CAPSULE: I find it a bit odd that I am making positive
comments about WORLD WITHOUT END, a film with several
bad points. It could tell us a good deal about the
early science fiction transitioning to more recognizable
modern science fiction films. But that still does not
make it a particularly notable film.

Hollywood's first science fiction time travel film (previous
attempts all used purely fantasy devices) is an updated but down-
scaled version of H. G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE. Curiously enough,
it features an early performance by Rod Taylor who would become the
best-known time traveler in cinema a few years later in George
Pal's THE TIME MACHINE. A contemporary man is boosted into the
future where the descendents of us have evolved splitting into
troglodytes and effetes. t

The year is 1957 and a manned trip to Mars is engulfed in a
mysterious field that looks like fire superimposed over the ship on
the film. The ship's crew blacks out, and when they come to, they
discover they had traveled at a higher speed than their meters
could register. Having crash-landed while unconscious, they at
first assume they are on Mars. Earth gravity, oxygen in the air,
and trees somehow do not tip them off where they are. All too
slowly they realize the primitive planet on which they have landed
is Earth after a nuclear war. Civilization has split into two
groups. There are the feeble intellectuals who live below ground
and the mutated troglodytes who live above ground. The radiation
has also made them deformed, typically Cyclopes, for no reason ever
made clear. The intellectuals are in the process of dying out due
to some sort of genetic simpiness that afflicts only the men. In a
tasteful way, bearing in mind that this really is mostly a film for
a younger audience, the script implies that the astronauts are to
be used for breeding purposes. This is an idea that was "borrowed"
by Harlan Ellison in A Boy and His Dog. I wouldn't mention it, but
Ellison tended to point out when ideas are borrowed from him,
except he does it in a courtroom.

What follows is some fairly uninspired intrigue involving a murder.
The real killer is one of the men from this society who is jealous
of the attention the women pay to the humans from the 20th century.
He is dispensed with in a predictable way and the only effect he
had was to use up some screen time without advancing the real plot.
Eventually the astronauts are able to re-colonize the surface
through the magic of re-inventing the bazooka. The film seems to
imply that a bazooka is a very simple weapon. In fact, it is a
portable rocket launcher and you don't have to be a rocket
scientist to realize that to build a bazooka from scratch you
probably need a rocket scientist.

Much of the acting is on the serial level. In spite of the fact
that this was a wide-screen production and was intended to have a
really nice look, the product as clearly aimed at a younger
audience and the acting was no better than would be expected for a
children's film. The writing has its share of fluffs also. Lines
in the film include looking at Mars, seeing green and saying "if it
is grass, there is no reason why there couldn't be life on Mars."
Later, looking at the new planet, they repeat the error by walking
through obvious vegetation and saying "forest, brush, no sign of
life." Ideas of Einstein they attribute to another scientist, but
do say he was a successor of Einstein.

The director lavished care on the widescreen photography, but still
the look of the film is a bit tacky at times. The costumes of the
future males are lame' jackets and silly looking head-caps. The
women's costumes were designed by Vargas who for years did
cheesecake paintings for Playboy magazine. The costumes look like
they would have been sexy on paper but just don't work out when
implemented in cloth. Much the same can be said of the spiders
(though when I saw them as a kid they were pretty frightening).
The score by Leith Stevens (who had done Destination Moon, When
Worlds Collide, and War of the Worlds) is mediocre. Stevens had
done those for Paramount, but here he was working for Warner
Brothers.

The plot is heavily rooted in Einstein's Twin Paradox and while the
mysterious acceleration is never explained, it would have resulted
in an application of the "Twin Paradox" much as was shown. In
fact, this is the film I think of when I picture in my mind the
Twin Paradox. Unfortunately, I am more likely to picture
unrealistic looking giant spiders.

Regarded as a children's film this one isn't bad. It just does not
stand up to adult viewing. I rate it low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.

Film Credits:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049964/reference>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/world_without_end>

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