Beyond the Time Barrier

Darlene Tompkins and Robert Clarke

Edgar G. Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier is a black and white sci-fi cheapie released in 1960. It is bargain basement, but with more than a few reasons to recommend it to committed auteurists. The picture was part of a deal that Ulmer struck with star and producer Robert Clarke to film enough footage for two features in Texas in just two weeks. The other feature was entitled The Amazing Transparent Man and was also released in 1960. A disused air base and some futuristic looking exhibition buildings at the Texas State fairgrounds were the primary sets for ...Time Barrier. Ulmer's daughter has a major supporting role and his wife was the script editor. Script writer Arthur C. Pierce worked as an extra and a production assistant, so it was made with a sense of all hands on deck.

Clarke, a film industry veteran whose acting career peaked with his role in Ida Lupino's Outrage in 1950. had bitten off more than he could chew by writing, directing, producing, and starring in 1958's The Hideous Sun Demon. He and Ulmer had worked together on 1951's The Man from Planet X and had gotten along, so he was an obvious pick to alleviate Clarke's burden. Unfortunately, after shooting was completed, Clarke's financing fell apart and he had to sell the two film properties to American International Pictures. AIP shaped the film for their own purposes. They inserted into Beyond the Time Barrier a few clips, during the "mutant" section, from Journey to the Lost City, AIP's cut and paste version of Fritz Lang's two Indian epics. Beyond the Time Barrier feels padded, even at 74 minutes. It unspools like a 52 minute Twilight Zone episode that has been padded with exposition, lame fights, and characters moving deliberately from point a to point b.

If Mr. Pierce's script resembles a Twilight Zone episode, at least it resembles a good one, even with the requisite surprise ending. Clarke plays a test pilot who fulfills the title and flies into the future which we eventually learn is the year 2024. His old air base is unpopulated as is a nearby city. A futuristic metropolis, pictured with cheesy graphics, beckons and soon the pilot has been imprisoned by the new powers that be. The town is called The Citadel and is presided over by an elite coterie headed by the Supreme (Vladimir Sokoloff). Only the Supreme and his adjutant are capable of speech. Mankind has mutated into a devoluted form and is not only deaf and dumb, but also infertile. The more sickly mutants are imprisoned within a ghastly gulag. Only the Supreme's comely daughter, Trirene (Darlene Tompkins), holds within her the possibility of reproduction and she is quick to pin her hopes upon the pilot. The locals are chary with details, but we eventually learn that mankind was devastated by a plague from outer space, earth's protective atmospheric belts having been undermined by atomic testing.

Given that Sokoloff gets to play a Russian for once, he played Mexican in the same year's The Magnificent Seven, it is hard not to interpret the Supreme and his minions as stand-ins for our Cold War adversaries. Even so, Sokoloff's Supreme, a kindly uncle joe, is given moments of tender warmth with his daughter. Ulmer allows an equivocal portrait in line with his socialist humanism. I especially enjoyed a sequence featuring Ms. Tompkins primping before a mirror, both a smitten young girl and unobscure object of desire. I see lots of cheap AIP features, mostly biker and beach pictures, that I can't get through the whole way. Mostly cheap jive and shuck. I could sit through some of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini just because it featured the Bobby Fuller Four, but that is a rare oasis in a desert of dada. Beyond the Time Barrier is equally slapdash, but has surprising sensitivity.