Lippert Pictures Series

Robert L. Lippert controlled a successful low-budget American film production and distribution company from 1948 to 1956, producing short, fast-paced westerns and crime films with a penchant for obligatory humor, and the occasional jarring edits. This is my third of eight Lippert films.

UNKNOWN WORLD (1951)

This seventy-four-minute science fiction weakling, distributed by Lippert Pictures, was directed by Terrell Morse and written by Millard Kaufman. The latter carries the brunt of the blame. The film was produced by Irving Block and Jack Rabin, both involved in the special effects side of movie-making. Supporting all the endless technical jargon and suspense-like developments is a forgotten music score by Ernest Gold, generating fame nine years later for his score for the film, Exodus. Arguably, Otto Waldis and Victor Kilian are the most recognized faces in the project.

Sounding more like a Wild West sheriff than a doctoral scientist, loony Kilian is so panicked by an imminent nuclear war, he suggests everyone cram into the center of the Earth to survive the inevitable holocaust. Never mind the small molten core which had been confirmed centuries before. He thinks that is fake news. Facts are merely opinions. I am not sure many 1950 adults bought into this wacky premise. Science and fiction in their most preposterous form. Jules Verne might have given it one star for the fairly believable filming of the rock-boring scale model tank, appearing to be designed by Raymond Loewy. It is not the only boring thing in the film.

To give the basement-budgeted film a sense of journalistic gravitas, a narrator walks the audience through the "logical" steps leading up to an expedition of scientists. The only expedition member without a doctoral degree is played by Jim Bannon. This makes his character quite expendable. After government funding falls through, the team is bailed out by a private kook, newspaper heir Bruce Kellogg, who would be tickled to go along. Part-time narrator and scientist, Marilyn Nash, is the film's ardent feminist—so says the opening narration. They will enter the Earth through a volcano in Alaska, then follow the “Earth Core” historical markers. With no time allowed for research and development, someone constructs an enormous atomic-powered tank, the Cyclotram, capable of drilling deep enough to get where they are headed.

The team's endless philosophizing and doubts about their success make the viewer stop and think: surely I have better things to do. They finally reach a utopia where every element needed for survival is present—except for sunshine and testing reveals that any life form is born sterile. [descending music cue: Dah-dah-dah-dah!] The dangerous journey ultimately claims the lives of two expedition members. They are soon forgotten once the eruption of the underground lake pushes the Cyclotram and its three survivors back to Earth's surface near a small tropical island named, Gilligan.