Just so...so bad

Charming and brutal

Absolutely amazing

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Great Britain's legendary Hammer Studio produced this film that was released in the USA by the Poverty Row company Lippert Pictures. It's a science fiction melodrama with some illicit romance tossed in with an espionage angle from a Cold War point of view. The anti-Communist angle plus the fact that the lead was American actor Howard Duff made Spaceways a good item for its time.Howard Duff is an American rocket science working with the British on an eventual manned rocket flight into space. The timing of that flight gets stepped up quite a bit when Duff is accused of murder.Not that he hasn't good and sufficient reason to murder his tramp of a wife Cecile Chevreau. She's carrying on with fellow scientist Alan Osborn who also happens to be a Russian spy. In any event both are looking to escape the top security base that they are on for their very different reasons.When Chevreau and Osborn disappear the day of a rocket test flight government security man Alan Wheatley best known for being the sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood TV series starts an investigation. One theory is that Duff murdered both of them and put them in the rocket which will orbit the Earth for years. That leaves Wheatley with no case to prove and Duff out in security limbo.That's not good enough for Duff who volunteers to go up himself and bring the first rocket down to clear himself. What happens after that you see the film for.Spaceways is certainly a film of its time. The British while never going as extreme as we did in the McCarthy days to prove our anti-Communism did have their own Cold War cinema which found an audience here. Spaceways is an example of it.Over there though they made Hungarian born and accented Eva Bartok who plays another scientist and one who really has it big for Howard the love interest. Over here that accent would have guaranteed she play a villain. There's a bit of suspenseful tension in the climax which viewers today of Spaceways might find enjoyable. Low production values, but good acting performances characterize this Lippert released film.

Spaceways exemplifies the characteristic weakness of early British SF movies. It has a potentially interesting premise but doesn't develop it.It is basically a 'first man into space' movie but by the time of its release there had already been three such movies, so it needed a twist. In this case, the twist is the reason for going into space at all. A scientist's wife and her lover have gone missing and he is accused of murdering them and hiding the bodies in a satellite. He goes into space to retrieve the satellite and prove his innocence.That is a satisfactory idea for a movie, but Spaceways just doesn't know how to run with it. It takes an hour to set up the situation so that the actual space flight is shoe-horned into the final ten minutes. Even then, the premise is completely undermined, because an investigator has already found the missing couple and solved the mystery before take off, making the space flight unnecessary.The movie was crying out for the actual murderer to be on the spaceship, trying to kill the hero to prevent his own discovery - or something of the kind. It wouldn't have been hard to plot. This would have given the space flight some purpose and would have allowed for some real tension in what should have been the climactic scenes.When you call a movie 'Spaceways' you are setting up certain expectations. If all you deliver is just a tepid mystery, with a desultory spaceflight tacked on at the end, it is a breach of faith with the audience.Although this movie is thoroughly competent for its budget level, it is hard to recommend it to any but the most determined SF completist.

Despite the disclaimers from both the director and producer, this is a fairly entertaining little movie. True, the space stuff struck me as dated, dull and not particularly interesting (aside from a shipboard explosion which is very deftly contrived), and the action is further handicapped by the colorless presence of Eva Bartok who, aside from her very last scene, does little to engage the viewer's attention. Admittedly, the script is weak in this respect and often gave me the feeling the heroine's role had been needlessly expanded simply to give Miss Bartok more screen time.However, once the murder sub-plot rears its head and the talented Alan Wheatley makes his presence felt, interest picks up considerably. Andrew Osborn and Cecile Chevreau also deliver charismatic portrayals which help to counterbalance disappointing characterizations by Michael Medwin and (to a lesser extent) Philip Leaver. As for the hero, Howard Duff seems adequate enough, though he doesn't really pull a great deal of weight.I must admit that, despite his cult following, I've never regarded Terence Fisher as one of the giants of the British film industry, but I thought he actually handled parts of this movie with a fair amount of savvy. Wheatley's scenes are directed (and edited) at a such an agreeably smart pace, one wishes that the Duff-Bartok-Medwin episodes were handled with at least an equal degree of expedition and dispatch.And, despite the tight budget, I thought production values were more than adequate by "B"-picture standards.So, all in all, I disagree with the claims of both producer Carreras and director Fisher that Spaceways has little or nothing to offer.

I like Spaceways, but it is a pretty average movie on all fronts (for the fifties). Even though it does have the lovely Eva Bartok in it, and was directed by Hammer Film's legendary Terence Fisher, the film's main problem is that it can't decide what type of genre film it is, with all the various story elements running around. We've got a early British science fiction (hence the title, of course), a murder mystery, and a bit of early Cold War thriller all tumbled together. The performances by all are solid if stereotypical, but the effects consist primarily of using the same stock footage of V-2 experiments that viewers would come to know and sometimes loathe in many movies later on (Fire Maidens From Outer Space, King Dinosaur, etc., etc.). The movie also seems to end a bit abruptly. Luckily, the DVD of the movie is available at mall music/video stores for about $6 (I got my in a double pack with Kronos for $10), so it is at least affordable for the 50's Sci-Fi Completest out there.