Richard Matheson on Screen

Hier das Kapitel über "Der Herr der Welt" in Richard Matheson on Screen.

Matheson, der Autor von Science Fiction-Romanen wie Ich bin Legende, unter anderem verfilmt als Der Omega-Mann, hat auch das Drehbuch zu der Jules Verne-Verfilmung verfasst.

Master of the World

(AIP, released May 31,1961) DIRECTOR: William Witney; PRODUCER: James H. Nicholson;

In writing Master of the World, Matheson was faced with the task of
combining Jules Verne's novel Maitre du Mond with his earlier Robur le
Conquerant (Robur, the Conqueror), in which Verne created an airborne variation
on his own Captain Nemo. Like Nemo, the charismatic character introduced with
his submarine, the Nautilus, in Verne's 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea, the
film's Robur uses his revolutionary airship, the Albatross, to make war on war
itself. According to Phil Hardy's Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction,
"Script and direction are both surprisingly lightweight, perhaps because
the problem of unifying the mood of the two novels was so great. The first
(published in 1886) sees Robur as a visionary and idealist, the second
(published in 1904) marks Verne's growing disenchantment and conceives of its
hero as a clumsy, power-hungry megalomaniac. These tensions are repressed in
the film in favor of an atmosphere in which adventure dominates." AIP
clearly aspired to the success of Disney's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
on a much smaller budget (albeit large by AIP standards).

"That was a biggie for American International, all of half a
million dollars!" Matheson told me in a letter. "[Charles] Bronson
was completely out of place. Strange man. The only person I ever knew who was
immune to Vincent Price's charm; Price was undoubtedly the nicest man I ever
met in the business. Actor anyway. Totally charming. Bronson? The first morning
I went in to watch shooting, I walked up to him and introduced myself as the
writer of the film. `Oh, don't talk to me,' he said and walked away. I really
seethed. I guess he must have thought it over because, later, he came over to
me and said, `I hear you're quite a good writer.' `I am,' I said coldly and
walked away from him. Then later, I had second thoughts and, after lunch
(during which Price told me that he had given up trying to get along with
Bronson) I approached Bronson and said, `Why don't we try again?' We got into a
brief conversation at the end of which he said, `I hope you don't mind if I
play [Strock] like a Polish coal miner.' I laughed and thought we had broken
the ice. The next morning, I said good morning to him and he walked past me
without a word. I gave up at that point."

He added in Midnight Graffiti, "I have a very quick temper.... If
someone rubs me the wrong way, and I can tell it immediately, because I have an
antenna, I will respond immediately. I remember [William Witney] ... who was
going to direct Master of the World. Obviously, he didn't understand the
script, had no feeling for it, and was making these comments. And immediately I
was bristling and speaking to him in a very cold, cutting tone of voice. And
Jim Nicholson knew it and tried to calm me down.... Anyway, most of the people
I have worked with may have their faults, but I haven't had any trouble with
them to a large degree.... I'm sure that it is an extrasensory thing. I mean,
some of it is obvious, of course. You can hear the tone of someone's voice, you
can hear the words they speak, but you can also pick up antipathy in other
ways.... The only thing that happens is, after you leave, the committee system
shows up ... and they just do a lousy job. The actual creation of a script, the
actual revision of a script, that's usually pleasant. The unpleasant part comes
when you go to see the screening, and you say, `Oh, Jesus. What have they
done?' That's what happens most often."

Certainly the film would have benefited from a surer directorial touch
than that of Witney, who was a veteran of Republic Westerns - including no
fewer than 27 with Roy Rogers - and serials (many of them co-directed with John
English); he displayed no particular affinity for this genre. Equally damaging
is the obvious use of anachronistic stock footage from Zoltan Korda's Four
Feathers (1939) and Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944), including a shot of
London from the latter with the Globe Theatre clearly in view. Secondbilled
Bronson, who had his first starring role in Corman's Machine-Gun Kelly,
appears acutely uncomfortable as Robur's taciturn antagonist, John Strock. But
AIP mainstay Vincent Price cuts a suitably commanding figure as Robur, and the
special effects by Tim Baar, Wah Chang, and Gene Warren of Project Unlimited
are generally passable, with the Albatross model an admittedly impressive
miniature.

In Robur le Conquerant, Verne's imaginary "aeronef" is
constructed of treated and compressed paper around a hundred-foot-long ship's
deck, suspended and propelled by horizontal and vertical screws, respectively.
("The Albatross might be called a clipper with thirty-seven masts,"
he notes, hence the first novel's alternate title of The Clipper of the
Clouds.) Able to attain altitudes up to 8,700 feet, with a top speed of 120
miles per hour, the Albatross "could make the tour of the globe in two
hundred hours" - and indeed much of the novel, written in Verne's
characteristically discursive style, is little more than a glorified travelogue
interrupted by occasional snatches of dialogue. (This is demonstrated by such
chapter titles as "Across the Prairie," "Through the
Himalayas," "Over the Atlantic," and so on.) By the time of
Maitre du Mond-in which Verne switches to the first person, with the new
character of Strock as narrator - Robur has created a new machine, the Terror,
a kind of combination Albatross and Nautilus with which he tries to dominate
the world by land, sea, and air. It is finally destroyed when struck by lightning.

The movie is set in 1868. Strock is sent by the Department of the
Interior to Morgantown, Pennsylvania, to investigate apparent volcanic activity
inside the Great Eyrie. He flies over its unscalable crater in a balloon with a
munitions manufacturer, Prudent (Henry Hull), Prudent's daughter Dorothy (Mary
Webster), and her fiance, Phillip Evans (David Frankham). After the balloon is
shot down by Robur, they awaken as his prisoners aboard the Albatross. Once Robur
raids London, the horrified captives vow to destroy the airship, even at the
cost of their own lives. When Robur drops anchor to repair damages he has
incurred while trying to stop an African war, Strock plants a bomb in the
armory. Jealous of Dorothy's growing affection for Strock, Phillip knocks him
out and flees down the anchor rope with the Prudents. Strock recovers in time
to climb down and cut the rope with the repentant Phillip's help, while Robur
and his loyal crew go down with the stricken ship, as did the crew of Nautilus.

According to Mark Thomas McGee's Faster and Furiouser, Project Unlimited
- which later provided the memorable (if economical) special effects for The
Outer Limits- sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
to ask that their Master of the World work be given Oscar consideration:
"Miniatures: The Albatross, Jules Verne's airship, as the star of the film
had to be shown in its entirety and functioning in all aspects. To have built a
radical life-size model 200 feet long would have been a physical as well as a
financial impossibility. A scale model was constructed which was complete in
all respects, 39 practical [rotating] propellers, mechanized trap doors, rocket
devices, controls, etc. The only lifesize portion built was the rear deck. In
the miniature, puppet figures duplicated the live figures on deck for long
shots. The balloon was handled the same way as the Albatross and for the same
reasons. Optical Effects: Intriguing color effects of oil and fog -and revising
quality of period black and white shots. Made several colorful inserts for special
effect."

Les Baxter scored more than forty AIP pictures, including The Comedy of
Terrors and all of Matheson's Poe films. "Baxter claimed that the secret
to writing music for horror movies was to put notes where they didn't
belong," wrote Mark Thomas McGee. "Unfortunately, he seemed to use
this same approach for his non-horror scores." "One of my favorite
scores that I did was Master of the World," he told Tom Weaver. "I
think [it] has some good melodies and some lovely orchestration in it. Again, I
had carte blanche - here I had Jules Verne and Vincent Price and airships going
around the world, so we managed a lot of interesting orchestration. Pre-John
Williams work. I have been said to have influenced all of these guys in their
work. Unfortunately, `influenced' is a kind word. There's an awful lot of
copying that goes on that makes me a little bit unhappy. I hate to hear my
stuff quoted directly on the screen."

Halliwell's Film and Video Guide correctly labeled Master
ofthe World an "aerial version of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, with cheap
sets and much use of stock footage.... ome scenes however have a certain
vigor," while Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide said simply, "very well
done." A more mixed message came from the Time Out Film Guide, which
called it "a pleasantly ludicrous children's fantasy movie, with a
talented production team making the most of a low budget.... [T]he film's
imaginative use of stock shots and its garish line in nineteenth century
hardware are admirable." The screenplay superbly shows off its author's
adap-tive abilities as it skillfully synthesizes Verne's two novels, the second
of which is especially lacking in narrative thrust. Matheson cleverly
conflates, transposes, and recombines elements from both books and expands an
extremely minor character into the obligatory love interest.

This was actually Matheson's second attempt at adapting
Verne after interpolating Nemo into The Deadly Powder of Thomas Roch, a
teleplay written for Albert Zugsmith in the 1950s, based on Verne's Facing the
Flag; it is not known whether this is related to The Kingdom ofNemo, an
unproduced pilot that Matheson wrote with Beaumont. And, according to Robert
Skotak, writing in Filmfax, a follow-up to Master of the World featuring Nemo
was planned: "The 1970 MGM film Captain Nemo and the Underwater City
actually owed its existence to a ... project entitled Captain Nemo and the
Floating City [that] Corman had developed in 1963 with the screenwriters R.
Wright Campbell and Harold Yablonsky. Art director Daniel Haller [Master of the
World's production designer and associate producer] provided preliminary
designs, including a flying ship and a multi-tiered city. Plans were made to
shoot underwater sequences at Marineland in Southern California."
Unfortunately, MGM's final product, on which Campbell shared screenwriting
credit with Pip and Jane Baker, suffered from uninspired direction by James
Hill and the miscasting of the otherwise estimable Robert Ryan as Nemo.