The Hound Salutes: George Pal Movie Review
There are fans who say that the Hollywood career of George Pal (1908-1980) parallels that of Walt Disney. But while Uncle Walt went on to become a household name as an entertainment innovator, Pal, who took as many risks with even more way-out material, suffered reversals for every step forward. George Pal's history alternates between fantasy masterpieces and tantalizing sci-fi projects that just missed greatness.
Born in Hungary, Pal worked in Germany, the Netherlands, and France before arrived in Hollywood in the 1940s as an animator. Rather than simple cartooning, Pal perfected three-dimensional stop-motion techniques featuring whimsical figures, and his Oscar-winning “Puppetoon” short subjects, done for Paramount, were unique for the time and preceded works like The Nightmare Before Christmas by half a century.
Inevitably Pal moved into mainstream features, soon showing a serious interest in sf and fantasy. Though science-fiction literature was enjoying its Golden Age at the time, Hollywood's genre efforts were marginal, almost nonexistent except for comic-strip adaptations. Pal changed that with his big-budget, carefully researched production Destination Moon (based on a Robert Heinlein novella), which brought off-planet exploration to the screen in realistic, almost documentary fashion. Though it may seem a bit stiff by today's standards, back in 1950 there had never been anything like Destination Moon.
It's fair to say that in the years before Sputnik, George Pal did more research into space missions than did the U.S. government, and Destination Moon’s success propelled a sci-fi boom in the 1950s. Numerous imitators offered low-budget, B-movie genre pics, but Pal (often in conflict with more Earthbound studio moguls who Just Didn't Get It) wielded all the resources of Hollywood f/x magic and design to produce the blockbusters When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, and Destination Moon’s semi-sequel Conquest of Space. This last, however, was a costly failure for Paramount, and no serious space-travel depictions came out of Hollywood studios for 10 years.
Pal was unusual for his era in that he had great respect for writers – David Duncan, scripter of Pal's classic The Time Machine, said Pal was the only director who ever consulted with him during a shoot. A true devotee of fantastic literature, Pal was drawn to an unsung giant of sf literature, Olaf Stapledon, whose Odd John (1935) is probably the best serious novel on the mutant-superman theme. Unfortunately the script Pal commissioned turned out a mediocrity (complete with a Hollywood happy ending) and was mercifully never shot. Unwilling to relinquish the premise, Pal decided to film a somewhat lesser novel about psychic superhumans, Frank Robinson's The Power.
Some critics have described the resulting film as the finest screen sf up to that time, a well-made and intelligent thriller about a scientist (George Hamilton) stalked by an unknown mastermind whose brain waves alter perception and reality. Today it has a cult of admirers, but when The Power bombed at the box office in 1967 it caused the most painful reversal in Pal's career and, in effect, ended it.
Pal's final completed project was another audacious adaptation, of the “Doc Savage” series of pulp novels (penned by various authors under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson since 1933). Pal planned an adventure in the style of a vintage 007, but the studio, fixated on the camp phenom of TV's Batman, turned Doc Savage – The Man of Bronze into an archaic spoof by the time it staggered onto screens briefly in 1975. Rumor has it Pal's early vision of Doc Savage caught the ears of network TV executives, who reworked the premise into a prime time hit – Mission: Impossible.
A feature-length tribute, The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal, mixing interviews, clips, and tributes from the likes of Ray Bradbury and Charlton Heston, can be found on home video. And a set of original George Pal Puppetoons are compiled in The Puppetoon Movie.