Writer-director Edward Bernds was invited to make this film by Richard Heermance, a producer who wanted to use some stock footage from an earlier science fiction film, Flight to Mars (1951). Armed with the concept of astronauts arriving on a strange planet, Bernds says he was inspired by a non-fiction Arthur C Clarke book on science which mentioned the Einstein theory that if you move fast enough, time slows down, and if you approach the speed of light, time stands still. Bernds constructed a story about four astronauts on the first space rocket to Mars who are accidentally transported 522 years into the future. (As Bernds pointed out to Tom Weaver later, this was well before Planet of the Apes (1968) and The Twilight Zone (1959-64); however it was well after HG Wells’ novel, The Time Machine.) The astronauts discover that Earth has become a bleak world inhabited by mutants and giant spiders; the remnants of the human race live underground, where the women are voluptuous and smart but the men are withered and weak. The astronauts help the humans revive and take on the mutants.
Bernds admitted having read The Time Machine but denied there were any similarities between Welles’ book and World Without End – which seems odd since both feature time travel, hopeless impotent humans of the future under the thumb of mutants, time travellers fighting the mutants, and a girl of the future being attracted to a virile time traveller (in the film she is called “Deena” – in Wells’ book, “Weena”). Plagiarised or not, the story of World Without End is the film’s greatest strength; the acting is patchy, but serviceable
Originally titled Flight to the Future, the film started shooting on July 21, 1955. Although the budget was low, it did extend to include Technicolour and CinemaScope. Bernds wanted Sterling Hayden or Frank Lovejoy for the lead but Heermance insisted on the cheaper Hugh Marlowe (from All About Eve (1950)) instead. The other astronauts were played by Nelson Leigh, Chris Dark and Rod Taylor.
Bernds was not happy with Marlowe’s performance or his attitude on set:
He was not prepared, he didn’t know his lines, and that’s unforgivable. He was lazy. We spent a lot of time out on location – hot, dusty, disagreeable old Iverson’s Ranch – and, as you remember the picture, they were loaded down with packs and weapons and things like that. Between takes Marlowe would chuck the pack, put his weapon down, find shade somewhere. Eventually we’d have to go send for him, find him. Then it took time to get the pack on again. This was unpardonable – the minutes that you lose are precious. Then when he’d get on set he frequently didn’t know his lines, he’d blow scenes. And most of all he didn’t generate the strength that I wanted…
When an actor behaves like that, he tends to infect the others. Chris Dark was like a spoiled kid: if Hugh Marlowe could goof off and sit in the shade and forget where he put his pack so the prop man had to find it, why, he tended to do the same thing. Rod Taylor was all right, he was very new to the business and anxious to please. Nelson Leigh was an old pro.
Bernds thought Heermance was too concerned with cost, forcing him to compromise on the quality of the special effects. An example of the former was the giant spiders used in the film. Bernds says the spiders had legs which were operated by selsyn motors, but since the motors did not work all the time the actors had to “provide most of the struggle” in their scenes with the spiders.
The art director was Alberto Vargas, who had a notable career as an illustrator of women for Esquire and Playboy magazines. Incidentally, Sam Peckinpah worked as a dialogue director, and future Oscar-winning producer Walter Mirisch was an executive at Allied Artists at the time.
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