Dr Who and the Daleks (1965)
Directed by Gordon Flemyng

Film Review

1965 was the year in which Britain was gripped by the mother of all crazes, Dalekmania.  Following their first two appearances in the popular British television series Doctor Who, the Daleks had become a merchandising phenomenon and the nation's children were obsessed with the metallic monstrosities from the planet Skaro.  With such a bountiful cash cow to milk, it is hardly surprising that some enterprising film producer stepped in and gave the Daleks their first outing on the big screen, bigger and better than before, and in glorious widescreen Techicolor.   The summer of 1965 must have seemed like Christmas when the Daleks blazed their way onto cinema screens across Britain, just a few weeks after their latest television adventure, The Chase.

It was the American film producer Milton Subotsky who first realised the cinematic possibilities of the Daleks.  A few years previously he had founded a company named Amicus Productions with Max J. Rosenberg, which specialised in low budget horror films.  Having purchased the rights to adapt Terry Nation's first Dalek story for Doctor Who, Subotsky put the film into production without a moment's delay, eager to capitalise on the growing success of the metal monsters.  Subotsky wrote the screenplay, keeping virtually all of Nation's original storyline but changing drastically the nature of the central character.  The mysterious time traveller known as The Doctor in the television series became a doddering old inventor named Dr Who, who lives in a suburban house and likes reading boys' adventure comics from the 1950s. 

The film retains the series' other key concept, Tardis, the spacetime ship which is, to coin a phrase, bigger on the inside than on the outside, as well as the series' infamous obsession with corridors.  The lead actor of the TV series, William Hartnell, was not available to appear in the film, so he was replaced with Peter Cushing, a stalwart of the horror genre, best known for his Dracula and Frankenstein films for Amicus's rival company, Hammer.  The film retained the now iconic design of the Daleks, although they were substantially larger and bulkier in their film manifestation, their oft-mocked sink-plungers replaced with metal attachments.  The Daleks' original designer Raymond P. Cusick received neither a credit nor payment for the film, beginning a long and bitter dispute between Cusick and the writer Terry Nation over the ownership of the Dalek concept.

Although Dr Who and the Daleks was, predictably, a massive commercial success (easily one of the most popular British films of the year), it does not stand up to critical scrutiny and is generally loathed by the fans of the television series.  One of the main objections to the film is that it adheres far too closely to Terry Nation's original story, which was conceived for a children's low budget television series to be broadcast over a seven week period.  Consequently, much of the film consists of Dr Who and his friends walking up and down the same tedious stretch of corridor and struggling to resolve obviously contrived cliff-hangers every ten minutes or so.  Whilst Subotsky made an effort to tone down some of the darker elements of the original story, he failed to remove its many plot weaknesses and so the film looks like what it is - a watered down copy of the television series on which it is so obviously based.

Another cause of contention is Peter Cushing's portrayal of the principal hero, which lacks the depth and mystique of William Hartnell's superb portrayal of the original Doctor Who.  Cushing plays Dr Who not as a seasoned time traveller but as a rather bland and silly science professor from the home counties, one who just happens to have knocked up a fully equipped space-time machine in his back yard.  The other main human characters are also wishy-washy copies of their television counterparts, played by actors who were clearly chosen so as not to detract from the film's main stars, the Daleks.  Likewise, the set design and special effects are mediocre for a sci-fi film of this era, although given that most of the story takes place in corridors, dead forests and caves, there presumably wasn't much scope for originality in the design department.  Without the thrill of the Daleks, the film would have bombed at the box office and earned its place in a forgotten corner of the more dismal annals of film history.

Dr Who and the Daleks is about as ephemeral a piece of science-fiction as you can imagine, although the film still enjoys a certain popularity on account of its connection with the television series from which it sprang.  Milton Subotsky did a far better job with his next Dalek film - Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966) - partly because he threw more money at it, but principally because he had a far better story to work with.  Plans for a third Dalek film, based on The Chase, were hastily shelved once the Dalek craze had finally subsided in the summer of 1966.

Film Synopsis

With the help of his granddaughters Susan and Barbara, Dr Who, an elderly science professor, has invented a fantastic machine named Tardis that can travel through time and space.   On the outside, the ship resembles an ordinary police telephone box, but the interior contains a huge control room crammed with scientific paraphernalia.  So pleased is he with his creation that Dr Who cannot resist showing it to Barbara's boyfriend, Ian Chesterton, who accidentally sets it in motion.  Opening the doors, Dr Who finds they have landed on an alien planet, in a petrified jungle that testifies to there having been a global nuclear catastrophe.  At the edge of the jungle, the party discovers a vast futuristic city, which they cannot resist exploring.  Inside, they are captured by strange machine-like creatures, the Daleks, who reveal they are the survivors of a nuclear war they waged against their enemies, the Thals, many thousands of years ago.  With her friends succumbing to the effects of radiation poisoning, Susan is compelled to return to Tardis to collect a tin of anti-radiation drugs which they had found outside the ship.  The Daleks believe that the drugs will cure them of their present condition, which compels them to live in protective metal casings.  In the jungle, Susan is surprised to find that, far from being disfigured mutants, the Thals are  humanoid and friendly.  The Thal leader Alydon gives Susan a second tin of drugs to treat her friends and hopes that he can make peace with the Daleks.  Unfortunately, the Daleks have no intention of sharing their world with the Thals - they intend to explode a neutron bomb that will wipe out their enemies.  Dr Who and his friends soon find that they have no choice but to join the Thals in their fight against the Daleks.  But the city is well protected and the only way by which they can make a surprise attack is by crossing rocky mountains bordered by a lake that is filled with unspeakable mutations...