Word: fi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Soft Skin abandoned the visual conceits of, narrow and widening screen and rocketing flashbacks that characterized his previous works. Skin was a mild film of convention that won few admirers. Fahrenheit 451, starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie, was his only true failure, an atypically emotionless sci-fi attempt to show the future as nightmare. The fact, of course, that it was done in English by a director who could not speak the language made the project disaster-prone from the beginning...
...only claim to outright novelty is his predilection for science fiction, represented by three stories in this collection. But even here, as in the memorable title piece of his previous book of stories, Among the Dangs (1961), he insists on the moral. The sci-fi gimmicks of his fantasy worlds point metaphorically back to the truths of the real world. Into the Cone of Cold is typical: a poet allows himself to be frozen and thawed out again in a scientific experiment; beyond the spooky suspense of the situation, the cone of cold comes to stand for a state...
Unfortunately, all this expert attention was about as helpful as pouring a magnum of champagne into a thimble, because most of the hi-fi sound that Cole created for next week's Andy Williams special will be wasted when it is fed through the nation's strictly lo-fi TV sets. The unhappy fact is that, to keep prices competitive, most TV units are equipped with 4-in., $1.50 speakers, which have all the fidelity of a string stretched between two tin cans. Nonetheless, as Cole forever demonstrates in the specials he engineers for such headliners as Williams...
Intermission. By this time, almost 1 hr. and 40 min. have passed, and the non-sci-fi fanatic may feel as benumbed as the scientists in their "hibernacu-lums." In depicting interplanetary flight 33 years from now, Director Stanley Kubrick and his co-scenarist, Arthur C. Clarke, England's widely respected science and science-fiction writer, dwell endlessly on the qualities of space travel; unfortunately they ignore such old-fashioned elements as character and conflict. As the ship arcs through the planetary void it is an object of remarkable beauty-but in an effort to convey the idea...
...that Kubrick has taken off on his space kick, his fans are convinced that a sci-fi renaissance is on its way. As the spy film sinks slowly in the West, and the western sinks rapidly into TV, studios are occupied with some dozen ambitious fantasy features, ranging from Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man with Rod Steiger, to the high-camp French comic strip Barbarella, with Jane Fonda. The next trend for Kubrick? All he will give away is that it will be "a mind boggler...