger, Sloth, etc. "I suppose it's the wages."

He offers Stanley seven wishes in exchange for the miserable little soul that, he says, is no more useful than Stanley's appendix. The appeal is irresistible to desperate Stanley: a chance to remake himself in any way imaginable to win Margaret's heart (as well as, naturally, her other bits).

Thus begins, with the magic incantation "Julie Andrews!", an episodic series of altered-reality shaggy-god scenarios that place Stanley in situations of his choosing — as an intellectual aesthete, a millionaire already married to "highly physical" Margaret, a pop star with Margaret among the hoard of groupies, a fly on the wall (endearingly cartooned), and so on.

The Devil, though, can't resist the opportunities to insert himself into Stanley's wishes and screw them up. After all, it's in his job description. It's the old "Be careful what you wish for" angle, with the wording of Stanley's wishes interpreted with all the fiendish legal exactitude of an iTunes Terms & Conditions form.

Cook's deadpan skewering of fleeting pop-idol vanities will never lose its currency. "I'm callous … I'm dull … You bore me ... You fill me with inertia," he monotones as Drimble Wedge & the Vegetations, upstaging and out-groupie-ing Moore's Tom Jones–esque soul-cry, "Love Me!"

The silliest/funniest sequence arrives when exasperated Stanley wishes to be with Margaret in a place of peace and spiritual purity: there he and Margaret find love as nuns in the cloistered Order of the Leaping Berylians, whose rituals require their sacred trampolines. (This bit originated with a sketch on Pete and Dud's Not Only...But Also.)

To exit a fantasy, all Stanley has to do is blow a raspberry (a fitting response to worldly inadequacies, I think), whereupon he returns to wherever George happens to be awaiting the next attempt.

But the best of the many funny moments here aren't necessarily Stanley's fantasy sequences, which sometimes drag. They're the in-between bits with Moore and Cook in their well-honed dialogue mode.

In their chats about theology, morality, organized religion, and the nature of evil, Stanley learns that old Beelzebub is just another put-upon civil servant following orders. He may be the Prince of Darkness, but Spiggot's 24/7 job is chiefly urbane sarcasms and petty pranks such as expiring the time on parking meters, scratching LP records, melting ice lollies, gouging "ventilation" holes in oil tankers, targeting pigeons' bombardier runs, and phoning Mrs. Fitch ("Abercrombie here, I work with your husband") to tell her that Mr. Fitch has just checked into the Cheeseborough Hotel Brighton with his secretary.

It's a mundane, dreary job for God's favorite fallen angel who aspires only to earn his way back into Heaven now that mankind can do his work well enough without him. So naturally he's suffering from burn-out and a lack of that driving inspirational spark:

"There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas. I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising."

Honestly, who among us can't identify with him? Stanley tells Margaret that although George is the Devil, "he's not so bad once you get to know his problems." Meanwhile, George shows signs of affection for the sad-sack little twerp, and together the pair form, however temporarily, a convivial mutual-support rapport.

Bedazzled stitches its sketch-comedy scenes together with winning banter and collegiate theological spoofery: Mussolini barely slipped through George's grasp ("all that work, then right at the end with his last breath he says, 'Scusi, mille regretti,' and up he goes!"), God is English and "very upper class," the Garden of Eden was "a boggy swamp just south of Croydon; you can see it over there."

Squeezably sexy Raquel Welch, clad in Frederick's of the Underworld lingerie, steals her scene as Lust, an American Southern hothouse flower, in a bedroom cameo/typecasting. The promo imagery, from the film's original advertising (e.g., the posters at the top and bottom of this page) to the current DVD box art, oversells her brief presence, but it's an understandable marketing ploy from her peak pinup years between One Million Years B.C., Fantastic Voyage, and The Magic Christian. Cook had suggested titling their film Raquel Welch so the posters could read "Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Raquel Welch." Oddly, that didn't fly.

And that's Barry Humphries ("Dame Edna Everage") appearing as Envy.

The old sporting rivalry between George and God dates back at least to Job (who, George says, "was what you'd technically describe as a loony)." But a game of equals it isn't. Eons ago God may be have challenged George to a round of metaphysical chess, then provided him with little more than a Snakes and Ladders board, giggling behind His hand while fucking with earnest George. 

It's no spoiler to note that due to a technicality in the contract Stanley gets to keep his soul. Still, George makes sure that he gets in the last word:

 [to God] "All right, you great git, you've asked for it. I'll cover the world in Tastee-Freez and Wimpy Burgers. I'll fill it with concrete runways, motorways, aircraft, television, automobiles, advertising, plastic flowers, frozen food and supersonic bangs. I'll make it so noisy and disgusting that even you'll be ashamed of yourself! No wonder you've so few friends; you're unbelievable!"

Looking around at the state of things over the intervening 44 years, especially now with a U.S. election cycle revving up with its new class of crackpot evangelical politicos who've signed their own regrettable contracts with George, we can only admire George for being so thorough at his underpaid, tedious job.

All the same, the fade-out makes it clear that it's God, as usual, who has the last belly laugh. It's good to know the "great git" still has a wicked sense of humor.

On the down side, after a while the film doesn't quite generate the energy needed to sustain its momentum. The narrative doesn't so much "arc" as stretch out as straight as a block of sidewalk slabs. Each slab is funny to its degree, though occasionally we're ready to move on to the next one before it's ready to let us go.

Bedazzled is bedeviled by what appears to be a directorial ambivalence, or a creative arrow that lands a couple rings off the bull's eye. Old-school Donen directed with an eye toward modish stylings. As a result we view much of Bedazzled through the murk of soft focus or on-set filters. He's Stanley Donen, so he knows how to fill a screen well, but there's no question that Welch is all but wasted when viewed through filmy bedcurtains. And that's not to mention the flare of stage lights projected straight into the camera. Now, director of photography Austin Dempster may shoulder the lion's share of this. His IMDb profile lists Bedazzled as his first promotion to DP after years (since 1941) as a "camera operator" and the occasional second-unit photographer.

Either way, Donen seems too timid to fully unfurl his New Wave freak flag, alternately shooting Moore and Cook straight up without augmenting their established dialogue-heavy partnership. That's all to the good verbally although I still see the pair straining against the 35mm frame surrounding them.

I wonder if the Donen of Charade and Arabesque was too restrained, too generationally inhibited to really make the most of his two leads. Richard Lester might have been a better fit. I can imagine the director A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, and Petulia adding his own contemporary backspin that allowed Cook and Moore to send the material into orbit with the riffing spontaneity of their stage and British TV work. Donen's other film from '67, the British comedy Two for the Road (also with Bron), feels more comfortable with its "experimental" side, in that case a fractured-time narrative structure reminiscent of Lester's Petulia. (Lester did direct Cook and Moore two years later in the post-apocalyptic farce The Bed-Sitting Room.)

Nonetheless, Bedazzled supports itself amiably on the heads of its two stars. Besides carrying the lead roles, Cook wrote the screenplay and Moore crafted the score, which he performed with his jazz trio.

The film didn't make the hoped-for splash in the States, so any potential Pete-and-Dud wave over here never rose above a ripple. It opened in '67 on December 10, the same month that also saw the release of The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Valley of the Dolls, numbers 2, 4, and 6 of the top-grossing films that year. So it's not a big leap to suggest that such a comparatively small film got lost in the Klieg lights of the unarguably greater titles around it.

Bedazzled did mark a turning point in the career trajectories of Cook and Moore. By all accounts Cook was the more productive and inventive writer-comedian of the two, and was handily the lead dog in the pack in the U.K., with Moore at ease as Cook's natural second banana. But Cook the anti-establishment satirist's dry, acerbic, erudite wit and absurdist approach to comedy didn't catch fire in the U.S. He was a transformative influence on comedians that came after him both in the U.K. and the U.S., and even this long after his death in 1995 there's no denying an ongoing legacy in the shape and form comedy has taken since his active years. (In 1999 the main-belt asteroid 20468 Petercook was named after him, so there's some more posterity for you.) He was a gifted groundbreaking comic that simply didn't translate well to a broader medium.

On the other hand, "Cuddly Dudley" came across as more likeable and identifiable, more agreeably mainstream. After more years in a few subpar British films — including a terrible comic interpretation of The Hound of the Baskervilles as Watson to Cook's Sherlock Holmes — Moore's post-Bedazzled career eventually spun up to a house in Malibu and Hollywood hits such as 10 (1979) and Arthur (1981). While both actors bounced between London and L.A. into the '80s, only Moore achieved household-name status in the U.S.

They remained close after the break-up of their long partnership, and reunited by performing on stage together at benefits such as Comic Relief for the homeless in the U.S. and The Secret Policeman's Balls for Amnesty International in the U.K.

Japanese poster

Bedazzled has attained the status of a modest comedy classic, and remains an essential splash in the sea change in British and American comedy that preordained, among others, Monty Python's Flying Circus.


The few vintage extras on the DVD are welcome even if they're not substantial. In an amusing off-the-cuff promo, "Peter and Dud: Interview with the Devil," filmed on-set. Moore appears as a TV interviewer collaring George Spiggot, Esq., a.k.a the Devil. A five-minute clip gives us Cook and Moore discussing their shared history on L.A.'s "Paul Ryan Show" in 1979 when Moore was just about to hit stardom in Blake Edwards' 10.

Finally, a newer piece is a six-minute interview with Harold Ramis, director of the 2000 remake starring Elizabeth Hurley and Brendan Fraser, lauding the original. Also here are the American trailer and a click-through image gallery of 20 behind-the-scenes stills.

Music: Betty Carter
Near at hand: sandals off

The Magic Christian (1969) — If you want it, here it is, come and get it

This third film in my alone-on-the-couch-with-the-flu Peter Sellers retrospective — after Blake Edwards' The Party and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas — was based on the short book by hipster novelist Terry Southern. According to Southern, a copy of his 1959 comic novel found its way to Peter Sellers via their mutual friend Jonathan Miller.

"Peter liked it to the improbable degree that he went straight to the publisher and bought a hundred copies to give to his friends. One such friend, as luck would have it, was Stanley Kubrick."

Thus Southern pinged Kubrick's radar, and that led to Kubrick hiring Southern to co-write the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove once Kubrick decided to make his nuclear Armageddon movie a comedy.

In the movie-making Circle of Life, that's not a bad little outcome for a writer's first solo novel.

Sellers, meanwhile, imagined a film version of The Magic Christian as a pet project, with himself taking the lead role. In 1968 Southern wrote draft after draft of the screenplay, aided (or hindered) by Sellers, director Joseph McGrath, and a pair of TV comedy writers named Graham Chapman and John Cleese.

The ultimate result, 1969's The Magic Christian, is at best a baggy, vapid interpretation of the source novel. Ringo Starr's character was invented for the film and for Starr specifically. While seeing Starr cohabit a film with Sellers, Racquel Welch, Yul Brynner, Roman Polanski, etc. is of keen interest to us lifelong Beatles fanatics, The Magic Christian is diverting more as anthropology than as entertainment. Indeed, it may engender a trippy period appeal you might otherwise reserve for a lava lamp. Unfortunately, both as a movie and as a satire of society's corruptibility and greed, it's likewise formless and gloopy.



This gaudy bauble from the paisley era just drips with low-gloss British Mod Pop style and a would-be Richard Lester vibe, but with no clue about how to put its abundant British talent, chiefly Peter Sellers, to any worthy purpose beyond playing at adolescent cynicism.

It aims, with unearned smugness, to skewer the moneyed classes through the English Theatre of the Absurd that fostered Monty Python among others. Because pre-Python Cleese and Chapman were among the too many cooks behind this screenplay, some of its better moments bear that distinctive Python stamp.

Sellers plays millionaire prankster Sir Guy Grand, who in the movie's first moment of unexplained whimsy adopts as his son a scruffy youth sleeping in Hyde Park (Starr, mere months from becoming an ex-Beatle and seemingly anesthetized). Together they work their way up the social ladder staging elaborate scenarios — at Sotheby's, in a fine restaurant, at an Oxford-Cambridge boating race, bringing an anti-aircraft gun to a pheasant hunt, and so on — to freak out the toffs, expose the shallow bigotry and avarice of the Establishment, and generally prove that "everyone has their price."

The final 20 minutes boil over aboard the luxury cruise ship "Magic Christian," where the cream of elite society is curdled by a mishmash of psychedelic goings-on that include a vampire, willy-nilly dwarfs, and a rampaging gorilla suit.

Just to be clear here: It's not as though I'm constitutionally opposed to the movie's "message." I acknowledge that human beings can willingly become self-degrading Pavlovian animals when fat wads of cash are wafted under our noses. And if you know me personally you already know that "black humor" and I have a long and happy relationship.

It's just that I'm repulsed at the cellular level by any vehicle — a movie, a political manifesto, a raised-fist poetry slam declamation, a bathroom graffiti pronouncement, the typical Tea Party utterance — that mistakes pompous, unnuanced, mean-spirited and blinkered treatment of its thesis for thought-provoking insight. Especially when I'm supposed to be laughing along with the humor of its delivery mechanism.

In The Magic Christian, this self-satisfied faux-profundity reaches face-palm levels in its final moments, when, to make sure we Get The Message, Sir Guy tosses wads of bank notes into a swimming pool vat brimming with offal, shit, and piss, into which the dapper swells mingle with the hoi polloi to wade in and submerge to line their pockets. 

On the other hand...

Because its sketch-comedy indictments of Society's Empty Values don't get much less sophomoric than that, The Magic Christian is never as clever or enlightened as it thinks we think it is. Never mind that, after more than 40 years, any satire here that might once possibly have been biting now just gums.

One of the movie's problems is that there are no characters here, only actors used as furniture moved about from one underdeveloped vignette to the next. Its rudderless, rambling course — leading to its over-the-top, throw-anything-at-the screen climax — makes this an English cousin of 1967's overstuffed Casino Royale, with whom it shares director Joseph McGrath; although Casino at least had the good nature to be occasionally stupid-silly-fun instead of just callow and bitchy.

Oh, Christopher....

Not such a fantastic voyage.

As The Magic Christian meanders drunkenly from scene to scene, out come the "name that celebrity" cameos that contribute to its minor cult-kitsch popularity. There's Laurence Harvey as a strip-tease Hamlet, Raquel Welch in a brass brassiere as the "Priestess of the Whip" among a galley of topless slave girls, barfly Roman Polanski chatted up by singing transvestite Yul Brynner, and Christopher Lee in full Dracula regalia as the Ship's Vampire. Continue this drinking game by spotting Cleese and Chapman, Richard Attenborough, Spike Milligan, Dennis Price (Kind Hearts and Coronets), and Wilfrid Hyde-White.


Mind-scrub of the week: Yul Brynner in drag hits up Roman Polanski at the bar.

The music — namely Badfinger's "Come and Get It" (penned by Paul McCartney) and Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air" — adds to the nostalgia fest.

Geoffrey Unsworth supervised the photography, though it's safe to say that he's better remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cabaret, and Superman.

The Magic Christian has fleeting moments of fun, is a should-see for those of us who dig on Sellers and vintage Britcom, and heaven knows it's a sampler tray of its time. Too bad it's all such a dismal mess, a joyless exercise that sets out to deliver a Statement that's puerile and obvious and ultimately doesn't amount to much. One may ask if Sellers, Southern, and other well-heeled individuals behind The Magic Christian made it as a quick, easy means to sucker in the "rebel" youth market it's so clearly aimed at. But that would be cynical, wouldn't it?

Music: Ute Lemper, "All That Jazz"
Near at hand: Wild Child by T.C. Boyle

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."