You Were Expecting Someone Else III (Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD)
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| Note how the Doctor is mentioned prominently in the advertising this time. |
You Were Expecting Someone Else is a recurring feature covering non-televised Doctor Who from classic eras, generally more or less in the period where they came out. Today we look at the 1966 film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who, Roberta Tovey as Susan Who, and Bernard Cribbins as Not-Ian-Chesterton.
It’s August 5, 1966. The Troggs are at #1 with “With A Girl Like You,” a nice, proper, crunchy record. The rest of the top ten, however, is mostly pretty unambitious pop, with The Kinks chillaxing at #9. Since we last saw Doctor Who, the news has been a standard mixture of war, mass murder, military coup, and the like. Beyond that, as mentioned last entry, England won the World Cup. Also, The House of Lords issued the Practice Statement a somewhat important milestone in political liberalism in the UK in that it freed the House of Lords up to be more progressive, and August 3rd, 1966 happened, which is interesting only if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan. Also, Revolver came out. And, as it’s the summer break in Doctor Who, it’s time for another Dalek film!
It’s strange how different a position this film is in compared to the last one. I mean, first of all, this film flopped and killed plans for a third one (which would have been an adaptation of The Chase, a prospect that is mind-bogglingly weird). Second of all, the show is in a very different place. At the end of season 2, the show was as strong as it had ever been, coming off an inventive season of hits. At the end of season 3, the ratings were in the toilet, the star was being fired, and there was an increasing consensus that the TARDIS had landed everywhere worth landing. As a result, the last movie was in a position to remind us how wonderful Doctor Who could be, and show us things bigger and grander than before. And it basically did that.
But what, exactly, is this film for? Most obviously, it seems to be an occasion for Doctor Who to make a case for its continued relevance – to say “This is what the show can do.” It’s taking a season 2 episode – i.e. from the program’s heyday – and doing it bigger and better. And ironically, given that it failed at the box office, the film is frankly a rousing success in that department.
I suppose we should deal with the film’s flop status. Why did it flop? The argument that Doctor Who was also flopping at that time is certainly compelling, but it’s worth noting that the film was not advertised as a Doctor Who film, it was advertised as a Dalek film. Admittedly the two were not entirely distinct in people’s minds, and the Dalek craze was past its immediate prime, but Doctor Who’s decline has been compellingly argued to mostly be down to the fact that ITV was aggressively counter-programming it with the Adam West Batman series, not due to actual problems with the snow. No, to my mind the most compelling account for why the film flopped is that six days after a massive nationalist victory in the World Cup is possibly not the ideal market to release a film about a bombed out and decimated London. The film had a release date that went bad on it. Had West Germany beaten England, a film in which horrible Nazi-esqe monsters who have decimated London are defeated by a dottering old Victorian man would very possibly have captured the national mood perfectly. Having won, though, and with England feeling at the top of the world, maybe bombing out London wasn’t quite in step with what people wanted that week.
Because in most people’s hindsight, of the two Cushing films this is decisively the superior one. And it’s not hard to see why – if nothing else, Russell T. Davies admonition that he doesn’t care about aliens on the planet Zog, he wants stories about humans applies here – fundamentally, it’s easier to have a compelling drama about London than it is about Skaro. Just… not that week. There is, after all, a whole strand of thought on Doctor Who that says this – aliens invading London – is what the show is for. It’s not a strand of thought I particularly subscribe to, but on the other hand, it’s tough to make a real argument that the occasional massive invasion of Earth isn’t good fun. So even if the two films about as well made, this film would have some natural advantages.
On the other hand, if we think back to the actual story this is based on, one of the things we’ll see is that it’s a story that’s trying to be a much later version of Doctor Who than it is, and doing a mixed bag of a job at it. It’s hard to oversell how absolutely essential Terry Nation’s writing is to the style of Doctor Who, but the fact of the matter is that his ideas beat his execution a lot of the time, and that much of the fun of watching The Dalek Invasion of Earth is watching the series start to discover what it is, not watching the series actually succeed – exhibit A on this remains, of course, the spectacularly bewildering plot point of the Daleks planning on flying the Earth around as a space ship, a point that they manage to make even weirder in the movie. On the other hand, exhibit B in the “why The Dalek Invasion of Earth doesn’t quite work” game is probably the Slyther, which, to its credit, the movie omits entirely as one of several fixes David Whitaker applies to Nation’s script in order to shrink it to movie size/make the pacing not mind-wrenchingly excruciating. (As we saw in Season 3, and will see again in Seasons 4, 12, and arguably 17, taking Terry Nation’s concepts and having someone else write them is generally a recipe for success.)
I’m dancing around it a bit, so I may as well come out and say it – almost everything that is well-regarded about The Dalek Invasion of Earth is done better and more memorably by this film. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say most people who have not watched either lately imagine the episodes to be much more like the film when they wax nostalgic about it.
Watching Doctor Who and the Daleks, one got the sense of the TV show being done more competently but with less soul. That doesn’t vanish here, but the fact of the matter is that when the series is flailing about trying to find what it’s good at as much as late Season 3 was, seeing a film that’s at least confident about its strengths is oddly relieving. In some ways, watching the film clarifies just how odd the run from The Ark on has been – a series of experiments often (but not always) with dramatic high and low points, but never a show that felt like it knew what it was doing. That’s going to settle out, though if you set the date where Doctor Who stopped knowing what it was doing at The Ark, we’ve got as many stories ahead before it settles down as we do behind.
But this film is useful, if nothing else, in that it shows us very clearly some things that work in Doctor Who. Things that we’re going to see integrated into the series proper over the next few weeks of entries.
First of all, let’s talk about Peter Cushing. Back in the first film, I observed the way in which he uses the visual space afforded to him in order to characterize the Doctor, using a stooped walk and physical presence to do what Hartnell does with small gestures, and how that lends a cinematic feel to the proceedings. Here he fine-tunes that even more. He drops the stoop slightly, and adds a proper action hero edge to the character that, while short even of the Jon Pertwee era, little yet of a standard action hero, enlivens the action considerably. The eccentric Victorian inventor is still clearly the base, but the character has been reworked into a more viable leading man.
And for two of his three companions, there’s some significant stuff going on as well. Susan Who, as in the first film, is played by child actress Roberta Tovey, and while she can be a bit overly precious, she still works better than Susan Foreman ever did. The dynamic of a child companion is intriguing, and one of the few places where movies may work better than television for Doctor Who. The logistical reality of a child actress on a shoot as grueling as Doctor Who, to say nothing of how many plot problems it would introduce, makes a child companion something of a non-starter in the series (although it is difficult, even as a dedicated Karen Gillan fan, not to wish that the Doctor had come back after five minutes and we’d gotten a seven-year-old Amelia Pond as a companion). But on the screen, it’s a delight, with Susan a satisfying mix of precocious and vulnerable.
And then there’s Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, our Ian Chesterton stand-in. It is, of course, impossible to mention Cribbins without pointing to his later turn as Wilfred Mott, one of the highlights of the David Tennant era. Especially because, as I said in the entry for The Chase, there are clear similarities between Wilf and Ian, so casting Cribbins as an Ian stand-in makes some real sense. Cribbins’ stand-out scene is a lengthy comedic bit in which he, dressed in a Roboman costume, has to try to impersonate the mechanical Robomen and flails about trying to keep in lockstep with them. It’s easy to see this scene as pointless faffing about akin to Roy Castle’s comedic sequence trying to get a door in the Dalek base to stay open last movie. But where the Castle scene was just broad slapstick, Cribbins gets a scene with some real tension underneath it. Yes, Cribbins is doing some physical comedy here (and he’s great at it), but there’s a genuine tension underlying the scene. It may be funny, but it’s funny played out over a backdrop of immediate danger – every comedic fumble Cribbins makes is also a direct threat to his life. One thing that makes the Hartnell era of Doctor Who harder to watch for a fan of any later era is that theres markedly less comedy in it, and the comedy that is there is generally based more on broad concepts than on specific “gags.” This scene is very much a template for the sort of humor that does come in later, and much as I love the Hartnell era, I confess, this scene was a welcome omen of the future.
There’s also the Daleks, who are effective in a way they aren’t necessarily on television. Part of this, to be frank, is that there are six of them and they can be used in action sequences, with explosions, at night. Yeah, the show isn’t going to come close to that for decades. But the point is less that the Daleks are terrifyingly effective like this than that the movie highlights the importance of getting a set piece to work well. We’ll see some startlingly good ones in both The Tenth Planet and Power of the Daleks in which the show thinks about what it can manage and does that effectively – in a way that highlights the degree to which maybe having Daleks overruning London was a bit much for them. (The flip side of that night shoot is that the iconic shots running around London are replaced with some very generic cityscapes, and the action focuses heavily on the countryside. Of course, as soon as the UNIT era begins, we’ll get lots of stories in which aliens invade everything in England they possibly can except for London itself.) Even if the story falls down here for its excessive reliance on action sequences, the movie is a sobering reminder that a good spectacle goes a long way. (See also the glam rock Daleks, two years too early and still just as fabulous as last time.)
The last thing we should note is something we didn’t talk much about in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and I should hat-tip once again to Wood and Miles’s About Time, available from finer Amazon Associates widgets everywhere. The normal brief on The Dalek Invasion of Earth and thus this film is that it’s about the Blitz. But Miles and Wood compellingly argue that the story is best read as part of the “tear it down and rebuild” fervor of the youth culture in Britain. In other words, for all the darkness of the premise, this story, as with the television version, has a real sense of hope about the future. Yes, we might be slaughtered by Daleks, but we’ll rise up, overcome them, and build something better. (A sense that is heightened by the Doctor talking about “mother Earth” and sounding positively eco-friendly and Gaia-hypothesis when he does it) Which is perhaps the big thing – Doctor Who works very well when it balances a scary universe with a genuine sense of optimism. The movie, for all its faults, captures that well, and that alone makes it a major influence on where the show is about to go.
On the other hand, if we think back to the actual story this is based on, one of the things we’ll see is that it’s a story that’s trying to be a much later version of Doctor Who than it is, and doing a mixed bag of a job at it. It’s hard to oversell how absolutely essential Terry Nation’s writing is to the style of Doctor Who, but the fact of the matter is that his ideas beat his execution a lot of the time, and that much of the fun of watching The Dalek Invasion of Earth is watching the series start to discover what it is, not watching the series actually succeed – exhibit A on this remains, of course, the spectacularly bewildering plot point of the Daleks planning on flying the Earth around as a space ship, a point that they manage to make even weirder in the movie. On the other hand, exhibit B in the “why The Dalek Invasion of Earth doesn’t quite work” game is probably the Slyther, which, to its credit, the movie omits entirely as one of several fixes David Whitaker applies to Nation’s script in order to shrink it to movie size/make the pacing not mind-wrenchingly excruciating. (As we saw in Season 3, and will see again in Seasons 4, 12, and arguably 17, taking Terry Nation’s concepts and having someone else write them is generally a recipe for success.)
I’m dancing around it a bit, so I may as well come out and say it – almost everything that is well-regarded about The Dalek Invasion of Earth is done better and more memorably by this film. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say most people who have not watched either lately imagine the episodes to be much more like the film when they wax nostalgic about it.
Watching Doctor Who and the Daleks, one got the sense of the TV show being done more competently but with less soul. That doesn’t vanish here, but the fact of the matter is that when the series is flailing about trying to find what it’s good at as much as late Season 3 was, seeing a film that’s at least confident about its strengths is oddly relieving. In some ways, watching the film clarifies just how odd the run from The Ark on has been – a series of experiments often (but not always) with dramatic high and low points, but never a show that felt like it knew what it was doing. That’s going to settle out, though if you set the date where Doctor Who stopped knowing what it was doing at The Ark, we’ve got as many stories ahead before it settles down as we do behind.
But this film is useful, if nothing else, in that it shows us very clearly some things that work in Doctor Who. Things that we’re going to see integrated into the series proper over the next few weeks of entries.
First of all, let’s talk about Peter Cushing. Back in the first film, I observed the way in which he uses the visual space afforded to him in order to characterize the Doctor, using a stooped walk and physical presence to do what Hartnell does with small gestures, and how that lends a cinematic feel to the proceedings. Here he fine-tunes that even more. He drops the stoop slightly, and adds a proper action hero edge to the character that, while short even of the Jon Pertwee era, little yet of a standard action hero, enlivens the action considerably. The eccentric Victorian inventor is still clearly the base, but the character has been reworked into a more viable leading man.
And for two of his three companions, there’s some significant stuff going on as well. Susan Who, as in the first film, is played by child actress Roberta Tovey, and while she can be a bit overly precious, she still works better than Susan Foreman ever did. The dynamic of a child companion is intriguing, and one of the few places where movies may work better than television for Doctor Who. The logistical reality of a child actress on a shoot as grueling as Doctor Who, to say nothing of how many plot problems it would introduce, makes a child companion something of a non-starter in the series (although it is difficult, even as a dedicated Karen Gillan fan, not to wish that the Doctor had come back after five minutes and we’d gotten a seven-year-old Amelia Pond as a companion). But on the screen, it’s a delight, with Susan a satisfying mix of precocious and vulnerable.
And then there’s Bernard Cribbins as Tom Campbell, our Ian Chesterton stand-in. It is, of course, impossible to mention Cribbins without pointing to his later turn as Wilfred Mott, one of the highlights of the David Tennant era. Especially because, as I said in the entry for The Chase, there are clear similarities between Wilf and Ian, so casting Cribbins as an Ian stand-in makes some real sense. Cribbins’ stand-out scene is a lengthy comedic bit in which he, dressed in a Roboman costume, has to try to impersonate the mechanical Robomen and flails about trying to keep in lockstep with them. It’s easy to see this scene as pointless faffing about akin to Roy Castle’s comedic sequence trying to get a door in the Dalek base to stay open last movie. But where the Castle scene was just broad slapstick, Cribbins gets a scene with some real tension underneath it. Yes, Cribbins is doing some physical comedy here (and he’s great at it), but there’s a genuine tension underlying the scene. It may be funny, but it’s funny played out over a backdrop of immediate danger – every comedic fumble Cribbins makes is also a direct threat to his life. One thing that makes the Hartnell era of Doctor Who harder to watch for a fan of any later era is that theres markedly less comedy in it, and the comedy that is there is generally based more on broad concepts than on specific “gags.” This scene is very much a template for the sort of humor that does come in later, and much as I love the Hartnell era, I confess, this scene was a welcome omen of the future.
There’s also the Daleks, who are effective in a way they aren’t necessarily on television. Part of this, to be frank, is that there are six of them and they can be used in action sequences, with explosions, at night. Yeah, the show isn’t going to come close to that for decades. But the point is less that the Daleks are terrifyingly effective like this than that the movie highlights the importance of getting a set piece to work well. We’ll see some startlingly good ones in both The Tenth Planet and Power of the Daleks in which the show thinks about what it can manage and does that effectively – in a way that highlights the degree to which maybe having Daleks overruning London was a bit much for them. (The flip side of that night shoot is that the iconic shots running around London are replaced with some very generic cityscapes, and the action focuses heavily on the countryside. Of course, as soon as the UNIT era begins, we’ll get lots of stories in which aliens invade everything in England they possibly can except for London itself.) Even if the story falls down here for its excessive reliance on action sequences, the movie is a sobering reminder that a good spectacle goes a long way. (See also the glam rock Daleks, two years too early and still just as fabulous as last time.)
The last thing we should note is something we didn’t talk much about in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and I should hat-tip once again to Wood and Miles’s About Time, available from finer Amazon Associates widgets everywhere. The normal brief on The Dalek Invasion of Earth and thus this film is that it’s about the Blitz. But Miles and Wood compellingly argue that the story is best read as part of the “tear it down and rebuild” fervor of the youth culture in Britain. In other words, for all the darkness of the premise, this story, as with the television version, has a real sense of hope about the future. Yes, we might be slaughtered by Daleks, but we’ll rise up, overcome them, and build something better. (A sense that is heightened by the Doctor talking about “mother Earth” and sounding positively eco-friendly and Gaia-hypothesis when he does it) Which is perhaps the big thing – Doctor Who works very well when it balances a scary universe with a genuine sense of optimism. The movie, for all its faults, captures that well, and that alone makes it a major influence on where the show is about to go.
April 19, 2011 @ 7:18 am
I basically disagree that the film does everything better, or is even simply better overall.
The serial has its flaws, many of which are removed in the film, but what the serial has going for it is atmosphere. It feels grim, grubby and nasty in a way that the gaudy film cannot manage. A good example is the scene where Barbara and Jenny come across the two women in the house who promptly sell them out to the Daleks. The TV version is really quite seedy and squalid, an unpleasant portrayal of human nature at its lowest. The corresponding scene in the film tells the same story, but comes across as much lighter, less threatening, and less relevant to the world outside the cinema.
You've already mentioned the shots of the Daleks parading around the London landmarks in the TV serial, so I won't bang on about them.
You're quite right that, in general, the Dalek material is executed better in the film. However, what is memorable to me from the story is not so much the sci-fi invaders as the human reaction to alien occupation, and I think that's done much more effectively in the TV serial.
April 19, 2011 @ 7:28 am
Hm. In the original plan of this entry there was a paragraph where I reiterated that despite being technically better in most regards, as before there's something faintly soulless about the film that the TV serial never had. I agree, if nothing else, that the television series had the advantage of trying new things and pushing itself. At the end of the day, this is still a streamlined version of something that was creative, with some faults smoothed off and no major new ones added. I think it is more fun to watch than the serial, but yes, the serial is obviously the more creative, edgy, and groundbreaking of the two. I don't think it watches as well, on the whole, but then, I'd rather watch the Peter Jackson movies than read Lord of the Rings, even though I know full well which of the two are the most influential novels of their genre and which were pretty OK movie adaptations.
April 19, 2011 @ 10:39 am
For many of us growing up this was the closest we would ever get to the fabled Hartnell originals. I imagined all the plots I read about being like this film, with huge production values and action galore. Think about The Keys of Marinus as filtered through the look of this film.
My earliest Who memories are this film and a Sea Devils omnibus while on holiday. Imagine my surprise when I finally started to see the TV Hartnell stories on vhs. What? Where is the amazing attack on the dalek saucer? Surely the scene in the tv version was just a cast bbq that went wrong and they filmed it?
But there really is something missing from the film version after you get to know the proper Doctor and companions from the tv version. Perhaps it is soul?
Can you imagine the film's production values with the tv cast? Now that would be something to see
April 19, 2011 @ 10:42 am
Well, let's be honest – that's basically the new series, which shoots for the production values of a low budget feature film coupled with the classic series' level of ingenuity at stretching the budget.
But yes – the role of these two films in TV reruns is fascinating. Not something I could quite figure out where to put in either entry, since it's in many ways a product of the 70s and 80s, but a really interesting detail in the transition of the show from a serial to something with repeatability. I suspect when I get to things like the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeats, I'll also mention the films again. 🙂
April 20, 2011 @ 9:55 am
I think that you're possibly placing too much importance on the lower ratings for the third season. As far as I can tell, the greatest reason for the dip is that ITV were offering more competitive and better-networked opposition to Doctor Who in the form of the exciting pop show 'Thank Your Lucky Stars', a strong draw for youth audiences. When you take this into consideration, Doctor Who audiences still held up pretty well.
April 20, 2011 @ 9:59 am
Well, as I said, the ratings dip has been compellingly explained in terms of ITV's counter-programming. On the other hand, explicable or not, the ratings were not good at the end of the third season, and surely Lloyd was expected and told to improve them. I mean, as I've said, I liked most of the late Season 3 stories, with only The Ark and The Celestial Toymaker really irritating me. Since then, Lloyd put out three quite good stories. So I certainly don't think anything was wrong with the program at this point in time. On the other hand, compelling as the ITV argument is, the fact of the matter is that the program has had an air of desperation around it. Certainly Troughton was concerned that it had done all it had to do.
August 9, 2011 @ 8:04 am
I don't know where you stand on fan fiction–the unlicensed kind, that is–but there's a perfectly delightful story called "The Care and Feeding of Tiny Humans (and slightly larger Time Lords)," featuring Eleven traveling with a seven-year-old Amelia Pond that, given what you said above, you may want to take a look at.
And while I'm at it, I may as well mention that this is a fascinating blog. I was referred to it a few days ago via Balloon Juice and have slowly working my way forward from the beginning. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
January 22, 2012 @ 3:37 am
When Target first novelised Dalek Invasion of Earth, the images on the cover were from the movie, not the series, which led to a major surprise for me when I eventually saw the serial.
August 6, 2012 @ 7:13 am
About 20 years ago, the DW Magazine did a feature on the 2 films. In there, it was revealed that Milton Subotsky was hoping the 3rd film would once again be an adaptation of a Terry Nation serial– "THE KEYS OF MARINUS". Now, for some reason, in recent years, every website in creation says "THE CHASE". Which makes a lot less sense, unless one thinks the films absolutely "have" to have freakin' Daleks in them. (The internet is like that a lot– someone posts inaccurate info, everyone else repeats it.)
"INVASION EARTH: 2150 A.D." (as it was listed n TV GUIDE in the late 60's) my my introduction to Doctor Who. In fact, I accidentally turned it in a few minutes late. My first view of ti was Peter Cushing & Bernard Cribbins walking along the riverfront, when, suddenly, this big salt shaker comes up out of the water. What a place to come in!
I loved the film (I also loved Irwin Allen TV series, and Japanese sci-fi TV series and monster movies, and Gerry Anderson tv series, etc.). Eventually I saw it again from the beginning, a couple of times, and also saw its predecessor, which I have also been at least a bit disappointed in, by comparison to the much-better sequel. I wished they'd done more. It is still my all-time favorite Dalek story.
In recent years, I've fantasized that if they'd kept going into the early 70's, they might have done a story with Christopher Lee as The Master, Nigel Greene as The Brigadier, and Jane Asher as Jo Grant.
The general concensus (at least, 20 years ago), was that people flocked to see the 1st film, but were bitterly disappointed that it didn't contain the TV cast. (Imagine if the 1966 BATMAN film had starred anyone other than Adam West– come to think of it, they came close to doing that, considering Julie Newmar was replaced by Lee Meriweather.) It was suggested they stayed away from the sequel in droves as a result of that. However, considering just how popular Peter Cushing was, I suspect your theory about the World Cup may have been closer to the real reason. It's still one of Amicus' best films.
It's interesting how "London invaded" could be said to be both the theme of this film and "THE WAR MACHINES", in their separate ways, both seem to point to the UNIT era. Someone once also suggested the more light-hearted portrayal of The Doctor may have led to what we got with Patrick Troughton.
Meanwhile, I think Roberta Tovey's Susan is just adorable, Bernard Cribbins is sympathetic (and sometimes funny, I've since seen him in quite a few earlier comedy films), while Jil Curzon's Louise is gorgeous but sadly underused. (I saw her in a SAINT episode the other day, with an Italian accent!) And then there's Philip Madoc, the rotter with the incredibly charismatic smile. I've discovered he was in some early AVENGERS as well (one with Venus, two with Cathy, one with Emma, and one with Tara).
Oh yeah– and I love both the theme song (Barry Gray?) and the jazz score. And doesn't that flying saucer look like it was moonlighting from a Gerry Anderson show?