An authentic oddity and paradigm of low-budget science fiction cinema from the early ‘60s, TheCreation of the Humanoids depicts a future time after a nuclear war has decimated much of humanity. The remaining enclaves of the species have since become ensconced in super-technological cities, beset by slowly encroaching sterility and aided by an ever-growing populace of androids. Paranoia amongst humans at the increasing superiority of the androids, and their rapidly evolving human-like characteristics, has grown to the extent that a reactionary political group calling itself the Order of Flesh and Blood has started agitating for political action to get rid of the higher-functioning androids. They monitor and pester the mechanical men everywhere except in the one place humans are barred from, the recharging facility for the robots which they have started referring to as “the Temple.” A black market for androids subsists despite the Order’s efforts, and the androids are buying up older models and upgrading them with the aid of brilliant but nervous human scientist Dr. Raven (Don Doolittle). Soon it becomes clear that Raven and the most advanced androids are creating life-like “humanoids” and implanting them with human memories extracted from the recently deceased: these creations have no idea they are artificial and continue on with their lives. When members of the Order track one of the black market robots to Raven’s laboratory, the scientist, rather than be captured, is expected to commit suicide. Raven finds he doesn’t have the will to do this, so he has the android, still in the disorientated phase of the implanting procedure, throttle him to death instead. The Order members and policemen break in on this scene and immediately the anti-robot activists presume they have at last an example of a dangerous android.
The Creation of the Humanoids weaves authentic, then cutting-edge sci-fi ideas with a parable for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement in the US, as well as a broader contemplation of the tension between the clasping need for psychological security manifesting as reactionary sentiment in the face of rapid scientific change, as it journeys towards a climax that beholds a new frontier for the consciousness and humanity. The androids are referred to with the derogatory nickname “Clickers.” A portion of the plot deals wryly with the prospect of intermarriage. The finale hinges on the discovery of major characters, one of them a bigot, discovering that they’ve been accidentally passing, and further bonded by an act of political terrorism. After the death of Raven, the Order of Flesh and Blood quickly hold a meeting and policy debate over how to exploit the new, perturbing discoveries, with Kenneth Cragis (Don Megowan), one of the Order’s ardent leaders, urging forthright but considered action. He is soon confronted by the damaging report that his sister Esme (Frances McCann) has joined with an android named Pax in “rapport,” a process of psychological bonding very close to marriage. Cragis confronts his sister and Pax in an amusing sequence where Pax exhibits a not-quite-human irony strongly reminiscent of Spock and Data from later generations of Star Trek: “Don’t put me on dear – I have a sense of humour but I’m not creative,” he confesses at one point, before requesting of Kenneth, “Please don’t dislike me too much Cragis – nobody asks to be created.”
Esme is tellingly characterised as a classic liberal with a touch of bohemia – she works for the rather internet-like future news services and finds rapport with Pax a refreshing breeze after a disastrous marriage as well as a statement of independence from the bigoted upbringing of her and Kenneth’s father, one which Kenneth, although a driven and intelligent scientist, hasn’t yet questioned. “You both would’ve been great back in the days when war was a national pastime!” Esme accosts her brother when he tries asserting pompous authority over her. Kenneth’s own desire is to halt the advance of sterility and achieve immortality, and he falls heavily for Esme’s similarly open-minded friend and neighbour Maxine (Erica Elliot), who works for a pro-android news service. Jay Simms’ screenplay, based very loosely on a novel by Jack Williamson, has something of the talky, heady staginess of a TV drama script of the time: the settings are few and the film is essentially a number of long, involved conversations. The drama is created not by unfolding melodramatic events, but by the flow of exegesis, as the characters, whether with pure logic like the humanoids or with the brittle blends of thought and feeling that compound human reactivity, attempt to work through the problems and epiphanies confronting them. TheCreation of the Humanoids is dense with speculative conceptualism beyond just about anything on display found in other genre cinema of the time, and the film has a simple willingness to engage intellectually that feels almost radical. The fusion of thinly-veiled sociology and heady sci-fi metaphor again anticipates Star Trek and its preoccupation with that approach. The narrative bears a crucial resemblance to Blade Runner(1982) in tackling the limitations of liminal identity in the context of a post-apocalyptic age and the evolution of synthetic people, whilst Barry’s film is far more sophisticated on a theoretical level than something like the recently lauded Ex Machina (2015) with its artfully contrived take on ideas this confirms as hoary and superficial.
The threadbare production is redolent of a very low-budget film, in touches like the Confederate Army-style caps the Order’s foot soldiers wear, and the presence of Dudley Manlove in the cast, who played Eros the alien in Ed Wood’s Plan Nine From Outer Space(1959). Director Wesley E. Barry and Simms nonetheless showed here what filmmakers could accomplish with limited means, although the participation of two aging former heavyweights of studio film probably imbued a level of technical proficiency: cinematographer Hal Mohr, who accomplishes some beautiful colour effects, and Jack Pierce, the former Universal makeup wizard who had created Boris Karloff’s famous Frankenstein(1931). Here Pierce applied his talents to creating the look of the humanoids, with their bald pates, sickly skin hues, and ball bearing-like eyeballs. Barry had been a popular ingénue in silent film before turning to directing, and his direction here suits the material perfectly with his all but flat mise-en-scène, regarding the characters against limited sets in a manner reminiscent again of TV theatre but also the rectilinear visual approach of early cinema, as well as Fritz Lang’s deliberate systematisation of that style on Die Nibelungen (1924): it’s like someone’s retelling an A.E. Van Vogt novel through the prism of a Cecil B. DeMille biblical movie. Barry, in dealing with a similarly mythic pivot of history to Lang and DeMille, visualises that pivot as a hieroglyphic scrawl where everyone and everything is reduced to a place in a schematic graph, struggling to emerge from the cage of both biology and film technique.
The stylisation of the settings on the other hand closely resembles the covers of sci-fi magazines, with the clashing, saturated hues, whilst the minimalist use of space and shadow in the scene of debate in the Order’s headquarters both eloquently conquers budgetary constraints and evokes a kind of techno-religious architecture, anticipatory of Ken Adam’s concepts for Kubrick and James Bond and John Barry’s work on Star Wars (1977) in creating an argot at once futuristic and atavistic. The mood that TheCreation of the Humanoids exudes is indefinably weird and acausal, perhaps one reason Andy Warhol was purportedly so fond of it, who might also have been compelled by the portrait of a post-erotic future. The film as a whole feels like a landmark, far more small-scale and subtle than some genre works before and after it, like, say, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but like them marking a vital moment where something shifted, where up-to-date soft sci-fi ideas properly colonised cinema as hard sci-fi ideas had with Destination Moon (1950). The finale, heavily signposted and arrived at less with a sense of answered mystery then with inevitable irony, sees both Kenneth and Maxine unmasked as humanoids, forced to confront their real state by the revived, newly confident Raven, who hopes to give the human race a chance at survival by taking it to another level, whilst trying to meet the instilled needs of the species – love, the belief in identity, sexuality – at the same time. Barry and Simm even touch on the ugliest aspects of the Civil Rights era, as it’s revealed Maxine actually died in a bombing of her office arranged by the Order, an act of terrorism Kenneth signed off on. There are undeniable limitations to The Creation of the Humanoids– there are lines of dialogue that drop like lead and some stiff performances from the no-name cast, and the whole thing can probably be listened to like a radio show as easily as watched. It still stands as a fascinating, highly individual artefact that said something about its own time’s moral quandaries as well as its preemptive daydreams, and, considering all the furore about the same fundamental issues of human coupling and social integrity today as well as the ever-closing dawn of artificial intelligence, still has relevance to ours.
