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"Between inner and outer space," the human body's lava-lamp planetarium. The outside world offers drab intrigue, the underground lab is a vast garage filled with monitors, the party doesn't get going until the top-secret submarine is unveiled over a honeycomb tile floor. A valuable scientific mind lies comatose, the vessel is shrunk to test tube size and injected into the patient's circulatory system for a bit of laser surgery. A saboteur lurks in the crew. The blocky government agent (Stephen Boyd)? The philosophical doctor (Arthur Kennedy)? The intrepid assistant (Raquel Welch)? The claustrophobic consultant (Donald Pleasence)? The groundwork of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea comes in handy for Richard Fleischer's anatomy lesson as pulsing canal, with each organ a psychedelic pit stop. The heart must be stilled for a full minute ("Each beat separates man from eternity"), the lungs become a wind tunnel encrusted with tobacco rocks, the lymphatic system is a Sargasso Sea and the brain a jungle of electrified webs. Red cells and gelatinous corpuscles swim across purple CinemaScope innards, Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell oversee the mission in their military greens. (The colonel inadvertently elucidates the fable's spiritual intimations when he can't quite bring himself to crush an ant: "You'll wind up a Hindu. They respect all forms of life, however small.") The trip dares not venture below the bellybutton, still a risqué gag sneaks in as Welch must have antibodies peeled off her torso in a desperate group-grope. Miniaturism, Clovio and El Greco's métier transposed to Cold War espionage, a certain touch of Méliès as microscopic travelers climb an optical nerve and depart in the flood of a single tear. "Very poetic, gentlemen. Let me know when we pass the soul." Kubrick notices much of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey. With William Redfield, Jean Del Val, and Barry Coe.
--- Fernando F. Croce |