<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Master of the World (1961), one of several scripts acclaimed author Richard Matheson wrote for American International Pictures, was clearly AIP’s answer, on a smaller budget (albeit large by its standards), to successful Jules Verne adaptations like Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954). In fact, the title character in Robur le Conquérant (Robur, the Conqueror) is Verne’s airborne variation on Captain Nemo—the charismatic character introduced with his submarine, the Nautilus, in 20,000 Leagues—who in the film uses his revolutionary airship, the Albatross, to make war on war itself.

Master of the World presented Matheson with the task of combining Robur and its eponymous sequel, Maître du Mond; as noted in Phil Hardy’s Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, “Script and direction are both surprisingly lightweight, perhaps because the problem of unifying the mood of the two novels was so great. The first (published in 1886) sees Robur as a visionary and idealist, the second (published in 1904) marks Verne’s growing disenchantment and conceives of its hero as a clumsy, power-hungry megalomaniac. These tensions are repressed in the film in favour of an atmosphere in which adventure dominates.”

“That was a biggie for American International, all of half a million dollars!” Matheson joked in a letter to writer Matthew R. Bradley. “[Charles] Bronson was completely out of place. Strange man. The only person I ever knew who was immune to [co-star] Vincent Price’s charm. . . . The first morning I went in to watch shooting, I walked up to him and introduced myself as the writer of the film. ‘Oh, don’t talk to me,’ he said and walked away. I really seethed.” After an apparent rapprochement, Bronson returned to his antisocial ways, and unfortunately, he was not the only one with whom the ordinarily mild-mannered Matheson clashed during the production. He added in an interview with Paul Sammon for Midnight Graffiti, “If someone rubs me the wrong way, and I can tell it immediately, because I have an antenna, I will respond immediately. I remember [William Witney] . . . who was going to direct Master of the World. Obviously, he didn’t understand the script, had no feeling for it, and was making these comments. And immediately I was bristling and speaking to him in a very cold, cutting tone of voice. And [producer James H.] Nicholson [who had co-founded AIP] knew it and tried to calm me down.”

Certainly the film would have benefited from a surer directorial touch than that of Witney, who was a veteran of second-feature Westerns—including no fewer than twenty-seven with Roy Rogers—and low-budget serials (many of them co-directed with John English) for Republic Pictures throughout its twenty-year lifespan, starting in 1935, but sadly displayed no particular affinity for the SF genre.

Equally painful is the obvious use of anachronistic footage from Zoltan Korda’s Four Feathers (1939) and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), including a shot of London from the latter with the Globe Theatre clearly in view, while second-billed Bronson, who had an early starring role in Roger Corman’s Machine Gun Kelly (1958), appears acutely uncomfortable as Robur’s taciturn antagonist, John Strock.

But studio mainstay Vincent Price—whose minion Bronson had, ironically, played in House of Wax (1953) years earlier under his real name, Charles Buchinsky—cuts a suitably commanding figure as Robur, and the special effects by Tim Baar (often billed as Tim Barr), Wah Chang, and Gene Warren of Project Unlimited are generally passable, with the Albatross model an admittedly impressive miniature.

In Robur le Conquérant, Verne’s imaginary “aeronef” is constructed of treated and compressed paper around a hundred-foot-long ship’s deck, suspended and propelled by horizontal and vertical screws, respectively (“The Albatross might be called a clipper with thirty-seven masts,” he notes, hence the first novel’s alternate title of The Clipper of the Clouds), and able to attain altitudes up to 8,700 feet. With a top speed of 120 miles per hour, the Albatross “could make the tour of the globe in two hundred hours,” and indeed much of the novel, written in Verne’s characteristically discursive style, is little more than a glorified travelogue interrupted by occasional snatches of dialogue, as demonstrated by such chapter titles as “Across the Prairie,” “Through the Himalayas,” “Over the Atlantic,” and so on. By the time of Maître du Mond—in which Verne switches to the first person, with the new character of Strock as narrator—Robur has created a new machine, the Terror, a kind of combination Albatross and Nautilus (like the “flying supersub” Atragon in the 1963 SF film Kaitei Gunkan) with which he tries to dominate the world by land, sea, and air, and which is finally destroyed when it gets struck by lightning.

After documentary footage depicting the “conquest of the air,” Strock is sent by the Department of the Interior to Morgantown, Pennsylvania, in 1868 to investigate apparent volcanic activity inside the Great Eyrie, and flies over its unscalable crater in a balloon with a munitions manufacturer, Prudent (Henry Hull), his daughter, Dorothy (Mary Webster), and her fiancé, Phillip Evans (David Frankham). Shot down by Robur, they awaken as his prisoners aboard the Albatross, and following an abortive escape attempt as her crew is taking on water over Ireland, Robur raids London; then, the horrified captives vow to destroy the airship, even at the cost of their own lives, so when Robur drops anchor to repair damages he has incurred while trying to stop an African war, Strock plants a bomb in the armory.

Jealous of Dorothy’s growing affection for Strock, Phillip knocks him out and flees down the anchor rope with the Prudents, but Strock recovers in time to climb down and cut the rope with the repentant Phillip’s help, as Robur and his loyal crew go down with the stricken ship in yet another nod to Nemo (who later returned in Verne’s sequel, Mysterious Island, filmed the same year as Master of the World).

According to Mark Thomas McGee’s revised history of AIP, Faster and Furiouser, Project Unlimited—which later provided the memorable special effects for The Outer Limits—wrote to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, asking that their work on Master of the World, in particular the Albatross model, be given Oscar consideration, although it was ultimately not nominated.

The composer, Les Baxter, scored more than forty AIP films, including Matheson’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963) and all four of the Edgar Allan Poe films he scripted for Roger Corman. “One of my favorite scores that I did was Master of the World,” he told Tom Weaver in It Came from Weaver Five. “I think [it] has some good melodies and some lovely orchestration in it. . . . I had carte blanche—here I had Jules Verne and Vincent Price and airships going around the world, so we managed a lot of interesting orchestration. Pre-John Williams work. I have been said to have influenced all of these guys in their work. Unfortunately, ‘influenced’ is a kind word. There’s an awful lot of copying that goes on that makes me a little bit unhappy. I hate to hear my stuff quoted directly on the screen.”

Halliwell’s Film Guide correctly labeled Master of the World as an “aerial version of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, with cheap sets and much use of stock footage . . . some scenes however have a certain vigor,” while Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide said simply, “Very well done.” A more mixed message came from the Time Out Film Guide, which called it “a pleasantly ludicrous children’s fantasy movie, with a talented production team making the most of a low budget,” though noting that Matheson “was obviously making a bit of a holiday of this one. . . . [Robur] flies around the world trying to end war by the threat of mass destruction. Although the final message is pretty sickening, the film’s imaginative use of stock shots and its garish line in 19th century hardware are admirable.”

Its intended “final message” (if any) aside, the screenplay superbly shows off its author’s adaptive abilities as it skilfully synthesizes Verne’s two novels, the second of which is especially lacking in narrative thrust, with Matheson cleverly conflating, transposing, and recombining elements from both books and expanding an extremely minor character into the obligatory love interest.

Interestingly, despite the film’s mixed reception, a follow-up featuring Robur’s role model was planned, as stated in “Famous Fantastic Factoids from Fantasy Films,” a Filmfax article by Robert Skotak, who has himself shared Oscars for visual effects in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). “The 1970 MGM film Captain Nemo and the Underwater City actually owed its existence to a development made by Roger Corman years earlier. It was originally a project entitled Captain Nemo and the Floating City [that] Corman had developed in 1963 with the screenwriters R. Wright Campbell and Harold Yablonsky. Art director Daniel Haller [Master of the World’s production designer and associate producer] provided preliminary designs, including a flying ship and a multi-tiered city. Plans were made to shoot underwater sequences at Marineland in Southern California.” Unfortunately, MGM’s final product, on which Campbell shared credit with Pip and Jane Baker, was an appropriately soggy opus suffering from uninspired direction by James Hill and the miscasting of the otherwise estimable Robert Ryan as Captain Nemo.