In 1960, it likely still felt relatively recent that a plane had broken the sound barrier, so it is only logical a sci-fi film would explore a jet pilot going Beyond the Time Barrier, in a low-budget picture of that name from that year.
Robert Clarke stars as a pilot who travels to that distant year of 2024. It is interesting to compare and contrast the time as presented in the film versus what it was like when we lived through it just a year ago. The population is overwhelmingly either mutants or mutes. Given the mutes will eventually become mutants themselves, I’m going to call them mutetants.
There are also those who can speak and are not yet mutated, and those people get to boss everybody else around. That group is led by the head of the military, played by Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan. This guy has a beard which recalls that of Fidel Castro, and he has a voice that is somehow equal parts Droopy and Colonel Sanders. Morgan says he is on his way becoming a mutant, and that isn’t too surprising, given that weird-ass voice.
The actual leader of the remaining humans in this future is Vladimir Sokoloff. He is grandfatherly, and that is appropriate, as he is the grandfather of Trini (Darlene Thompkins), the only one of the mutes who is not sterile. In addition to being quite attractive, she is telepathic, and I wondered if the men around her had to strain to control their thoughts.
Her ability read minds leads to a funny moment where catty scientist Arianne Ulmer alludes to that character’s plan for Clarke. Ulmer starts out saying “So little Tirini can get busy and…” until Thompkins smacks her, so I assume that sentence was going to end with “…get busy.”
Given this, I’m not sure why Clarke is in such a hurry to return to the past, but he’s in good company. Ulmer and some other scientists he encounters also all traveled there from different points in the past, those being 1973 and 1994. Those from 1994 are especially desperate to return, presumably because they think the music from that era is so much better than that of any other. At least, that’s how a lot of people in my age group seem to regard the music.
The scientists think they can send Clarke back to 1959 and stop the origin of the virus. I had hoped they would also ask him to look into a mysterious “Army of the 12 Monkeys”, but no dice. Then again, they also think he was brought there by the 5th dimension, which makes so little sense in any regard that I had to completely set this aside. Besides, the name of that group’s most famous song is not “Up, Up and Away, in My Beautiful Experimental Jet Aircraft”.
There are some elements here that are interesting and which make this a film to seek out for fans of vintage sci-fi. Most intriguing is the weird use of triangles. A set designed by Ernst Fegté has inverted pyramids for columns. This looks intriguing, except the same rather small set is reused so many times as to make the even the most casual viewer realize they are just seeing the same thing from different angles. Video screens and windows in this world are also triangular. An odd production decision was to use triangle wipes between many scenes. It is shocking and interesting the first time it’s done, only to become annoying when it is repeated ad nauseum.
Performances are overall rather good. Clarke is livelier than he was in The Man from Planet X. Perhaps that is because he was one of the producers this time around. Unfortunately, he completely lost his shirt on this production, as it went bankrupt and the rights were auctioned off by the lab which did the film developing. Thompkins is good, though one obviously cannot tell how she would fare with dialogue if one only has seen her in this. Her film career was brief, with the highlights being bit parts in Elvis’s Blue Hawaii and Jerry Lewis’s The Ladies Man. Sokoloff has probably the best part in the film, and he is as solid and dependable as this character actor was in the great many other productions I’ve seen him in.
Beyond the Time Barrier is a flawed and a fairly insignificant film, even among the low-budget sci-fi pictures of the 50’s and early 60’s. Still, it has a certain charm, some intriguing visual elements and even some aspects which are entertaining when regarded as camp. I found it interesting how blatantly it seems to reference such films as This Island Earth, with similar triangular viewscreens, and Forbidden Planet, as there is a scene here where Thompkins supposed swims au naturale in a pool surrounded by laughably fake “jungle” foliage. Given the choice, I’d rather see Thompkins in the altogether than Anne Francis, though both are wearing swimsuits matching their skin tone. A film Barrier could not have foreseen would share a similar opening text crawl, as this and Star Wars are among the few films to open with text scrolling out towards the horizon.
Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring Robert Clarke, Darlene Thompkins, Vladimir Sokoloff
Watched on the Kino Lorber blu-ray Edgar G. Ulmer Sci-Fi Collection