Remembering science fiction icon William Phipps

When retired screen and television actor William Edward Phipps died June 1, 2018, at 96 in Santa Monica, Calif., most print and online sources identified him to readers as the voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney's 1950 animated classic CINDERELLA. Not a bad thing to be remembered for, but you had to read on or dig a little further to discover that as the science fiction craze took hold of Hollywood in the '50s, Phipps was one of the more visible thespians cast in such outstanding examples of the genre as THE WAR OF THE WORLDS and INVADERS FROM MARS, as well as a lesser production, CAT-WOMEN ON THE MOON, all from 1953.

To generations that grew up viewing these and other productions of the like on TV, Phipps' face and voice offered a reassuring presence amidst the otherworldly chaos that had come to visit us on Earth. Although he played his share of villains over the years, the native of Vincennes, Ind., projected the image of an all-American guy that found its way into his portrayals. 

And while Phipps had no particular preference for sci-fi or even horror, he told interviewers that if the part felt right to him, he'd take it. The bad films and programs in which he appeared did little to hurt his career as he dashed from featured part to uncredited bit; indeed, the IMDB points out a number of his performances went without mention in the opening or closing titles.

Following service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Phipps was in his mid-20s when he stormed the movie capital. By 1947 he had worked up to important parts in film, starting with a key role in the noir CROSSFIRE at RKO Radio. As Leroy, an agreeable soldier from Tennessee awaiting his discharge, he aids his sergeant, Keeley (Robert Mitchum) and Washington D.C. police Lieutenant Finlay (Robert Young), trap fellow non-com and bigoted double-murderer Montgomery (Robert Ryan) in a still-timely social drama.

Although released in 1949, Irving Allen's production of THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER, shot on location, in a new color process known as Ansco and distributed by RKO, was filmed two years earlier and featured Phipps as Janvier, one of the Paris police detectives aiding Inspector Maigret (Charles Laughton) in seeking the killer of a wealthy American expatriate. 

Dismissed by some critics, THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER maintains suspense and builds to an exciting climax on the title edifice. The mind games Laughton plays with the crafty villain (Franchot Tone, who co-produced with Allen) more than justified the title of the Georges Simenon story "A War of Nerves" on which the screenplay was based. Interestingly, director Burgess Meredith remembered the Simenon property purchased by Tone as THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY, but "A War of Nerves" is what appears in the credits as the inspiration for the script. THE MAN WHO WATCHED TRAINS GO BY was filmed in 1952 by British producers with Claude Rains in the lead; its U.S. release title was PARIS EXPRESS.

"It was one of the most colorful experiences of my life," Meredith, who did double duty in the film as an actor, recalled later in life. "(A)nd although we were always short of money -- the film was financed by Franchot's personal fortune -- we came out with a good picture."*

Phipps' initial encounter with science fiction reportedly pre-dated the first such screen efforts that appeared in 1950 with the production of FIVE, written, produced and directed by Arch Oboler (1909-1987), one of the leading playwrights of radio's golden age. Taking over scripting duties from Willis (later Wyllis) Cooper on LIGHTS OUT in 1936, Oboler's name became synonymous with the bizarre as well as the deeply dramatic programming heard on the airwaves durting that time. He began writing screenplays in 1940 and by 1945 moved up to directing with STRANGE HOLIDAY for independent distribution and BEWITCHED at M-G-M. After helming THE ARNELO AFFAIR (1947) for Metro, Oboler moved into television as the decade drew to a close.

But keeping his ear close to the public pulse, particularly anxiety over the creation of nuclear weapons, Oboler wrote a film script dealing with a post-apocalyptic future, obtained financing and filmed FIVE. He cast Phipps as Michael, a bearded intellectual who has taken up residence in a beachfront house of unusual design. (In reality, the site was Oboler's own home in Malibu, Calif., called "Eaglefeather," designed by none other than iconic architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1940 and completed the following year).

Into Michael's lonely existence comes pregnant Roseanne (Susan Douglas Rubes, then billed as Susan Douglas), who lost her husband in the nuclear war that has destroyed civilization. Initially uneasy with one another, Michael and Roseanne come to accept their situation. The arrivals of three more survivors (James Anderson, Charles Lampkin and Earl Lee) create new tensions that ultimately leave Michael and Roseanne alone to forge a new existence.

As Michael, Phipps lends conviction to his reading of the occasionally bombastic lines provided by Oboler, as well as likeability to his portrayal of an idealist determined to press on, evidenced by his efforts to produce food from a land apparently unaffected by radiation. He finds his position challenged by Eric (Anderson), a rugged individualist who is nevertheless an embodiment of the greed and hatred that brought about the war. Eric's conflict with Charles (Lampkin), the sole black man who comes to the enclave, results in a brawl in which Roseanne loses her unborn child. Eric convinces Roseanne to accompany him on a trip to the city to find other life, but he is instead poisoned by lingering fallout, leaving Roseanne to find her way back to Michael.

Once in the can, it seems to have taken Oboler over a year to find a distributor for FIVE. Columbia picked it up and tested it in several major cities in the spring of 1951 to disappointing results until future producer Sid Pink, then overseeing advertising for United Artists Theaters out of Los Angeles, saw it and was impressed enough to rescue it with a big reissue and sensational ad campaign later in the year. That's Pink's story, but it makes sense.

"...I saw an enormously interesting story done in a weird style, totally unlike any film I had seen," Pink recalled a few decades later. "Arch had managed to retain the flavor of radio in a visual medium, and this awkwardness served to enhance the subject matter. It was obviously a low-budget effort, but so different and unusual as to deserve a better fate than shelving."

However, Pink's memory of these events can be called into question because he cited the cast of FIVE as being led by Phipps, "whose name was well known in radio but who had never before ventured into film."** If FIVE was produced as early as 1949, as Pink claimed, Phipps may not have been a familiar face to moviegoers yet but had a number of screen credits under his belt, with more work to follow in the budding field of TV.

Labeled "pretentious" -- a term often attached to Oboler's work by his detractors -- and worse by critics over the years, FIVE maintains an unsettling aura and the novelty of its author's attempt to adapt radio style to film, as Pink described so succintly from his initial viewing experience. Stark images of a deserted city and the question of survival spoke to growing concerns of the day in which FIVE was first seen, particularly after the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, China fell to Communist rule and war loomed in Korea.

Although his later science fiction film roles were of lesser importance, fans easily recognize Phipps in three films from 1953, when the SF boom took off proper with tales of alien invasion, spaceflight and prehistoric monsters returning to life to again roam the Earth.

The first of these epics was George Pal's classic version of H.G. Wells' 1897 novel THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, in which Pal changed the bucolic English setting of the original to a rural California town where the crash landing of something other than a meteor precedes an actual assault from Mars. Employing more spectacular visuals than Pal's previous entries in the genre, DESTINATION MOON (1950) and WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951), THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was acclaimed as exciting entertainment upon its release by Paramount on Feb. 20. Over 50 years later, Leonard Maltin and associates hailed the film as "superior sci-fi" and "(d)ramatically sound ... filled with dazzling, Oscar-winning special effects."***

In a cast of new faces and seasoned character actors, Phipps is Wash Perry, one of the locals who senses the commerical properties of the unknown disc that's landed near his town. His participation is cut short when he and two other citizens (Paul Birch and Jack Kruschen) become the first victims of the Martians' destructive ray. The film itself, a shining example of talent merged with a well-appointed budget under the direction of Byron Haskin, pointed the sci-fi boom in a positive direction.

The momentum took Phipps into the thematically similar INVADERS FROM MARS, an Edward L. Alperson production distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox on April 22. Whereas THE WAR OF THE WORLDS focused on action and awe at the rampage launched by the Martians, INVADERS FROM MARS, directed by film design genius William Cameron Menzies (1896-1957), has both of those qualities in addition to a disturbing edge enhanced by Menzies' simple yet unnerving images.


Primarily told from the viewpoint of a boy, sole witness to an alien craft descending from space and burying itself in the sand dunes near his home, INVADERS FROM MARS offers in addition to a thrilling story a psychological portrait of a frightened youth reacting to a world of adults, including his own parents (Leif Erickson and Hillary Brooke), who have been taken over by the Martians. The aliens are visualized as abnormally tall, zombie-like creatures standing guard over a grotesque head encased in glass that orchestrates the resulting chaos.

"What matters," critics and historians Michael H. Price, John Wooley and Jan Michael Henderson observed, "is that INVADERS pivots on just one imaginative Everychild played with a natural immersion in character and a manly questing attitude by Jimmy Hunt, whose doubts about his place in a turbulent society drive him to experience a dream of childish simplicity and cosmic foreboding."@

Phipps figures in the latter portion of the movie as Army Sergeant Baker, who aids his commanding officer (Morris Ankrum) in penetrating the Martian lair beneath the dunes and setting a time bomb to insure their destruction. The urgency of the mission is expressed superbly by Phipps as anxiety builds over the invaders' infernal superiority that has so far given them the upper hand.

CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON, released by smaller scale Astor Pictures on Sept. 3, has built a reputation of its own exemplifying science fiction as schlock cinema -- "tacky" in the estimation of Maltin & Co. Producer Al Zimbalist spent most of the film's limited resources on shooting it originally in the still-novel three-dimensional process. However, Zimbalist did expend wisely in the choice of cast, in which Phipps, as Doug Smith, played in support of such notables as Sonny Tufts, Marie Windsor, Victor Jory and Douglas Fowley, whose professionalism lent the film some credibility.

Phipps' Doug is a crew member on a manned exploratory flight to the Moon that also includes a female scientist (Windsor). Reaching their objective, the crew encounters the title pulchritude (all reportedly winners of get-a-Hollywood-contract pageants) and fends off their attempt to hijack the ship and invade Earth.

Phipps acquits himself well under Arthur Hilton's direction, which struggled against such low budget considerations as a cramped spaceship interior and cave locations in which oxygen is somehow present, allowing the early astronauts to conveniently discard their protective suits. Windsor, often cast as a siren, brings an air of mystery to the proceedings to counterbalance the conflict between pilot Tufts and engineer Jory over her and the intent of the cat-women. Astor allowed the film to be remade in 1958 by Richard E. Cunha as MISSILE TO THE MOON, co-starring Richard Travis, K.T. Stevens and Cathy Downs.

Although greeted with lukewarm or openly hostile critical notices, CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON earned some notoriety at the time of its release when Zimbalist filed suit against the producers of the radio version of the situation comedy MY LITTLE MARGIE for allegedly defaming his magnum opus. He cited an episode in which Margie Albright and friends attend a screening of a lousy picture called CAT-WOMEN FROM OUTER SPACE. Zimbalist believed the made-up title was a snarky reference to CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON and was potentially damaging to the film's marketability. "Presumably, the two parties settled out of court," wrote bad cinema observers Harry and Michael Medved.@@

Phipps' personability comes in handy in his next sci-fi entry, THE SNOW CREATURE, issued by United Artists in November 1954. He and his character, Los Angeles police Lieutenant Dunbar, don't appear until the second half of this feature from producer-director W. Lee Wilder (1904-1982) and his then-teenage son Myles Wilder, who penned the script from his original story.

THE SNOW CREATURE's first half deals with Dr. Frank Parrish (Paul Langton), a botanist seeking plant life in the Himalayan montains who unexpectedly tracks and captures a Yeti, the legendary, mysterious and unseen dweller of the heights that came into the public consciousness when climber Edmund Hillary reached the top of Mount Everest in 1953.

Parrish returns to L.A. with the creature, which breaks loose from its refrigerated traveling compartment to terrorize the city. The scientist joins Dunbar in a desperate search to recapture the monster, discovering it uses the cool recesses of the city storm drain system to get about undetected. Parrish and the police eventuallty corner the creature, which attacks the scientist and then dies in a hail of bullets.

While all business except for delivering film's jokey closing line, Phipps eschews the Jack Webb/DRAGNET approach to playing a cop so popular at the time for a more rounded portrayal. Dunbar is awaiting the birth of his child, but instead of pacing around a hospital waiting room, he's out hunting a monster and guzzling coffee while awaiting news of the next creature sighting.

THE SNOW CREATURE was the last of a triptych of sci-fi movies made by W. Lee Wilder in 1953-1954, the others being PHANTOM FROM SPACE and KILLERS FROM SPACE. One latter-day analysis of these productions blames Wilder for being too remote with the audience in THE SNOW CREATURE, keeping all at a distance that even extended to the cast. "THE SNOW CREATURE is like critiquing performances in a documentary," wrote Arthur Joseph Lundquist. "Good, bad or indifferent, the actors are what they are. The film simply presents them to us, to take them or leave them as they are."@@@ In our estimation though, Phipps and Langton engender sympathy as their characters cope with the latest developments.

Constrained by budget, THE SNOW CREATURE suffers from overlong footage of the expedition climbing the mountain in search of the Yeti, as Lundquist rightly maintains, yet Parrish's foreboding narration during same does much to keep the story moving. In the second half, limited and repeated scenes of police cars racing to the scene of the creature's latest attack are also a drawback. Wilder does, however, redeem the visual negativity with the climactic sequence in the sewers by filming the search on location with minimal repetition. The scenes are also rendered more suspenseful with the use of atmospheric library music familiar to fans of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN and other '50s TV shows.

Phipps' last brush with the fantastic in cinema came a decade later when he was engaged to appear in additional Hollywood-shot scenes to pad the length of the British-made EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964) for its initial showings on network TV. Phipps played the father of the mute, feral girl (Katy Wild) in the original footage produced by Hammer Films with Peter Cushing making the third of his six appearances as Baron Frankenstein.

Universal performed the same task on two other Hammers it had released stateside, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962) and KISS OF THE VAMPIRE (1963). The latter aired as KISS OF EVIL as NBC expanded its popular SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES to other weeknights. These versions containing the additional scenes with American actors are rarely, if ever, seen today.

While he had become identified with science fiction cinema in the '50s, Phipps pressed on with a wide assortment of roles. It was no accident that he had parts of varying importance in two of the biggest movies of 1956, LUST FOR LIFE (as Vincent Van Gogh's friend Emile Bernard) and THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT (an Army sergeant in the film's lengthy flashback sequence). Along the way, he gave notable portrayals in 1954's most talked-about film, RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, as the sexual predator Mickey, and as a gangster named Stitch in support of John Payne as THE BOSS (1956), an unusually frank look at crooked politics authored by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo under one of the numerous pseudonyms he used at the time. 

Phipps lent a poignant quality to the the role of Lt. Al Hendricks, a wheelchair-bound former Navy pilot who hasn't yet accepted his disability, opposite Cary Grant in the offbeat World War II romance KISS THEM FOR ME (1957). Phipps' last screen appearance was as a minister in SORDID LIVES (2000), a feature he also co-produced.

Just a way of saying thank you to a "that guy" actor for the moments he helped create in science fiction cinema. Phipps was one of those Hollywood perennials whose professionalism always leaves an indelible impression.

* Meredith, SO FAR, SO GOOD: A MEMOIR, Boston and New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1994, p. 164.
** "Producer Sid Pink Remembers THE TWONKY, the Film Nobody Wants to Love," Filmfax, No. 26, April-May 1991, pp. 40-41.
*** LEONARD MALTIN'S CLASSIC MOVIE GUIDE, New York: Plume Books, 2005, p. 616.
@ In FORGOTTEN HORRORS, VOL. 5: THE ATOM AGE, Lower Klopstokia: Cremo Studios, 2011, p. 243.
@@ In THE GOLDEN TURKEY AWARDS: THE WORST ACHIEVEMENTS IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY, New York: Berkley Books, 1981, p. 192.
@@@ Lundquist, "Planet Filmplays Inc.: The Science Fiction Cinema of W. Lee Wilder," Midnight Marquee, Issue 38, Spring 1989, p. 10.