CITY BENEATH THE SEA

(vt One Hour to Doomsday)

   1. Made-for-tv film (1970). 20th Century-Fox TV Productions for NBC TV. Dir Irwin ALLEN, starring Stuart Whitman, Robert Wagner, Joseph Cotton, Rosemary Forsyth, Richard Basehart, Robert Colbert, Sugar Ray Robinson. Screenplay John Meredyth Lucas from a story by Allen. 100 mins, cut to 93 mins. Colour.

   Released outside the USA as a feature film called One Hour to Doomsday, this was a pilot for a tv series that was never made. In an incoherent jumble of over-familiar sf situations, the citizens of 21st-century Pacifica have to contend with a super-H-bomb to be exploded somewhere within their underwater city, invasion by an "unfriendly foreign power", a sea monster, rebellion, the theft of a shipment of gold from Fort Knox, and imminent destruction by the impact of a planetoid approaching Earth. This is Irwin-Allen plotting at its most typical, foretelling the DISASTER movies which would become his speciality. All ends happily.

   JB/PN

   2. UK tv serial for children (1962). ABC TV. Written John Lucarotti. Prod Guy Verney. 7 25min episodes. B/w.

   This told of a reporter and his young sidekick kidnapped to the underwater base of a mad scientist intent on world control.CBTS was the sequel to Plateau of Fear (1961). ABC TV. Written Malcolm Stuart Fellows, Sutherland Ross. Prod Guy Verney. 6 25min episodes. B/w.

   Thriller set in the Andes where a reporter and young sidekick investigate a strange beast thought responsible for attacks on a nuclear power plant; the true villain is a general who wants the plant for military purposes.The sequel to CBTS was Secret Beneath the Sea (1963). ABC TV. Written John Lucarotti. Prod Guy Verney. 6 25min episodes. B/w.

   Again in the undersea city of Aegira, the plot revolves around an ex-U-boat commander (from the earlier story) and rare metals vital for space research.

   SH