Just Imagine (1930)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Hard to imagine a worse movie in any one of the three genres in which it's classified. It fails on all three levels, as a comedy, a fantasy, and as a musical. As a fantasy it is a juvenile attempt to depict martians as primitive jungle types and with no atmospheric difference from earth. The worst musical number in the picture takes place in this setting. As a musical, the first two songs were not too bad but needed better arrangements as they fall somewhat flat. But "The Drinking Song" was god-awful. As a comedian, El Brendel wins the Hand-Painted Mustache Cup as the worst movie comedian ... ever. And "Just Imagine" is not his first offense.A truly terrible movie, and the only valid reason to see it is to prove to yourself that even great Hollywood minds can come up with a lemon. But we already knew that. (Capitolfest, Rome, N.Y., 8/16)

Set in New York City in the far future year of 1980, this was the first science fiction film made as either a talkie or a musical. It stars the little remembered vaudeville comedian El Brendel as a man who is struck by lightning in 1930 and revived 50 years later. I can't say that I found either him or the film particularly funny. The biggest chuckles were provided by Frank Albertson and Marjorie White, who was sadly killed in a car crash in 1935. The songs are pretty forgettable or just...odd. They're not exactly Cole Porter or Irving Berlin. However, I did like the one about drinking which is one of several digs at Prohibition in the film. Of the 386 films that I watched since January 2014, this is the oldest as well as being the oldest talkie that I have ever seen, though I have seen several older silent films.Only 19 years old at the time, Maureen O'Sullivan, one of Ireland's first film stars, is the female lead and the best actor in the film. She and Albertson were really the only ones in the film to have careers worth mentioning afterwards. The acting is generally pretty bad. That may have something to do with the fact that sound films were still very new in 1930 and actors were learning the new craft of acting in such films but I've seen several others from 1931 to 1934 where the acting was considerably better so that excuse only goes so far. Maureen O'Sullivan and Joyzelle Joyner were the only actors in the film who were still alive in the real 1980, which was the year that the latter died. The director David Butler - who later directed several Shirley Temple films and "Calamity Jane" - died in June 1979 so he just missed out on seeing whether the film's vision of the future would come true or not. However, by that stage, it was a pretty safe bet that it wouldn't! I loved the design of the New York of 1980, which was presumably inspired by "Metropolis". The footage was later reused in the "Flash Gordon" and "Buck Rogers" serials while the very impressive looking "rocket plane" used to travel to Mars was later seen as Dr. Zarkov's rocket ship in the "Flash Gordon" ones, as were some of the props and costumes. Speaking of Mars, I loved the design of the planet too. I think that this could very well have been the first on screen depiction of a manned mission to Mars. The scenes on Mars are pretty bizarre, it has to be said, but they're good fun and probably the best part of the film.Incidentally, Maureen O'Sullivan's family and mine go way back! Well, sort of. I'm not lifelong best friends with her grandson Ronan Farrow or anything. My great-grandfather was a private in the Connaught Rangers before, during and after World War I and his commanding officer was her father Captain Charles O'Sullivan. They served together in India and the Western Front. When in Ireland, they were stationed in Boyle, County Roscommon, her hometown, and my great-grandfather remembered her playing around the barracks as a little girl. That means that I am only three degrees of separation from a 1930s Hollywood star.Overall, this is not a great film by any means but it's fun, even it isn't particularly funny, and has an important place in sci-fi history as the genre's first sound film. However, it did little for it on the big screen as, outside of some of the Universal Monsters films which were more horror orientated in any event, there were hardly any sci- fi feature films (as opposed to serials) made in the 1930s or 1940s. It was not until the 1950s that the genre began to have an impact in Hollywood.

A man (El Brendel)is (for some reason) frozen alive. He is resurrected in the far flung future of 1980 (!!!) Here everybody drives airplanes (cars don't exist), streetlights hang in the air by themselves, people wear reversible clothes (don't ask) and if you want a baby you just put a coin in a slot and one comes out! Also people no longer have names--they're identified by a combo on letters and numbers. Basically we get to see all those "wonders" with Brendel and hear his groaningly bad "jokes". Oh yeah and it's a musical!I caught this back in 1985 at a revival cinema. At first there was scattered laughter at how 1980 was supposed to look. But eventually the audience sat there in stunned silence. The plot was stupid, the songs pretty terrible (I won't even comment on the dancing) and El Brendel's jokes were so bad you wanted to hurt him. I heard this had an incredible effect on audiences of 1930--but not anymore. I do applaud the movie for actually being the first science fiction musical but it's really a terrible film. You sort of watch it in stunned fascination about how truly bad a film can be. A 1 all the way.

I have to say, this movie was so bad that if Ed Wood saw it, it's no wonder that he thought he could make movies. Like 50 years later when Sylvester Stallone first put pen to paper, assuming he couldn't possibly write anything worse than "Easy Rider." I kept watching, since if Maureen O'Sullivan was in it, it couldn't be that dreadful.The hero was an offensive stereotypical Jewish man who spoke with a horrible dialect. The men and women on Mars were all born as twins, one good and one bad and one of the characters on Mars, a woman, spoke entirely in hyena-like laughter. It was.