Unlike today's fantasy-sci-fi directors, who draw on untold millions of studio cash and command armies of computer animators for their projects, Pal created his cinematic wonders with threadbare, minuscule budgets and a hardy band of of two or three special effects guys. Such was the lot of any 1950's producer who dared to make films of imagination.....
At face value, the whole idea of 'Doc Savage' seemed delightfully irresistible,. Taken from a series of fantasy adventure novels ground out by pulp fictioneer Lester Dent, the stories followed the fantastic exploits of all-around super-guy Doc, a beefy, infinitely educated stud with a ripped open shirt and a severe white-blonde widow's peak. With the help of his Scooby-like gang, The Fabulous Five, Doc periodically emerged from his arctic Fortress of Solitude to take on archvillains and monsters with grim determination.......
We wish we could tell you that "Doc Savage" served as a fitting farewell for Pal's long career. But the film, a cheap looking stillborn thing done in by its exhausted campy approach, opened dead-on-arrival in theaters, finding no audience. George Pal continued to prepare future projects, even including a 'Doc Savage' sequel, but the studios were done with him.....and this sorry effort remained the last movie associated with his name....
Doubly sad, because six years later, Steven Spielberg would essentially co-opt and alter the 'Doc Savage' template into Indiana Jones and 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' and captivate and thrill the entire world with it.....Spielberg's film winked at the audience with the sheer silliness of Indiana's adventures, while at the same time making the thrills propulsive and adrenalin-fueled.....
So what went wrong with Pal's own Indiana? A terrible, terrible decision, done presumably in the script stage, to film the story in the same arch, wink-wink, it's-all-a-big-joke manner of the Adam West "Batman" TV series. Turning Batman into a campy clown show tickled the nation's fancy during its debut year 1966. But by 1968, it played like the same tired joke repeated over and over.....everyone yawned and the show simply withered and went away.....
Why Pal decided, nine years later, to apply this completely worn out and now unfunny approach to 'Doc Savage......we have no idea. 42 years later, the movie's as much of a joyless chore to watch as it was in l975.....
If nothing else, it's consistent in its wrong-headedness........in case anyone walked in not knowing the film was intended as a mockery, the music score consists of a male chorus singing clumsy lyrics put to John Philip Sousa marches. When Doc (Ron Ely, a former TV Tarzan) appears, a cartoon gleam in his eye sparkles....a joke that Blake Edwards had already worn out with Tony Curtis in "The Great Race". The rest of the movie plods along like a dress rehearsal for a busted TV pilot, staged by British veteran Michael Anderson as if he were directing the movie from a hospital bed while on life support.....
What seemed brilliant in 1966, when scriptwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. lampooned comic book heroics in his "Batman" TV episodes, curdled badly in l975. If the 'Doc Savage' movie was conceived as nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek jape, then why would any of us sit through it? The answer: no one did. Certainly not for the action sequences, poorly choreographed and resembling lame imitations of old movie serial fistfights.....and the only thing we smiled at was the sight of the movie's logo plastered on all of Doc's fleet of cars and planes.....we're not even sure the ham-fisted filmmakers even saw that as a joke......
But we'll still always love and cherish George Pal for the classic sci-fi/fantasy films that became touchstones for baby boomer childhoods......as for Doc Savage, we last heard Dwayne Johnson, the Rock himself plans to revive the franchise. We don't doubt that Dwayne's Doc will indulge in a bit of sly self-mockery.....he excels in that regard....and we can only imagine how many hundreds of CGI artists are currently digitizing monsters and assorted catastrophic events for him to survive. Well, he 's got nowhere to go but up.....since we can only give up 1 Fortress Of Solitude star (*) for the '75 Doc. Here's hoping his next house call knocks us silly.....and not from campy jokes.
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