For the first hour and 15 minutes, Forbidden Planet (1956) holds up well as science fiction, then falls apart with its Id-as-monster plot device. Oh well. It is still a curious entertainment proffering a familiar-looking robot and those electronic tonalities on the soundtrack. Sets are still often impressive when they are not, like the idyllic backyard woods, strikingly quaint. Plus FP has Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis. Oddly, it respects religion and it respects leggy females (that is, Miss Francis). More ambitious than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is nonetheless a lesser film, although . . . I wish I had seen it when in opened in Cinemascope.
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