Just Imagine (1930)

Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Absolutely amazing

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Here's a first for me - a pre-Hays Code science-fiction romantic musical comedy. Just Imagine, directed by David Butler, envisions a 1980 where everybody flies rather than use cars, are given numbers instead of names, eat food and drink alcohol in pill form, and have their life partners decided by a judge. Just Imagine is a true oddity, and should be seen by anybody interested in obscure curiosities or the evolution of sci-fi in cinema. Despite the wonderful Oscar-nominated set design, the film is also very, very bad, plagued by wooden acting, forgettable songs, and some plain old weirdness.J-21 (John Garrick) is in love with LN-18 (Maureen O'Sullivan), but the fact that he has reached the peak in his field - aviation - is stopping him from achieving greater things. Due to the limits of his field. the judge deciding on LN-18's ideal partner is the favouring smug and loathsome aristocrat MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson) instead. After witnessing a successful experiment to bring back a man, who dubs himself Single O (vaudeville performer El Brendel), back to life after being frozen in 1930, J-21 is approached by a scientist who has perfected a 'rocket plane' capable of reaching Mars, and wants J-21 to be the pilot. Joined by Single-O and his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson), J-21 sets out on a mission into the unknown in the hope of becoming a hero and winning the hand of his true love.Some early moments of Just Imagine are truly wonderful. Riding high above the city in their aircrafts, R-21 parks up next to LN-18 for a mid-air chat amidst the backdrop of skyscrapers. The special effects throughout are wonderfully charming and hold up well 75 years on. These brief delights are sadly few and far between, and the film spends the majority of its hefty 110 minute running-time churning out blandly-filmed song-and-dance routines, including a bizarre number about never killing a fly because it may be in love with another fly, Brendel's tiresome and unfunny shtick, and taking its sweet time to actually get into outer space. When we finally lands on Mars, we are in Ed Wood territory, with scantily-clad natives and plonky fight scenes. It flopped upon release due to the decreasing popularity of musicals at the time (pre-Busby Berkeley), but Just Imagine at the very least deserves to be seen once and never again.

Set in New York City in the far future year of 1980, this was the first science fiction film made as either a talkie or a musical. It stars the little remembered vaudeville comedian El Brendel as a man who is struck by lightning in 1930 and revived 50 years later. I can't say that I found either him or the film particularly funny. The biggest chuckles were provided by Frank Albertson and Marjorie White, who was sadly killed in a car crash in 1935. The songs are pretty forgettable or just...odd. They're not exactly Cole Porter or Irving Berlin. However, I did like the one about drinking which is one of several digs at Prohibition in the film. Of the 386 films that I watched since January 2014, this is the oldest as well as being the oldest talkie that I have ever seen, though I have seen several older silent films.Only 19 years old at the time, Maureen O'Sullivan, one of Ireland's first film stars, is the female lead and the best actor in the film. She and Albertson were really the only ones in the film to have careers worth mentioning afterwards. The acting is generally pretty bad. That may have something to do with the fact that sound films were still very new in 1930 and actors were learning the new craft of acting in such films but I've seen several others from 1931 to 1934 where the acting was considerably better so that excuse only goes so far. Maureen O'Sullivan and Joyzelle Joyner were the only actors in the film who were still alive in the real 1980, which was the year that the latter died. The director David Butler - who later directed several Shirley Temple films and "Calamity Jane" - died in June 1979 so he just missed out on seeing whether the film's vision of the future would come true or not. However, by that stage, it was a pretty safe bet that it wouldn't! I loved the design of the New York of 1980, which was presumably inspired by "Metropolis". The footage was later reused in the "Flash Gordon" and "Buck Rogers" serials while the very impressive looking "rocket plane" used to travel to Mars was later seen as Dr. Zarkov's rocket ship in the "Flash Gordon" ones, as were some of the props and costumes. Speaking of Mars, I loved the design of the planet too. I think that this could very well have been the first on screen depiction of a manned mission to Mars. The scenes on Mars are pretty bizarre, it has to be said, but they're good fun and probably the best part of the film.Incidentally, Maureen O'Sullivan's family and mine go way back! Well, sort of. I'm not lifelong best friends with her grandson Ronan Farrow or anything. My great-grandfather was a private in the Connaught Rangers before, during and after World War I and his commanding officer was her father Captain Charles O'Sullivan. They served together in India and the Western Front. When in Ireland, they were stationed in Boyle, County Roscommon, her hometown, and my great-grandfather remembered her playing around the barracks as a little girl. That means that I am only three degrees of separation from a 1930s Hollywood star.Overall, this is not a great film by any means but it's fun, even it isn't particularly funny, and has an important place in sci-fi history as the genre's first sound film. However, it did little for it on the big screen as, outside of some of the Universal Monsters films which were more horror orientated in any event, there were hardly any sci- fi feature films (as opposed to serials) made in the 1930s or 1940s. It was not until the 1950s that the genre began to have an impact in Hollywood.

This movie is one of the most unique films of the early talkie era. It seems to cross the boundaries of every genre of film. A science-fiction-musical-romantic comedy for the ages. There are fantastic settings and ideas put forth in this. This film cost over one million dollars to make in 1930 dollars. Some of the humor is surprisingly frank for the time. Best line in the film comes when El Brendel meets first the queen of Mars and then her male second in command. After the latter flirts with him, El Brendel says: "She's not the queen, he is!" There are several musical numbers, most notably a strange modernistic dance on Mars with writhing dancing girls in the arms of a giant idol. Some of this footage along with the space ship used wound up in the "Flash Gordon" serials from Universal which came out a few years later. Once you've seen this amazing film, you won't forget it.

This is one of the strangest films of the early talkie era. This is a sci-fi musical adventure about life fifty years in the future - 1980 at the time. The story revolves around John Garrick and Maureen O'Sullivan, whose characters are assigned alphanumeric names as is everyone else.Garrick and O'Sullivan were also teamed romantically in "A Song O' My Heart" during the same year, another early musical by Fox. At any rate, Garrick and O'Sullivan play lovers of the future that want to wed, but the state now intervenes when a woman accepts "competing bids" or proposals of marriage based on the merits of the applicants. Garrick has a competitor for O'Sullivan's hand, and the only way he can win in court is to do something outstanding. A nearby scientist needs a pilot for his spacecraft to Mars, and Garrick figures this is a way of distinguishing himself and winning the hand of his lady love.As comic relief there is El Brendel, who has a vaudeville brand of humor. He comes along for the ride to Mars too. There are several musical interludes in the film including one ode to old fashioned girls - the girls of 1930 - showing flappers as moms in a none too flattering light. They still show prohibition being enforced in 1980 too, though with a promise of light beers and wines being legalized shortly.I'd recommend this film as being good but strange fun for the right audience.