TWONKY DVD PROFESSIONAL

Oboler’s script is quite daring and subtle, implying the kind of oppressive future which manufactures this shapeshifting robot, a tyrannical labour-saving device which dashes books about freedom from the professor’s hand, forces him to listen to brass bands rather than Mozart, and distracts him from serious subjects so that he composes a lecture based on a pornographic popular history book Passion Through the Ages (a quietly progressive aspect is that Oboler depicts a contemporary mixed race college classroom without making a fuss about it). The set walks on puppety Muffin the Mule legs and emits an optical zapping effect which lights cigarettes and pipes, does the dishes, replicates five-dollar bills and shaves the master, but also defends itself by temporarily crippling a would-be attacker (a drunken loser football coach played by Billy Lynn) and altering the brain patterns of those who defy it (they solemnly intone ‘I have no complaints’). The ‘twonky’ takes the shape of an Admiral television set which Carolyn West (Janet Warren) buys for her tweedy college professor husband Cary (Hans Conreid) to keep him company as she visits her pregnant sister. Moore (who wrote as ‘Lewis Padgett’) about a mysterious gadget from the future that turns up in the present.

TWONKY DVD PROFESSIONAL

Like a few other films from early in the ‘50s sf boom (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing From Another World), The Twonky looks to material from the s-f magazines (the studio hacks would soon learn they could just make this stuff up without the aid of professional sf writers), adapting a story by the respected team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Arch Oboler made his career as an innovator in radio his sparse filmography as director consists almost entirely of imaginative if awkward off-Hollywood efforts (Strange Holiday, Bewitched, Five), often wedding social content to the fantastical in Rod Serlingish manner (though he also kicked off the 3D craze with Bwana Devil). One of the oddest science fiction films of the 1950s, but still not very good.

Twonky dvd