Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Forbidden Planet
1956 · Fred M. Wilcox · Forbidden Planet on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for where the music stops and the effects begin. (sound)
Louis and Bebe Barron made every sound on circuits they built and drove to overload. There is no melody and nothing repeats. A landing, an approach and the mood of a scene all arrive in the same warbling material.
Payoff: You cannot separate what you are hearing from what you are feeling. The soundtrack offers no comfort and no guidance. In the reading: qualite-puissance. The reading calls this a pure quality-power: an intensity expressed for itself, belonging to no object and no person.
Look at the two kinds of architecture: ship and house. (staging)
Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan keep them rigorously apart. The cruiser is circular military modernism. Morbius's house is mid-century domestic comfort with alien curves grafted on.
Payoff: The design does the explaining. Two buildings lay out the arrangement of this planet before anyone describes it.
Notice the green sky, the two moons, the painted mesas. (light)
George Folsey lights Altair IV the way MGM lit its musicals: hard colored keys on faces, no haze in the air, the horizon closed off by a painted backdrop. Nothing pretends to be shot outdoors.
Payoff: The planet is a sealed, designed room rather than a location, and that closure works on you for the whole film.
Look through Robby's clear dome at the spinning gyros. (setting)
Robert Kinoshita glazed the head so the mechanism shows. Gyros turn, solenoids fire, and Marvin Miller's voice stays courteous and faintly amused while Robby cooks, sews and distills bourbon by the gallon.
Payoff: You are watching a machine think in public. Every polite screen robot after this one is copying it.
Count how often Altaira is framed with pools and tame animals. (camera)
Anne Francis is placed in gardens, beside water, among creatures that obey her. Eighteen men arrive and start competing over her within a day. Her father keeps her inside grounds he designed.
Payoff: The framing treats her as property long before any character says anything of the kind.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch Morbius's house. Alien curves sit inside its mid-century comfort, and he stays calm in every room.