Fantasia Obscura: ‘Unknown World’

There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.

Sometimes, you just can’t bury your head in the ground…

Unknown World (1951)
Distributed by: Lippert Pictures
Directed by: Terry O. Morse

You can hide, for all the good it’ll do you.

Maybe it’s easier to just avoid things. Maybe you’re thinking, if things get bad, you can just bug out. Or maybe you can just keep your head down, not really being there, blending into the scene without anyone realizing you never left.

All of these may be the only option on the table, but are never great choices, especially in the face of something truly terrifying. Like, for example, nuclear war…

We start once the opening credits have finished with a brief shot of a film projector being turned on, after which we watch a newsreel. We’re given an info-dump about what’s happened before the film starts to introduced us to the main characters and what they want to accomplish.

Hey, this trick worked in Citizen Kane, so why not…?

The newsreel tells us about Dr. Jeremiah Morley (Victor Kilian), who looks on with alarm at the arms race as the Cold War gets underway. He’s certain that nuclear war will break out at any moment, and believes he can save humanity by finding a cavern vast enough to support a large population for an extended time.

He and his team, which includes Dr. Max Bauer (Otis Waldis), Dr. James Paxton (Tom Handley), Dr. George Coleman (Dick Coleman), Dr. Joan Lindsey (Marilyn Nash), and expert sandhog Andy Ostergaard, form the Society to Save Civilization. Their mission is to build the Cyclotram, an earth boring machine that looks like one of the futuristic tanks from Things to Come, with which the team expects to dig deep enough in the earth to find this cavern.

The team’s plans run into some problems, though, when they fail to get the government grant needed to build their vehicle. All of them are despondent, unhappy to see the government failing to pay for vital services-

No, must. Resist. Obvious. Comment…

With no money coming from the government, and not willing to wait 58 years for Kickstarter to be invented, the project folds, and the newsreel ends on a down note. And it looks like humanity is doomed…

Until the newsreel stops and the lights go up. We find that the short subject we’ve been watching was playing in a room for the team, hosted by Wright Thompson (Bruce Kellogg), the son of the media mogul who gave us the newsreel. He’s played this film to them as he makes them an offer: He himself will fund the entire project, provided they take him along for the ride.

(Insert Katy Perry in space joke here…)

Soon enough, the film rushes forward to the main story, assisted by Joan narrating her diary entries to give us a sense of what we’re looking at. And faster than you can say “Arne Saknussemm,” the Cyclotram is ready to bring our people down, in more ways than one.

In fact, “descent” is probably the key word to describe what happens in the film. The cast faces setbacks, among them the deaths of expedition members, and many disappointing discoveries, which gives the film a hazy pallor that prevents viewers from sharing any potential fun that could be had from exploration and adventure.

It probably doesn’t much help that the impetus for the main story, why these seven folks are digging their way down into the ground, is such a weighty and depressing topic. The drive behind the journey, to try and minimize damage from inevitable nuclear war, infuses the entire film. This makes it impossible to inject any fun into the picture, which makes the movie feel dour and unapproachable.

The subtext infusing the production of the film is likewise depressing. Kilian’s Dr. Morley is the main driver for the entire film, as it’s his character that gets everything in motion with the effort to try and save civilization. Kilian himself, however, does not appear in the credits despite the prominence of his role; when this was made, Kilian was on Hollywood’s blacklist, unable to get work with any of the major studios. In all likelihood, the only way this film was going to get any kind of distribution would be if his name was not tied to the production, which led to the omission.

Likewise, the script also faced the wrath of the blacklist. The screenplay is credited to Millard Kaufman, who a year earlier allowed his name to be a stand in on the film Gun Crazy, to cover for Dalton Trumbo, who was also blacklisted.

There are some sources that claim that Unknown World was likewise written by Trumbo and fronted by Kaufman. There are a number of pithy lines that are Trumbo-esque throughout the film, many of which uttered amidst an overall theme of the futility of war that align with some of Trumbo’s other works, like Johnny Got His Gun. With this occurring on top of what Kaufman had already done for Trumbo the year before, it’s not solid evidence that the film was actually written by Trumbo, but there’s enough room to accept that speculation.

Were Trumbo’s connection to the film ever to be conclusively proven, it would perfectly embody the overall coda of the production: This was an ambitious film that tried hard without the means to accomplish anything. Overall, the movie is strictly a B-film, with cheap effects and serviceable acting that tried to tell a more important story than the film makers were able to mount. Having to make a film about the potential for a nuclear exchange being a disaster, during the height of the worst of Cold War’s paranoia, was going to be a big lift, and small studios like Lippert were never going to do such a project well.

This all resulted in a film that could not hide its limitations, even as it had to hide some of the talent tied to it. Conversely, maybe because of having to hide as much as it did, the film’s message about running away from what scares you takes on a more subtle resonance, showing the viewer that maybe hiding in the first place never should have been an option.

The film in the end suggests that hiding in fear will do no one any good…