MovieChat Forums > The Twonky (1953) Discussion > Poor, silly, dumb...in short, altogether...

Poor, silly, dumb...in short, altogether 'twonky'

posted 15 years ago by hobnob53
24 replies | jump to latest

I guess I should warn of POSSIBLE SPOILERS here, but then I doubt it's really possible to spoil much about this crummy little movie.

I'd never seen this film and was glad when I saw TCM planned to air it...though I approached it with a lot of trepidation based on reviews I'd read.

Sorry to the fans who think this was a "great" movie...it isn't. Not even close.

For this I blame Arch Oboler, the screenwriter-producer-director. Oboler was a fairly big name in radio (Lights Out and so on) but his ventures into filmmaking were uniformly pretty awful. His (relatively) best was probably Five (1951), just released on DVD, a post-nuclear war drama. But he's also the guy behind the first 3-D movie, Bwana Devil (1952), one of the cheapest, most imbecilic films of its type ever made, which is saying a lot, with an African theme park in California standing in for Africa. In all, he made ten scattered movies, including a couple of soft-core porn films in the late 60s-early 70s. The Twonky was his last film until something called 1 + 1: Exploring the Kinsey Reports (1961), actually based on a play he'd written, and which, coming 13 years after Kinsey, was hardly anything new.

Whatever Oboler's talents for radio may have been, he had little feel for movies. He has no visual sense whatsoever, little pacing, and whatever writing ability he may have had on radio utterly escapes him here...which didn't stop him from making some of the talkiest films ever made. His work is uniformly heavy-handed and obvious, with clunky and uninspired camera movement.

The Twonky is a good example of Oboler's lack of feeling for the medium of film. It's extremely cheaply made, all on real sites (no studio shots), and while that fact would seem a plus, it isn't. The sound is very bad (lots of echoing), and much exterior dialogue (as in the car sequences) is dubbed over, very, very badly. Camera angles and set-ups are poorly thought-out, editing is extremely amateurish, and the film has a claustrophobic feel due to Oboler's limitations as a visual stylist and his iditotic notion that "all close-ups, all the time", excessive mugging for the cameras and constantly shouted dialogue, are somehow the marks of expressive direction.

His script virtually defines "heavy-handed". Lots of subtle-as-an-anvil "humor" (which is about as funny as having an anvil dropped on your foot, and about as sophisticated). There's little sense or logic: an elderly college football coach suddenly, out of nowhere, comes up with not only the explanation for this mysterious TV set -- a transformed robot made by a being from an oppressive future -- but even knows its name -- "Twonky"? Right -- perfectly logical and credible! And this guy's a writer? Things progress without getting any more believable...and certainly without getting any funnier.

Oboler's handling of his actors is equally inept. I love Hans Conried, he's almost always great, and was a good dramatic actor before becoming known for his comedic gifts. But even as versatile and likable a performer as Conried is lost here, done in by a dreadful script and Oboler's insistence on making him approach the part in a state of screeching hysteria, coupled with his excessive (and unfunny) mugging for the cameras (as alluded to earlier). Frankly, I think Conried was miscast; the story calls for a more ordinary man, gradually driven to distraction by this machine. Already known as an eccentric performer, Conried's casting was too much of a set-up, too obvious for a movie about which the word "obvious" is a dictionary definition. The rest of the cast has done better things (and done them better), and unfortunately every one of them is, uniformly, annoying -- nothing interesting or sympathetic or funny about them at all.

This movie is, in short, just plain stupid.

Though I've never read it, The Twonky is based on a short story written by a man named Henry Kuttner in the 1940s. From what I've read in Bill Warren's book Keep Watching the Skies, in the story a being from the future lands in a radio factory and fashions a radio console into a Twonky -- a robot designed to help its owner make right choices -- for some "lucky" buyer. The Twonky's motives for "helping" its new owner, including its seemingly random decisions on what is and is not permissible for its owner to do, were more mysteriously motivated and unpredictable from the reader's point of view. And, in the story, the Twonky zaps both the owner's girlfriend (when she tries to destroy it) and ultimately the owner himself; the story ends with a new couple being shown the man's apartment, equipped with a brand new radio console.

Unsurprisingly, or should I say predictably, Oboler, an old radio man, makes the Twonky into a TV set, which may make sense for 1953, with TV the new gizmo on the block -- and a cheap and ready source of contempt for filmmakers too. But Oboler throws out all the subtlety and mystery of the story (as well as its "unhappy" ending, with the Twonky surviving its owner). The behavior he gives the Twonky is lame and unoriginal. The Twonky itself is some sort of odd kind of puppet rig, which though somewhat clumsy is acceptable for a film made on such a low budget. But things like its weird little voice, which comes out of nowhere, don't work too well. Still, when a poorly-done "monster" is the best thing about a movie, you know you have a pretty bad film overall.

Cheap, overbearing, badly written and directed, dragging...the complaints could be endless. The film is worth a look for curiosity's sake but when someone says this is funny or well-made they're just not used to decent films or are easily entertained. Low budget movies can be good but they have to be made by someone who knows what he's doing. Oboler doesn't, and unfortunately here he's a triple threat, writing, producing and directing: there was no one to step in and fix the bad parts (i.e., the film). This could have been a clever film with a serious undertone, had the original story had been followed, the humor been of something other than a sophomoric slapstick variety, and the actors been permitted to act instead of mug. Oboler fails on all fronts, and The Twonky becomes just a cheap, dull little oddity that cheats its audience even as it bores and irks them.

The Twonky is just junky.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

But did you like the movie? Tell us how you really feel about it!

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Is that an Arch Oboler line?

Hey, it's just a review and some fair comment. I like and happen to agree with your tagline, macemace -- "Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers." (The New York Times used virtually those exact same words in their mini-comment on A Night in Casablanca.) I like all sorts of movies of all kinds of quality, but as a Marx fan even you must admit that there's a Grand-Canyon-sized difference between even the poorest Marx Brothers film and The Twonky.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

as a Marx fan even you must admit that there's a Grand-Canyon-sized difference between even the poorest Marx Brothers film and The Twonky.

Of course. The Twonky is poorly made and poorly directed. However it still has a certain charm about it that makes me enjoy it. It's the premier example of the "Friendly Appliance" phenomonen taken to an extreme. (The microwave at work tells me "Enjoy Your Meal" whenever it finishes)

The tag line is something I once said about a showing of one of the Brothers films on television. I think it was "Room Service". It's possible I had heard it elsewhere, but of course not from the NYT. The Marx Brothers made some truly great films and some that were less so. I'm grateful for all of them though, and wish there were more.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

I'm with you there, macemace. 13 Marx ain't nearly enough (14, if you include The Story of Mankind, which, alas, we might have to, with an oversized asterisk).

I'm glad to see you have a proper perspective on poor little Twonky -- the film, I mean. But that's why I said (on your DVD thread, which I'm going to after this one to see your reply) that I'd buy a DVD, since it is a unique film and I like collecting even poor films if they're somehow different...all of which The Twonky undeniably is!

[–] cinema_universe 15 years ago

I've been a die-hard "Twonky" fan since I first saw this film on broadcast TV in NYC, back in the early 1970's (in the days before cable-TV).

Your hard knocking of Oboler is undeserved, to say the least. While "Twonky" was certainly a budget-challenged independent film (and it shows), there's no reason to knock it for not being 'believable.'
--- why should "Twonky" (or any film) be required to be believable?

Now....try looking at something Oboler did at MGM....

For all you've said about Arch Oboler, I think you may not have seen his film, "Bewitched" from 1945, starring Phyllis Thaxter and Edmund Gwenn.
I first saw "Bewitched" on (New York's)channel-2 WCBS-TV on January 1st, 1978.
This film absolutely stunned me.

Right from square-one, the eerie, chiming clock-tower in the opening credits of "Bewitched" grabbed at me. I just couldn't look away from the screen. I was so taken by THE WAY IT WAS TOLD (-not the story, itself-- one of multiple personalities, and murder--) that I can never forget the date I saw the film, nor the time (on "The Late, Late Show-2" at about 4:00am, on New Year's Day), nor the circumstances-- which I won't go in to here.....

I didn't get to see it again until TCM showed it earlier this decade. TCM has shown it frequently since then-- so, try and catch it next time it's on, and see how Arch Oboler can take a small story of mental illness(as madness), and turn it into a haunting film, best seen alone and undisturbed, well after midnight.

--D.--

[–] macemace 15 years ago

I have never seen this film either, and will certain try to catch it. Thanks for the tip. As for Twonky, I think they main problem was as you said it was budget challenged. As I previously said, it's an odd little film I really like.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

I know of Bewitched but have never seen it, and will do as you recommend and try to catch it next time it's on.

However, not having seen that film notwithstanding, I stand by my criticism of Oboler as a film director. He had little visual sense and no sense of camera movement or techniques beyond the pedestrian basics. His direction of actors is poor and his scripts generally weak, and whatever he might or might not have done in other films, my specific criticisms of Oboler's work here remain unchallenged. For what it's worth, most critical and scholarly opinion of his film work is fairly negative. Perhaps Bewitched is better than the rest of his output, but if so, it's the exception, not the rule. His films were not of high quality, and this has nothing to do with their budgets.

I didn't criticize The Twonky because it was cheap -- I merely called it a cheap film, which it is. I explicitly stated that there is nothing wrong with a film being low budget, that many very good "cheap" films have been made (and a great many terrible expensive films as well). What I criticized it for was its being a lousy movie. Obviously things like this come down to a matter of opinion, but I believe my critique of Twonky was well-taken and eminently reasonable and factual. I don't criticize anyone for liking a bad movie -- there are many undeniably dreadful films that are nonetheless entertaining and enjoyable, in spite or because of their "badness". However, I think The Twonky fails even on this level -- it's a terrible, poorly made, badly acted movie which I don't even find to be "fun" on a bad-film level. If you or others do, that's fine, but no one can seriously claim this is a "good", in the sense of well-made (whatever its budget), film.

As to believability: of course a film should be believable -- but not in the way you apparently understood what I wrote. In the first place, I didn't "knock it for not being believable." I knocked the fact that within its own terms the film took one or more unbelievable turns. When you get right down to it, most films are "unbelievable" in one way or another: they're an illusion of reality. But all films establish their believability within the context of their basic plots. The Twonky is obviously not a believable scenario; however, a well-made film will overcome this, lure the audience into the required suspension of disbelief, and as long as it operates in a believable manner within the accepted parameters of its plot, the audience will accept it and go along. In short -- they will believe it.

The Twonky fails because it doesn't conform to the need to be believable within an intrinsically absurd situation. An old saying in films states that "Audiences will accept the impossible -- they will not accept the implausible." A walking, talking TV set with magic powers is impossible, but a well-constructed scenario will allow audiences to accept it -- to believe it -- and go along. What they won't accept or believe is an elderly gym teacher's sudden explanation, out of nowhere and with no reason whatsoever, of what a "Twonky" is. That's totally implausible. It makes no sense even within the context of the film, not to mention there is no established reason for this teacher to be the holder of such information. It simply comes out of nowhere, in a completely ridiculous and impossible-to-swallow manner. Surely a writer of Oboler's supposed talent could have come up with a better scenario...like using the method employed in the original story? In any film, but especially a fantasy one, the audience will like and accept a fantastic premise...but the events in the film must proceed in a logical and plausible manner -- behavior must be realistic within the context of even an inherently unrealistic situation. The Twonky fails miserably in this regard, as it does in virtually all others -- and that's why it fails as a film. It has nothing at all to do with its being a low-budget movie.

By the way, I grew up in and around NYC and well remember the local movie shows on channels 2, 5, 7, 9 and 11 especially (4 was much less movie-oriented, as you'll recall, at least after the 60s). So I share and appreciate your movie memories from those times!

[–] macemace 15 years ago

I totally agree with your point about the gym teacher's explanation. It has always been one of the things that has bothered me most about this movie, even though on the surface it would appear to be a small point.

Let me make clear to Cinema Universe, that despite my fondness for this film, I recognize it's weak points. There are almost too many to name, but I find the movie enjoyable anyway.

You could almost say that I am enamored with not what this film was, but what it could have been. I always find myself thinking, "Wow, this could have been a real gem of a flick!". Imagine this story in the hands of say John Landis (I know, JL has also put out some Schlock, but also some great stuff). I think JL could have done excellent with this story. In fact, if anyone's got a contact, let's let him know he should do a remake of this movie. It seems obvious that if he's not too old, Christopher Lloyd could fill the shoes of Hans Conried.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

You know, macemace, you're absolutely right. This story should be remade -- properly, on a good budget, with fealty to the original story and using today's special effects possibilities, but not to excess. A lot of times people on these boards make silly speculations about possible remakes but there are a few cases where a remake genuinely could do wonders and you've hit on one here.

Landis might be good, though he always leans to excess: part of that school of, "If a two-car chase is exciting, having 50 cars would be even more exciting", which definitely ain't the case. But what about Spielberg himself? The point of the story -- not the silly one-dimensional slapstick Oboler wrought, but the real thing -- seems sort of up SS's alley. He might have some fun with it. I do think Christopher Lloyd is too old for the role now, which was written for a younger man, and in any event it's not properly a part for an eccentric type of actor like him (or Hans Conried). Steve Martin might have been good but he too is probably a bit old for it, though this might not be a major problem with a few minor story adjustments that would leave the basic nuances of the original written work undisturbed. You need someone who can be a basically straight actor in this, not an oddball type but a normal, settled guy (not a 20-something) whose life is taken over by this thing. Tom Hanks.

I think if Oboler had filmed this in a less heavy-handed, mugging-for-the-camera, gawking, hysterical kind of way I would have liked it more. That plus a more credible script. The responsibility for its many weaknesses really do rest with him.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

Actually, I would take either one. Obvious Landis' take would be a little more over the top, while Spielberg would probably tend to emphasize the "message" he sees behind the story. (Technology running rampant?)
Of course we could get Oliver Stone to do it and bring out the conspiracy behind the Twonky in the first place.
Heck, I'll even take George Romero although we would have to re-work the story some what and give it a title something like "Dawn of the Twonkies!"

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Too bad Kubrick is dead. If he were alive and undertook it now, it'd be released in 2025, be 3 hrs., 44 mins. long and have an aggregate of six pages of dialogue amidst the meticulously-photographed barren landscapes...or, as this involves a TV, perhaps I should have said "vast wastelands".

But maybe we don't need a Kubrick. Peter Jackson could make something just as long and meandering, but without the metaphysical qualities and intelligence Kubrick at least brought to his sometimes over-praised work.

Frankly, with the non-stop, 24-hour necrophiliac coverage ad nauseum of Micheal Jackson's demise, I wish I'd had a Twonky controlling my TV these past few days. It would have imploded itself and ended all our miseries!

[–] macemace 15 years ago

You know, when you think about it, Click could be described as a remake of The Twonky. I know that wasn't the film maker's intention but I wonder if he could have been subconsciously influenced from having see The Twonky previously.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Interesting thought. The Twonky had to assume the form of whatever piece of technology was available to it in the era it landed in. A crummy TV in 1953...a remote in 2009? And who would control it? The man, naturally! Henpecked Hans was born a couple of generations too soon.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

Yes, in the Arch Oboler movie, but in the original story (as in this movie), the Twonky was manufactured.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Well, the Twonky itself was of course manufactured -- in the future. But when it landed in "our" era (in the story, the 1940s), it found itself in a radio factory, and so to adapt, assumed the form of a standard radio console of the day. It wasn't built to look like such a radio, but had to disguise itself as one to blend in with its new surroundings.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

Hmmm. I may have to go back and re-read the original story. Admittedly it has been a long time since I read it, but the way I remember it is a somewhat confused man from another time/place found himself in unfamiliar surroundings which in this case was a radio factory. He knew that his job was to make Twonkies though, so he proceeded to make Twonkies that looked like radio console sets.
It's possible of course that in the intervening years my mind has melded more than one story together to produce this version.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Oh, you may indeed be right. My knowledge of the story is second-hand, from a detailed description of it I read, because I've never found the original, so what I read may be inaccurate itself. Either way, the bottom line is that the Twonky looked like a radio console (in the story) and like a TV (in the movie), disguised as a contemporary device so that it could "pass" and go about its functions. It didn't look like a Twonky...whose true appearance we never do discover, do we? Plus of course in the story the Twonky zaps its owner and survives to "serve" the next people who inherit it -- a crucial difference from the film.

The movie is on TCM again next month -- Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009, at 9:30 AM Eastern. But I doubt it's changed.

[–] macemace 15 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. It may not have changed, but maybe it will give me a chance to get a better recording of it than I currently have.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] hobnob53 15 years ago

Me too. Plus I want to watch it again to see if my opinion of it modifies in any way. See you then!

[–] The_Dying_Flutchman 11 years ago

I just watched it again this passed weekend and enjoyed it, but what I want to know from U is, which is worse this or "Zombies of Mora Tau"?

Significance is the popsicle of a melting mind.

[–] hobnob53 11 years ago

ZOMT.

[–] tdl797 11 years ago

While watching I was thinking of how it could be updated.
No TV antennas, so I guess the man would have to be from a satellite service like DISH.

Now we have flat screen TVs, which don't look much like an animal with legs like older console TVs. So I don't know how to replicate the walking around. Does the radio in the short story walk around?

Maybe it could be an iPod.

Or the record scene could have an iPod in a speaker bay.

[–] macemace 10 years ago

It could be a man that collects vintage TVs, and gets one that is a Twonky. For that matter, it could be a home computer.
In the original story, a befuddled man from some other dimension/planet/time found himself in a factory that made console radios. He only knew that his job was to make Twonkies, so he set about making Twonkies that looked like console radio. This set up wasn't included in the movie, but could be included in an updated remake which could be applied to Twonkies in any modern technological convenience the screenwriter cares to choose. Yes, it could be a flat screen TV that floats about, or sprouts legs or whatever.

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"

[–] macemace 10 years ago

Of course Zombies of MT. The Twonky actually has quite a bit of charm, and only suffers because of some less than stellar transference of the original short story into a screenplay. (OK, the sub-standard directing may have not helped either.)

"Mediocre Marx Brothers is better than no Marx Brothers!"