Director Richard Fleischer’s 1966 sci-fi cult favourite Fantastic Voyage stars Raquel Welch, who gives a notable turn as the sole woman among the crew of five doctors put into a capsule, shrunken to microscopic size and injected into the body of a nearly assassinated Czech scientist.
The crew travel through the blood stream to his brain to try to perform a life-saving operation. It’s okay, though, the Americans only really want his secrets!
Stephen Boyd also stars as CIA agent Grant who helps the scientist, Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), escape from behind the Iron Curtain with his secret to keeping soldiers shrunken indefinitely. The motorcade is attacked during the operation, and Benes gets a blood clot in his brain after he hits his head.
Grant is ordered to accompany the crew of scientists, who have one hour to get in Benes’s brain, remove the clot and get out. As if that isn’t exciting enough, an unknown assailant tries to sabotage the crew’s mission.
The main triumph of this extremely enjoyable sci-fi fantasy adventure is its Oscar-winning Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and its Best Effects, Special Visual Effects (Art Cruickshank), as well as Ernest Laszlo’s Oscar-nominated cinematography. He produced the plasma effect by using multi-coloured turning lights, placed on the outside translucent decors.
Film Editing and Sound Effects were also Oscar nominated, so you can tell that it was quite the technical triumph in its day, with the director drawing on the help of two people who worked with him on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, designer Harper Goff and technical adviser Fred Zendar. But the entertaining story and over-energetic acting are pretty fantastic too.
Always entertaining hokum, it has been turned by time (which has caught up with and overtaken it as it is set in 1995) into a near-classic of the genre. Huge suspension of disbelief is a must, but it manages to transcend being either daft of camp, to be a delight.
Also in the cast are Arthur O’Connell, Arthur Kennedy, William Redfield, James Brolin, Barry Coe, Ken Scott, Shelby Grant and Brendan Fitzgerald.
Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelisation based on the screenplay and, unusually, approached a first-class author, Isaac Asimov, to write it. He declared that the script was full of plot holes and got agreement to write the book his way. It was released six months before the movie, so there was a mistaken idea that the film was an adaptation of Asimov’s book. It is actually written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby.
The original story took place in the 19th century and is a Jules Verne-inspired adventure but Kleiner kept only the concept of miniaturisation and added the Cold War thriller element.
The score is composed and conducted by Leonard Rosenman, with no music for the first four reels before the scientists enter the human body.
Raquel Welch [Jo Raquel Tejada] was first cast in small roles in A House Is Not a Home (1964) and the Elvis Presley musical Roustabout (1964). Her first featured role was in the beach film A Swingin’ Summer (1965). She landed a seven-year non-exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox. After casting Welch in a leading role in Fantastic Voyage, 20th Century Fox loaned her to Hammer Studios in Britain where she starred in the spectacular 1966 prehistoric fantasy adventure One Million Years BC, as Loana the Fair One, dressed only in mankind’s first two-piece deer skin bikini.
Raquel Welch died at her home in Los Angeles on 15 February 2023 after a brief illness, aged 82.
© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2516
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