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Acknowledgements
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(1922– ). American director and producer.
Produced: Serpent Island (and wrote) (Tom Gries
1954).
Yet Gordon also warrants more sympathetic consideration. The topic of small
creatures becoming huge, trite and uninteresting to adults, is more
meaningful and evocative for children, a significant portion of his
audience, who are tiny people living in a world of large, looming
adults. And, regarding his rear-projection techniques, critics forget
that the obvious phoniness seen by their adult eyes is undetectable
to younger viewers, who might find, for example, his giant grasshoppers
in The Beginning of the End to be genuinely frightening (as
I know, from personal experience). His use of rear projection can
also be justified for reasons other than economy, as it allowed Gordon
to display gigantic menaces that were far more numerous, fast-moving,
and impressive to undiscriminating observers than anything Ray HARRYHAUSEN
could have achieved using the available technology of the times. For
filmgoers of a certain age, then, Gordon's films were something to
look forward to, and they were rarely disappointing.
Further, while his early films were usually threadbare—classic mom-and-pop operations, with Gordon and wife Flora Gordon chipping in
for most of the offscreen labors—they were not slapdash; within the confines
of his circumstances, Gordon usually tried to do good work, and if blessed with
capable performers and a decent story, he might succeed. Only when Gordon
attempted to cater to teenagers—an age group he manifestly did not understand—was an abysmal failure guaranteed.
That is why, out of all the films of his first prolific decade,
only The Spider and Village of the Giants should be
avoided at all costs; both mingle dubious science fiction with the
inane antics of talentless teenage actors, and are as a result the
sorts of films that only someone chained to a chair could reasonably
be expected to watch in their entirety. Vastly superior is one of
my three favorite Gordon films, The Beginning of the End, where
a young Peter GRAVES confronts the challenge
of protecting Chicago from an invasion of giant grasshoppers with
startling conviction. Equally meritorious is The Amazing Colossal
Man: even though visibly a hurried effort to exploit the success
of Jack ARNOLD's The Incredible Shrinking Man, the film nonetheless
managed to convey the genuine anguish of a man being separated from
his wife and society by a growing deformity, and if Glenn Langan did
not quite possess the acting ability for the task, well, neither did
Shrinking Man's Grant Williams. Other commentators might offer
kind words for Attack of the Puppet People, with John Hoyt
hamming it up as a man deriving perverse pleasure from shrinking people
and toying with them, or Tormented, an innovative collaboration
with screenwriter George Worthing YATES involving
a man haunted by the body parts of his dead wife. The other Gordon
films from this era—King Dinosaur, The Cyclops, War
of the Colossal Beast, The Boy and the Pirates, and The
Magic Sword—will at least keep you entertained, even if they
do not inspire tremendous admiration.
The decline of the B-movie in the 1960s left Gordon floundering
for a while, and his only contributions were the undistinguished horror
film Picture Mommy Dead and the black-magic epic Necromancy,
starring an Orson Welles increasingly desperate for sources of income
to finance his films. But Gordon did manage to garner the resources
for two major films in the 1970s based on the works of H. G. WELLS.
The Food of the Gods is generally risible, inadequately anchored
by hapless leading man Marjoe Gortner and sabotaged by a senseless
story line, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Empire of the
Ants, the third film I would submit in any defense of Gordon's
talents. Its giant ants represented the pinnacle of Gordon's limited
success with special effects, and its moderately involving plot features
the two most distinguished performances in Gordon's oeuvre: Joan COLLINS,
road-testing the rich-bitch persona that would later serve her well
in Dynasty, and a refreshingly surly Robert LANSING.
The money men in Hollywood were evidently unimpressed
with Gordon's talents, and his only subsequent contributions to the genre were
two rarely-seen horror films, Burned at the Stake and Satan's
Princess. Now presumably retired, perhaps he spends his days surfing the
Internet to find out how he is being remembered. While he cannot honestly be
characterized as a giant of science fiction film, critics at least might stop
describing him as a midget.
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