wonderboss

By 1965 the Hollywood "Jules Verne" genre was ready to be spoofed. In much the same way that a big-budget film series which once terrified millions of people ended up, 25 years later, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so the phenomenon that began with Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days got to the point where it just couldn't be taken quite seriously anymore. So director Blake Edwards conceived an ingenious idea: why not take the stalwart heroes and bumbling professors of classical Verne films and mix them thoroughly with the silent movie antics Mike Todd had only saluted? You'd include lots of improbable gadgets, of course, and a fantastic journey 'round the world. But you'd also turn some really first-rate comic talent loose on it—people like Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk. Yes, it'd have to have submarines and rockets and hot air balloons. But it would also need blackout gags, and mustache twiddling villains, and the pie fight to end all pie fights. Jules Verne meets Mack Sennett in other words. And thus The Great Race was born—dedicated, in its charming magic lantern prologue, to "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy." The set-up is simple enough: the impossibly good-looking and excessively virtuous hero, The Great Leslie (Tony Curtis at his comic best) embarks on an around the world automobile race from New York westward to Paris (including a short jaunt over the frozen Bering Strait to Asia). Leslie's arch-rival, the black-hatted and entirely sympathetic megalomaniac Professor Fate, determines to thwart him at all costs and thereby affirm his own rather shaky sense of self-worth. Along the way there are madcap adventures in the Old West, on the Arctic Sea, on the steppes of Russia, and in the intrigue-ridden European Duchy of Potsdorf. Basically, it's Around the World in Eighty Days with the funny knob cranked all the way up. And many of us do find it extremely, extremely funny. The Great Race may not have been (as it was billed) "the greatest comedy of all time" but it is one of the greatest comedies of the Sixties and that's saying quite a bit. The principals are joined by Natalie Wood, who shows fine comic flair, and Keenan Wynn, as Leslie's faithful manservant Hezekiah. Composer Henry Mancini plays a vital part, too. The score for The Great Race is one of his very best and crucial to the success of the movie. Many people find the extended episode in Potsdorf—a lengthy, clever spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda—to be fatally overlong. I'm not one of them. In theaters, this nearly three hour comedy came with an intermission. Potsdorf opened the second half, and did so at just the moment when audiences had started craving a more substantial story to sink their teeth into. This section of the film also includes one of the greatest sword fights ever filmed—a classic saber duel, played perfectly straight, between Tony Curtis and the late, great Ross Martin. If the movie does have a serious weakness, it's the finale. I don't see how it could have ended any differently myself, so I'm not one to be giving advice; but let's just say that the outcome of the race fails to completely satisfy…Oddly enough, this film which signals the end of the original Fifties/Sixties Jules Verne craze managed to give birth to a whole little sub-genre of it's own—a sub-genre of the sub-genre, I suppose. These were the multitudinous (and consistently inferior) Great Race imitators. They came by the dozens for the next five years or so: everything from big screen spectacles like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965), Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon (1967), and Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) to TV spin-offs for kids; stuff like Wacky Races (1967) and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (1970). But the original still retains a charm and panache that puts it in a class by itself.

Flight of the Lost Balloon is one of the more interesting failures in the 50s/60s Jules Verne cycle. Rarely seen today, the movie has a game cast, a director with excellent genre credentials, and some outstanding widescreen photography to display. You can tell that the filmmakers wanted desperately to emulate the major epics that had gone before, offering a Verne-inspired plot, lots of stock Verne situations, and a lilting theme song crooned over elaborate animated title work. Unfortunately, you can also tell that they didn't have nearly enough cash on hand to follow through with these grand ambitions. Flight of the Lost Balloon is not only a low-budget film, it's a cheap film--and way too cheap to have attempted anything like the continent-spanning adventure story we see sketched out here. The movie seems to be based, if only in spirit, on Verne's very first novel Cinq Semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). Commissioned by the London Geographical Society, Dr. Joseph Faraday (Marshall Thompson) attempts an aeronautical voyage across Africa to rescue a lost explorer. Along the way, a mysterious, nameless "Hindu" commandeers the expedition for purposes of his own. Despite a lengthy cannibal episode played mostly for laughs, Flight of the Lost Balloon was definitely intended as a straightforward action-adventure movie (quite unlike the "official" version of Five Weeks that would appear a year or so later). The story features several interesting plot twists and includes some effective villainy by James Lanphier, in an oily performance reminiscent of Vincent Price. Sadly, the meager budget ruins everything. The production, apparently, couldn't even afford a real hot-air balloon: every single aerial shot in the picture appears to have been accomplished with the miniature balloon Thompson proudly displays (as a "test model") in the first reel! Actually, I wonder whether the budget wasn't cut drastically during the shooting of the film itself. That's the only way I can account for several of this movie's many curiosities. The music score, for instance, disappears completely about half way through, leaving nothing but a long inexplicable silence. Likewise, a major special effects sequence seems half-finished. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the giant condor attack over Lake Tanganyika had originally been intended as a stop-motion set piece ala Ray Harryhausen. Director Nathan Juran had just scored a hit with Harryhausen's 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and the "Projects Unlimited" effects group hired for Lost Balloon included several expert stop-motion animators. As it stands however, the episode is laughably bad, with two or three see-through condors-on-a-stick buzzing the miniature balloon to no apparent effect. The scene must have looked especially ridiculous on theatre screens. Marshall Thompson went on to star in the "Verne-flavored" Around the World Under the Sea later in the decade, and Juran made one of the best pictures in the entire cycle with 1964's First Men in the Moon. But Flight of the Lost Balloon is little more than a curio. Yet who knows what it might have been like with just a bit more finance available?