NOTABLE DEATHS ELSEWHERE Bert I. Gordon, 100
Bert I. Gordon, the professed king of the monster movies whose B pictures featured giant rats, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant chickens, a colossal man and 30-foot teenagers laying waste to everything in sight, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 100.
His daughter Patricia Gordon confirmed the death.
As anxieties over nuclear testing and the effects of radiation swept postwar America, Bert Gordon embarked on a low-budget filmmaking odyssey that turned mutated monsters loose on the hapless world. Despite the fact that his movies featured stars like Ida Lupino and Orson Welles, and despite the eye-catching apocalyptic titles and lurid posters, he generated many flops, a few minor hits and largely negative reviews. He also generated a cult following.
In the 1950s and early ’60s, his monster movies were perfect for drive-in theaters, where audiences took in wildly improbable plots, silly dialogue and crude special effects: locusts overrunning a miniature city, a gigantic rat hovering over a girl in a negligee, Lupino being eaten by vast mealworms.
Filming a movie in 10 to 15 days, using rear-projection enlargements of creatures with ordinary people in the foreground, Gordon produced, directed and often wrote about 25 films over six decades starting in 1955, most of them monster movies. Among his best known were “The Cyclops” (1957), “Village of the Giants” (1965), “Necromancy” (1972), “The Food of the Gods” (1976) and “Empire of the Ants” (1977).
None came close to the quality or popularity of the classic atomic-monster films of the era: “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), directed by Eugène Lourié, about a dinosaur freed from Arctic hibernation by a nuclear test and slain amid crowds at Coney Island, and “Them” (1954), directed by
Gordon Douglas, about huge radioactive ants that menace Los Angeles and are trapped and firebombed in the city’s water tunnels.
Gordon’s first film, “King Dinosaur” (1955), with four actors, a seven-day shooting schedule and a $15,000 budget, was a template for his later work: When a new planet enters the solar system, four astronauts land and explore it as a possible home for humans. They battle giant insects and a prehistoric dinosaur, and they finally detonate an atomic bomb to destroy the creature.
Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’ reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”
Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.
Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”
Bert Ira Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sept. 24, 1922. He became interested in film as a boy, when an aunt gave him a 16-mm movie camera for his birthday. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison but dropped out to join the Army Air Forces during World War II.