Even among genre fans, Italian director Antonio Margheriti's name and reputation provokes little, if any, recognition. A simple and quick glance at his prolific filmography reveals a panoply of popular film genres, from Westerns to gothic horror, from muscle-man pictures to spy spoofs, and from giallos to sex romps. Margheriti, who often signed his films with the Anglo-Saxon sobriquet "Anthony Dawson" in order to sound more American (a common ruse in the Italian film industry), had his hand in so many genres, some may consider him a journeyman, a technician, a director-for-hire, or, less charitably, a hack. While Margheriti does have his defenders, particularly in his horror efforts such as Castle of Blood (Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas called him "The Third Man of Italian Fantasy", after gold and silver medalists Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda respectively), I feel his reputation will rest mainly on his gloriously frenetic and bizarre pop-art science fiction movies from the 1960s, a genre which had no antecedent in the Italian cinema before Margheriti pretty much built it from the ground up.
Before 1968, when Kubrick's 2001 made its grand splash and established new criteria for the portrayal of space travel on the screen, the SF space film was a hearty runt of a genre, although one whose history stretched back to Georges Melies and his Trip to the Moon. Since Melies' initial trip, other notable space movies graced the theaters like the 1924 Soviet allegory Aelita, Queen of Mars, Fritz Lang's follow-up to Metropolis, 1929's Woman on the Moon, and that fantastic mixture of hard SF and American ingenuity and optimism Destination Moon. By the early 1960s, the dawn of the space age, movies dealing with space travel had become common. The Soviets brought an element of socialist utopianism into the mix with films like Planeta Burg (Planet of Storms, which exhibited excellent special effects and design, but which also carried itself with the stodginess of a Politburo overcoat (but not too stodgy for it to be re-edited by Curtis Harrington and Peter Bogdanovich, under the aegis of Roger Corman, as Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women). Other films from the Eastern Bloc which also followed the utopian lead include East Germany's Der Schweigende Stern (known in the US as First Spaceship on Venus, and based on a Stanislaus Lem novel), and the remarkable Ikarie XB 1 (Voyage to the End of the Universe) from Czechoslovakia (which deserves it's own post!). While the SF space films from the Warsaw Pact were heavy and serious, space movies from Hollywood tended towards the juvenile with efforts like The Angry Red Planet, 12 to the Moon (which featured the photographic skills of the great John Alton), although there were good films like Robinson Crusoe on Mars which treated the subject matter with a modicum of respect, if not scientific verisimilitude.
Which leads us to Antonio Margheriti. While there has always been an element of the fantastic in Italian cinema, it usually stemmed from stories from antiquity and mythology (such as the peplum films which featured muscle-bound heroes like Hercules and Maciste and their laborious exploits against evil tyrants, treacherous queens, remarkable monsters), or borrowing from the previous century with the supernatural gothic horrors helmed by the likes of Bava and Freda, never did the Italians look to the future for their fantasy. Which is not to say Italians didn't have a taste for SF. After the war, science fiction stories and novels printed in periodicals such as Cosmo and, more importantly, Urania became extraordinarily popular. Mainly, these were translations of American and British SF by authors such as Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon. As there was little appetite for home grown SF in Italy in the '50s and early '60s, so when Margheriti decided to direct his first space picture Space-Men (Assignment: Outer Space) in 1961, he took the name of "Anthony Daisies" (a strict transliteration of "Antonio Margheriti") in order to hide his nationality (a common ruse among Italian filmmakers in the '50s and '60s -- even Sergio Leone signed his films as "Bob Robertson" once upon a time). As the first Italian space film, Space-Men set an important precedent. As Phil Hardy writes in his Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction:
"One of the strengths of even the worst of Italian Science Fiction is the visual sense of its designers and set decorators.... the space stations, moons and asteroids of Italian Science Fiction have an imaginative vibrancy about them about them that connects as much with fantasy as with the sober, however pulp inspired, Anglo-American predictions of the look of the future. When, in addition, such films are directed by the likes of babe... or, as here, Margheriti, a director with an equally keen visual style, the results can be superb."
The film was made on a shoestring -- 49 million lire, which translates to $30,000, which in 1960/61 was an extraordinarily paltry sum, especially for a movie which deals with space travel and requires plenty special visual effects. Nowadays, hipsters raised on MST3K and Ed Wood's pie tins snicker derisively when Margheriti's spacemen float by on visible piano wire and the spaceship's exhaust flares like an out of control Zippo, but one should overlook these handicaps and instead focus on the manic imagination and visual flair of Margheriti's space films. Especially with the weird I criminali delle galassia (best known by it's English title The Wild, Wild Planet). Candy colored pop-art spaceship interiors, dancers dressed like butterflies, disembodied organs tremble to life, kidnap victims shrunk to the size of dolls to fit into attache cases, automatons in wraparound shades and black leather, and an explosion of red at the end.... Not great art, but pulp art at least, with the kind of unfettered imagination that is hard to find in today's overly expensive and overly marketed sci-fi extravaganzas. What could Lucas do with $30,000 (or adjusted for inflation. $300,000? Maybe he could get off his ass and make a real movie instead of a toy tie-in.
Academia gives Margheriti his props with an overly serious entry in Senses of Cinema's Great Directors database. There's also a treasure trove of images and video at the official Antonio Margheriti tribute site run by Margheriti's son Edoardo. The best things on the site are the collection of trailers of many of Margheriti's movies, plus a really cool behind the scenes look at Wild, Wild Planet shot for Italian TV.
Then there's the question of authorship of Flesh for Frankenstein (aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. There are proponents for both sides: Margheriti's and Paul Morrissey's. There's one thing that's certain: the breathing disembodied pair of lungs in Frankenstein are the same found in Wild, Wild Planet, designed by the great Carlo Rambaldi.
