Film Review: A Study on "Beyond the Time Barrier" (1960) - [Essay #4 - March 2021]

Spring Forward, Fall Back: A Study on "Beyond the Time Barrier"

*Super Spoilers*

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"You are from a nation of speaking people. How glorious that must be!"  -The Supreme

                                                               ________ 

Table of Contents:

1. Summary

2.     History

3.     Production History

4. Set Design

5. Wardrobe

6. Sound

7. Cinematography

8. Editing

9.     Conclusion

*Reading time approx: 15 minutes 30 Seconds

*Published March 20, 2021

*Watch the Film

*Listen to Essay

*Featured on IMDB

*Written by Bolivar T. Caceres            

*Edited by Mike Gates

"Like Humprey Bogart in the Hollywood world, Clarke becomes a genre-picture stud and house-hold name."

    Humans have innate anxieties about the future, and stories about it can feel like preparations, warnings, or prayers against a particular outcome. Director Edgar G. Ulmer and his team explore these anxieties in the B-movie classic Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), and in a Wellsian fashion, shows how too much concern for tomorrow allows no notice of the wrongdoings done today. The wrongdoings that can reshape the human race to a subterranean colony afraid of the land they once thrived on. So, live in the now! 

                           

Summary: 

The United States Air Force dispatches Major Allison on America's first space expedition, a trip one-hundred miles above Earth. They hope to test the technological limits for humans' anticipated travel to the inner planets. The officers have a well-thought-out three-stage plan: "ground to max altitude," "max speed and controllability," and "reentry." 

Major Allison breaks through the fifth dimension in the second stage, arriving at the decimated Sands Air Base 65 years later. He discovers a subterranean human race with a population divided by the impact of a cosmic plague that results in sterility and/or the inability to hear or speak.

Major Allison's education begins when he meets the other' scapes — imprisoned time travelers who escaped the plague. He learns the pandemic is the side effect of nuclear testing done to enable space travel. And that the mutants — bald, would-be surface dwellers who can hear and speak — have been forcibly contained in the militant Citadel — an underground fortress, managed by two leading officers. The Captain and the Supreme lingering powers of speech and hearing have put them in a position of authority.

It is not in the 'scapes and their science, or the Captain and the Supreme's belief he can revive a dying species that gives Major Allison hope. It is the Princess of the Citadel, Trirene, the sole fertile deaf-mute with telepathic powers. She is the one who gives him the map that assists in his plan to return to his time to warn of human's future predicament. 

After a 'scape-lead melee, Major Allison is back to March 5, 1960, where he is wrinkled with gray hair. He warns of the impending doom from human's hellacious actions; his sole evidence is Trirene's ring. Although he is healthy and sound of mind, the other officers around his hospital bed are silent. Only a senator speaks -- "Gentlemen, we have a lot to think about" -- leaving the audience doubtful the tomorrow-obsessed humans can inflict a healthy change on the future.

 

History:

  The cold war and a potential nuclear annihilation are in every global citizens' mind in the 1960s. The memory of fifteen years before -- a decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki-- lingers in people's thoughts. Many respond by constructing bunkers and stockpiling provisions. Students learn to hide under desks to protect themselves in fallout drills. At the release of Beyond the Time Barrier, democracy and communism are toe-to-toe, in an apparent death-grip struggle for their ideologies. The future seems a bleak, tumble-down existence, where past acts force a plague-ridden, mutagenized human race underground. 

    The first country into space, the progress of advanced technology, an upper hand in the nuclear race, ideological differences, and the ole human hubris embitter relationships between nations. The Vietnam war is five years young. America launches the Pioneer 5 Spacecraft to gather information for the potential travel between Earth and Venus. Hefner opens the first playboy mansion in Chicago, and birth control pills ignite the counterculture's sexual revolution. 

    

    Ulmer, with producer and lead actor Robert Clarke, takes all the cause célèbre of the time, intermingles them with the crippling fears of the era, and molds it into a ghostly reflection of the outcomes of the world's short-sighted decisions. Beware! 

 

Production History:

Ulmer and Clarke create their first picture together with The Man from Planet X (1951), a B-movie take on The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950). In The Man from Planet X, Clarke portrays John Lawrence, a recognizable imitation of Casablanca's Rick Blaine, who tells his story in classic Film Noir fashion, using flashbacks and voiceovers. 

    Like Humprey Bogart in the Hollywood world, Clarke becomes a genre-picture stud and house-hold name. Clarke solidifies his place in the B-movie world when he writes, directs, and produces The Hideous Sun Demon (1958). This film examines the fear and ignorance around nuclear power while attempting to break away from the well-worn noir formulas that dominated the film industry. 

By the release of Beyond the Time Barrier, Ulmer's films were in high demand for their genre-bending entertainment, such as The Magnificent Transparent Man, a 1960 gangster twist on H.G Wells' The Invisible Man, which finds its poignancy by again tapping into the nuclear threat.

At the end of The Man from Planet X, the audience waits for Lawrence to say, "here's to looking at you kid," but instead, he cautiously utters, "knowledge will only bring more fears in a world already filled with it." This phrase, combined with the nine-years of world fears and the progress made in science fiction narrative, is what motivates Clarke to finally take his story to Ulmer to direct their second picture together, Beyond the Time Barrier.  

 

Set Design:

Major Allison, stunned by a manually-controlled sentinel, wakes up to find himself in a city evocative of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) and the modes of German Expressionism. His protest and inquiries unheard, Major Allison follows Trirene, wishing to find answers to his predicament and locality. After marching down a wide triangular corridor, topped and centered with a duct, Major Allison truly enters into production designer Lester D. Guthrie and his team's world. 

Major Allison and his escorts enter a spacious hallway with upside-down triangular pillars with negative triangular space between them. Although triangles define the Citadel's decor, they do serve to widen the scenic dimension and force perceptive, tricks adopted from German Expressionism. 

There are upper levels to this underground metropolis, where imprisoned 'scapes live and work, and there's space down below, where the mutants stay shut. There are elevator pillars, open-door rooms, abundant vegetation, and even a steamy indoor pool. And while everyone walks as if with a singular purpose, bulky surveillance cameras watch them with jerky movements. For an estimated $125,000 film budget, creativity is one's only ace-in-the-hole to create such appealing visuals of a place and time solemnly symbolic of human's past transgressions.  

 

Wardrobe:

What does a dystopian underground society wear? Does everyone wear different or similar clothes? What style and color are these clothes? If the society is unable to read, write, talk, and listen, are there concepts such as individualism, which strives so passionately to be different with striking new clothes, and the most-well-done and current hairstyle? 

Military raised, Major Allison has no quibbles when he changes his monochrome flight suit and helmet for a pied coverall with a white two-hole-punched belt, the standard attire for all men of the Citadel. The women look like Trirene: a fitting gray dress, three-inches above the knees, with a black undershirt and heels. 

Costume supervisor Jack Masters and Guthrie use the wardrobe's simplicity to portray the human race's loss of vibrancy, drained by turmoil, disease, and visions of death. The clothing alludes to what these cosmic transgressions will do to life. It will make it dull and hopeless. Like the citizens, the wardrobe is merely passing through space and time, waiting for death. -- Or for the past to repent.  

Sound:

A patriotic, uplifting fanfare plays while the X-80, the first interstellar aircraft, rides down the runway. The introduction credits roll-up the screen, and Major Allison pulls up to Sands Air Base. There is a sensation of prosperity and optimism; not only will tomorrow come and be fruitful, but it will also be great. The juxtaposition of images and what was innovative crawling credits is not responsible for rendering this sensation. It is the music that builds the conviction that Beyond the time Barrier will be about successfully reaching beyond human limits. In its way, the film does fulfill this expectation.  

The X-80 propels Allison through time and space to a human race pulled awfully beyond their limits. A human race with little hope, and only their desperate attempts for survival -- consummation between Trirene and Major Allison, double-crossing to return to one's time, and a final melee to the death, two men left alive. Albeit alarmist, the film progresses on a downbeat that at every glimmer of hope is bludgeoned like the citadel citizens by their prisoners. 

And, at every moment, as is common in all Umer's films, sound is the narrative's crux. When actors are flat, unable to provide the necessary pathos, or when the mood shifts too quickly, the sound is there to hold the film together, to give the narrative its panache. 

Major Allison returns to base, at his limits, older in age, back from seeing and participating in an irremediable future. The same patriotic uplifting fanfare plays, but the meaning has changed. The once triumphant music sending off a soldier on a mission is now one of warning and apprehension, lamenting the importance of amending our mistakes and asking for forgiveness for our wrongdoings. 

Cinematography:

Meredith M. Nicholson's 35 mm black and white cinematography is static, and when the camera does move, it is ponderous like a television production camera. These choices allow for the audience to be engrossed in the multilayered narrative and the mise en scene. However, this does not mean shots are dull and without depth. 

When Major Allison ends up meeting the other 'scapes, the camera lingers on a wide shot as he learns about his predicament. Nicholson utilizes an anamorphic lens to make the room and space between characters significant. Major Allison on the left of the frame is three feet from Capt. Markova (Arianne Ulmer) and Gen. Karl Kruse (Stephen Bekassy.) Adding to the depth of the room is Dr. Bourman (John Van Dreelen.) This staging suggests the prevalent triangle. The shadows are not too thick or frequent like in Film Noirs, as the cast and crew ventured to create something different from the 1950s genre pictures. 

Nicholson's stripped-down photography is a narrative device like the wardrobe: a visual interpretation of a bland and dying society with no extravagances. Nicholson takes sharp notice of the set design, using actor's strengths within the overall narrative with post-production in mind. While the staging decisions refrain from making a gaudy cinematic statement, they remain thoughtful and straightforward. they remain thoughtful and straightforward.

 

Editing:

Major Allison's plan to return to 1960 is a simple one: escape the Citadel and reverse the maneuvers that led him to break the "time barrier." With this opportunity, the 'scapes gaslight Major Allison to believe that their incited mutiny is the only way to escape. In actuality, each covets the X-80 to return to their time. 

Editor Jack Ruggiero intercuts mutants rampaging and killing their capturers, soldiers shooting down said mutants, a progressing love byplay that ends in Trirnene's death, three failed attempts to murder Major Allison, and a conclusive understanding between the Major and the Supreme that ultimately gives way to the Major's exit from the Citadel, to be evocative of Battleship Potemkin (1926), the revolt in Island of lost souls (1932), and the final deathblow in every Film Noir. It is a well-balanced fusion of film history, like all of Beyond the Time Barrier, keenly using parallel editing to captivate its audience. 

Indeed, no editing is seamless and without faults. Continuity errors or pacing ineptitudes riddle the majority of b-movies. However, editor Jack Ruggiero strives to heed the past to help produce a timeless piece whose influence seems to linger in future science fiction films. There are the fresh motif-inspired triangular transitions, but importantly, there is the know-how when not to cut, when to let a scene between blossoming lovers breath, or better when to cut away from unconvincing acting. At under an hour and twenty minutes, not a single cut seems wasted. Maybe this is another warning for the future! 

 

Conclusion:

Although Ulmer strikes a downbeat tone right to the end, leaving little hope that the human race will heed Major Allison's advice, there is still time to heed the urgent warnings of Beyond the Time Barrier. Either that, or we'll need to warm up to the idea of becoming Morlocks, bald mutants, or infertile deaf-mutes. What frightful imaginings!   

Bolivar T. Caceres is a Bronx-based artist and writer. His poems appear on ShortEdition and Ariel Chart. He is also the author of the chapbook Outside My Garret Window, published in 2020. He currently writes for the quarterly film blog Film Studies Quarterly and the news blog New York Positivity. Connect with him on social media @BolivarTCaceres and at www.BtcArt.co.

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