Review #947: 'Just Imagine' (1930)

Here's a first for me - a pre-Hays Code science-fiction romantic musical comedy. Just Imagine, directed by David Butler, envisions a 1980 where everybody flies rather than use cars, are given numbers instead of names, eat food and drink alcohol in pill form, and have their life partners decided by a judge. Just Imagine is a true oddity, and should be seen by anybody interested in obscure curiosities or the evolution of sci-fi in cinema. Despite the wonderful Oscar-nominated set design, the film is also very, very bad, plagued by wooden acting, forgettable songs, and some plain old weirdness.

J-21 (John Garrick) is in love with LN-18 (Maureen O'Sullivan), but the fact that he has reached the peak in his field - aviation - is stopping him from achieving greater things. Due to the limits of his field. the judge deciding on LN-18's ideal partner is the favouring smug and loathsome aristocrat MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson) instead. After witnessing a successful experiment to bring back a man, who dubs himself Single O (vaudeville performer El Brendel), back to life after being frozen in 1930, J-21 is approached by a scientist who has perfected a 'rocket plane' capable of reaching Mars, and wants J-21 to be the pilot. Joined by Single-O and his best friend RT-42 (Frank Albertson), J-21 sets out on a mission into the unknown in the hope of becoming a hero and winning the hand of his true love.

Some early moments of Just Imagine are truly wonderful. Riding high above the city in their aircrafts, R-21 parks up next to LN-18 for a mid-air chat amidst the backdrop of skyscrapers. The special effects throughout are wonderfully charming and hold up well 75 years on. These brief delights are sadly few and far between, and the film spends the majority of its hefty 110 minute running-time churning out blandly-filmed song-and-dance routines, including a bizarre number about never killing a fly because it may be in love with another fly, Brendel's tiresome and unfunny shtick, and taking its sweet time to actually get into outer space. When we finally lands on Mars, we are in Ed Wood territory, with scantily-clad natives and plonky fight scenes. It flopped upon release due to the decreasing popularity of musicals at the time (pre-Busby Berkeley), but Just Imagine at the very least deserves to be seen once and never again.


Directed by: David Butler
Starring: John Garrick, Maureen O'Sullivan, El Brendel, Frank Albertson, Marjorie White
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie