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Black Hole, The (1979) |
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DVD Sci-Fi-Fantasy
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Written by Bill Warren
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Tuesday, 30 March 1999 |
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title:
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The Black Hole |
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studio:
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Anchor Bay Entertainment |
| MPAA rating: |
PG |
| starring: |
Maximilian
Schell, Anthony Perkins, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette
Mimieux, Ernest Borgnine. Unbilled voices of Roddy McDowall and Slim
Pickens |
| release year: |
1979 |
| film rating: |
Two stars |
| reviewed by: |
Bill Warren |
As entertainment, "The Black Hole" is a failure, but as a historical artifact, for a film buff, it's fascinating.
After "Star Wars," everyone wanted to get into the space adventure
movie act in hopes of catching an edge of the endless stream of money
that Lucas' film was generating the world over. Ron Miller, the
son-in-law of Walt Disney and one of the studio's busiest producers,
decided that even Walt Disney Pictures needed to take a plunge into
space.
Trying to capitalize on the public's dawning awareness of the strange
space singularities known as "black holes" (which are collapsed stars,
and not holes at all) as well as to cash in on what "Star Wars" had
created, the studio announced a movie to be called "The Black Hole" --
and then stalled. Clearly, "Star Wars" itself was not the kind of movie
that the Disney company of the day would have made, so they tried to
reshape the idea of a space adventure into something at once suitable
for Disney, and yet which would capture the "Star Wars" audience.
Rumors emerged from the studio that "The Black Hole" was going to
feature a little boy and his pet dog, then that it was going to be
about a literal descent into Hell.
When Miller finally got the project underway, he made almost all the
mistakes interested onlookers were fearing; he failed to grasp just
what a big-scale science fiction film should be, as well as what a good
movie should be. For years, the studio had gotten by on family-film
projects entrusted to mediocre, easily-dominated writers and directors.
Even though "The Black Hole" was a very different kind of project for
Disney (it got the studio its first PG rating), Miller didn't
understand that this required different kinds of writers and director.
It's directed by Gary Nelson, a standard Hollywood studio director,
competent, but style-less and unimaginative. Nelson began his career
with a handful of sitcoms ("F Troop," "Captain Nice," etc.), and after
a brief foray into theatrical films, settled into a long series of TV
movies, mostly comedies at first, then crime films. He did do the
theatrical "Freaky Friday" for Disney, but there's nothing about his
career that even hints that he'd be appropriate to helm a space
adventure movie. After "The Black Hole," he returned to TV movies, and
with a few minor exceptions ("Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of
Gold"), he's remained there ever since.
The credited writers are similar. The original story is credited to Jeb
Rosebrook, Bob Barbash and Richard Landau, who very likely did not work
together, but rather successively. Rosebook's earliest screen credit
was for Sam Peckinpah's fine "Junior Bonner," but after that, like
Nelson, Rosebrook worked on TV movies, some of which ("I Will Fight No
More Forever") were considerably better than others ("Kenny Rogers as
The Gambler, Part III"). Rosebrook is also co-credited with the
screenplay for "The Black Hole" with Gerry Day, who wrote only one
other movie, plus episodes of TV series like "Little House on the
Prairie."
Barbash wrote only a handful of films, with "Tarzan and the Great
River" probably being best known. Richard Landau was another matter
altogether; he was probably the first writer on "The Black Hole." His
career went back to the early 1940s, but it was not exactly
distinguished. He was a busy utility-level writer, tending toward crime
melodramas and horror films, such as "Secret of the Whistler," "The
Lost Continent," "Pharaoh's Curse," "Voodoo Island," "Hot Cars," "The
Girl in Black Stockings" and "Frankenstein 1970." (He also is credited
with "The Quatermass Experiment"/"The Creeping Unknown," but the script
owes more to Nigel Kneale than to Landau.)
So why did Disney hire these second-raters to write and direct what
could have been a breakthrough film for the Disney studio? Because it
was the Disney studio, with its long record of avoiding (expensive)
major talent in favor of malleable nonentities who could be relied upon
to produce smooth, unremarkable movies that were exactly what the big
bosses wanted.
The story of "The Black Hole" is very slim, derived partly from Jules
Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and his sequel "Mysterious
Island." But it's short on incident and long on talk. A small American
spaceship passes near a dangerous black hole, which is sucking in
matter and light itself. Exaggerated fears are expressed -- the black
hole might swallow the universe, it's a rift in the fabric of space and
time; it's even referred to in religious terms as Hell itself. The crew
notices another ship apparently motionless in space near the
singularity, the Cygnus, missing 20 years.
Eventually, they board the giant Cygnus to be confronted by glowering,
bearded Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), alone aboard the ship
with lots of robots, including the pointlessly demonic Maximilian, who
seems to have no other function than to loom in a threatening manner. A
lot of talk follows, plus vaguely ominous scenes suggesting that
Reinhardt is really a villain. As if you couldn't tell already.
Very little is said about the black hole nearby, other than that
Reinhardt wants to go "into" it. Probes return from it every now and
then, but we learn nothing about whatever they might have encountered.
At the climax, the survivors do plunge "into" the Black Hole -- and
sure enough, it's Hell in there, with Maximilian presiding over gouts
of flame and jagged black rocks like Mephistopheles. There follows some
church-window imagery. This is supposed to be profound, but its
embarrassingly banal.
So is the entire movie. Someone assumed that since it was a Disney
movie, "The Black Hole" had to have Disney-like characters. Taking the
wrong cue from "Star Wars," there are two comic robots, which not only
talk funny (in the unbilled voices of Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens),
but, far worse, look funny, like a tin salt-and-pepper set. They have
big eyes and are given to big reactions, which makes their turning into
heroes toward the end awkward and awesomely unconvincing.
The performances vary wildly, from Maximilian Schell's intensity, to
the cool professionalism of Robert Forster, Anthony Perkins and Yvette
Mimieux (who is telepathically in contact with a robot), to the
colorless, bland Joseph Bottoms. Ernest Borgnine, who flowers under
good direction, either overacts or becomes stilted under bad direction
-- here he's stilted. His character is also required to abruptly turn
cowardly toward the end just to further a minor plot point.
But the whole movie is a plot point; it exists solely to be a movie
called "The Black Hole." The characters are routine, the conflicts
unconvincing, the plot developments abrupt and inconsequential, and the
climax wildly misjudged. (The old 1950s space movie standby, the swarm
of incandescent meteors, makes its unwelcome reappearance.)
The movie looks great, though. The cinematography by Frank V. Phillips,
like much of the rest of the movie, is routine. The sets are
preposterously vast (all that air!), but they're gorgeous, especially
the exterior views of the fragile, almost antique-looking Cygnus. Peter
Ellenshaw was the production designer, but he was really one of the
great matte artists of movie history (rarely a production designer),
whose career began with movies like "Things to Come" and many others
for Alexander Korda; he then worked for Michael Powell and the Archers
("The Thief of Bagdad," "Black Narcissus," etc.), and finally wound up
at the Disney studios, where he worked for 27 years. And worked very
well, too; virtually everything good about "The Black Hole" can be
credited to Peter Ellenshaw.
The score by John Barry is only serviceable, except that he provides a
driving, haunting title theme that really does create the musical
equivalent of a spiraling trip to the heart of Hell. Technically in
general, the film can't be faulted; though it's not a
show-off-your-sound-system DVD, "The Black Hole" does have some
satisfactory explosions here and there.
Anchor Bay has been releasing Disney films that the studio itself
apparently doesn't want to bother with, which is good for film history
and dogged collectors of Disneyana. In this case, on one side of the
DVD, they provide the film letterboxed and accompanied by a trailer and
a handful of uncaptioned stills. The other side features the film
panned and scanned, which doesn't help a movie that's this problematic
in the first place.
"The Black Hole" is one of the most interesting "cusp" films of movie
history; it was made just at the point that those running Disney studio
were beginning to realize that they were going to have to be more like
a real studio than they were in the past. But it was too soon for "The
Black Hole," which embodies almost all the worst aspects of the
studio's 1970s output -- the wrong directors, a compromised story, flat
characters and the split-brained attitude that to make a movie suitable
for the family, you insert childish elements into an adult story.
| more details |
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sound format:
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Dolby Digital |
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aspect ratio(s):
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letterboxed and pan-and-scan editions |
| comments: |
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| reference system |
| DVD player: |
Kenwood DV-403 |
| receiver: |
Kenwood VR-407 |
| main speakers: |
Paradigm Atom |
| center speaker: |
Paradigm CC-170 |
| rear speakers: |
Paradigm ADP-70 |
| subwoofer: |
Paradigm PDR-10 |
| monitor: |
36-inch Sony XBR |
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