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PROGRAM ERROR
"Disconnect blue light!"
Computers at the cinema have never had much in common with their real-life counterparts, and for one very good reason - the real thing is visually and dramatically boring as hell. So to counteract those humourless lists of "why don't laptops in films have proper cursors", we're here to celebrate the computers that bear as little resemblance as possible to the desk-mounted PC World boxes like the one you're no doubt skim-reading this missive on now. One rule here - no robots. Otherwise we'll be here all day. We're going to concentrate purely on those roomsize remnants of the pre-Intel age, so the likes of Yul Brynner's Z80-festooned face panel in Westworld don't make the cut (though a mention should go to the various domestic computers shown at the start of unloved sequel FUTUREWORLD, in which Usbourne Book of the Future staples like holographic chess are rendered lovingly in perspex and neon, which is exactly the sort of aesthetic we're after here). Ditto the wonderfully top-heavy Hector in SATURN 3, and the tear-jerking trio of SILENT RUNNING, much as we love them.
No, it's "electronic brains" only for us, such as the one that Spencer Tracy brings in to run his TV network in 1957's DESK SET, a screwball comedy with Katherine Hepburn that we think is the first Hollywood product to show those unspooling tape reels (yes, they do spark and catch fire at one point) and serried ranks of steel cabinets as backdrop to the usual lightning-paced verbal duels. The archetype had become firmly entrenched in film lore by the sixties, in such flicks as Ken Russell's wayward installment of the Michael Caine Harry Palmer series BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN, in which the titular machine conforms perfectly to the industry standard cabinets and tape reels arrangement (hard to imagine today how chilling the spectacle of an open-reel tape player STOPPING and REWINDING the tape BY ITSELF used to be, in a we'll-all-be-out-of-work-by-1985 way), plus added banks of the obligatory flashing lights to add cinematic presence. Caine, who in THE ITALIAN JOB had to send Benny Hill in to fiddle with the spools, looks well at home at the terminal, wearing his thick specs, flicking switches and attentively looking slightly to the left at an unseen display unit, as was the drill back then, although he criminally neglects to wear a long white lab coat, thus demystifying the machine slightly. That's nothing to what Peter Ustinov gets up to as cockney embezzler in have-we-mentioned-how-much-we-like-this-yet comedy caper HOT MILLIONS, who tries every trick in the book to get past the security measures of an insurance supercomputer, until he spies a charlady doing just that, by kicking a loose panel to expose the vital circuitry, on which she proceeds to warm the pot. Other actors who've indulged in valve-aided computer fraud include Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams in A MAN, A WOMAN AND A BANK, and Ryan O'Neill in THE THIEF WHO CAME TO DINNER.
But generally, computers were an unstoppable force, to be feared more often than not. ALPHAVILLE had a computer in charge of the titular fascist state, but it doesn't come close in presence to the eponymous behemoth in 1969's taut Cold War thriller COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT sees the titular giant hangar-filling computer placed in control of the US's nuclear arsenal, only for things to get sticky when it starts chatting to its Soviet counterpart, to the exclusion of all humans (see also the humbler Three Mile Island-predating TV movie RED ALERT for more micros-commandeer-nukes paranoia). Though the inner workings are kept mysterious, the terminals are firmly housed in good old beige plywood surrounds, and the main control panel even has COLOSSUS written above it in lovably chunky lettering. Even chunkier is the brain-enhanced computer at the centre of sensationally camp Michael Moorcock adaptation THE FINAL PROGRAMME, in which Jon Finch and the great Jenny Runacre run through chiffon tunnels and bleak industrial landscapes after a computer programme (stored on microfilm, natch) to create a post-apocalyptic superman. Throw in Nazis, swinging sexual ambiguity, some lovely Casino-Royale-on-a-TV-budget sets and a throwaway comedy ending that makes the Adam West Batman film look like The Seventh Seal, and you've got a lost work of daft brilliance from Dr Phibes director Robert Fuest, an Avengers episode writ semi-large.
Of course, no article about computers with delusions of grandeur can get away with not mentioning HAL in 2001. So that's that done, then. Just as pretentious, albeit more interesting, Graham Crowden's deranged doctor in Lyndsay Anderson's BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, fresh from pulling Malcolm McDowell's head off a Frankenstein monster, wraps up an already ludicrously symbolic state-of-the-nation allegory by calling in all the characters (including Mark Hammill, Leonard Rossiter and Robin Askwith) to witness the unveiling of Genesis, a pyramid-shaped device encasing a human brain (similar, presumably, to the one he liquidised and drank earlier) which quotes Hamlet in a tinny, reedy voice. Rhetorical questions about the survival of mankind are considered posed. The sentient Bomb #20 in DARK STAR provided a risible corrective to this sort of symbolic portent. Less archly, horny experimental AI unit Proteus in DEMON SEED is neatly represented by a robotic arm and some "tunnel of light" special effects as it stalks Julie Christie, although the daft Warhammer figure baby that results from the nasty union tips things over into silliness once more.
Which brings us to the '80s, and the similarly-themed favourite ELECTRIC DREAMS, in which a ditzy architect buys a computer, "Edgar", to run his house (as we were all supposed to be doing at one point - cue Fred Harris switching on his kettle via a payphone with the aid of a BBC Master) and help to seduce hotcha next-door cellist Virginia 'Class' Madsen. Sadly, after various incidents culminating in a champagne spillage, the computer gets a taste for romance itself, cueing a farcical race to get the girl, and culminating in the poor metallic sod realising that, with little to offer the girl aside from hands-free immersion heater control and the odd game of Battlechess, it might as well admit defeat, and phone the local radio station to request the plaintive tones of Phil Oakey. It may still be an out of control menace, but at least the computer was now ending up less a power-crazed Donald Rumsfeld, more a love-lorn Tony Blackburn.
Over at Matthew Broderick's house, though, it was business as usual, sort of. Although the defence computer WOPR in WAR GAMES becomes the Armageddon-triggering nightmare of old, this time it's hacking by irresponsible youth, and the deadly craze of noughts and crosses ("How do you get the computer to play itself?" "Mnyeeees, number of players nought!") that sets off the countdown. Other advances include old technology methods used to thwart security doors, a proper Speak and Spell voice for the computer instead of a plummy actor talking through an effects-enabled toilet roll, and a really rather convincing million dollar set. Of course, all that was undone in an instant by the screen's least likely hacker, cowboy-hatted Richard Pryor in SUPERMAN III, a film whose crowning achievements were allowing Robert Vaughn to show off the tie-in Atari video game during the film, and turning Annie 'Throw Momma From the Train' Ross into a proto-Starlight Express woman-machine. Cheers. For silliness of that calibre, the only other place to go was a Michael Crichton film. Beauty/advertising industry thriller LOOKER wasn't that bad, though it pulled the man's usual trick of combining plausible, well-researched technology (nascent CGI, body digitising etc.) with made-up tomfoolery (the "looker gun", for goodness' sake). RUNAWAY, meanwhile, went for broke with the latter, having Tom Selleck hunting down renegade robots (including a real, but daft-looking, artificial spider) being reprogrammed by a gurning Gene Simmons.
Things were going rapidly downhill for the computer's mystique by now, though, and thanks to Ian MacNought Davies and those pesky kids, a film's programming genius was increasingly less likely to own a Kiss backstage pass than a Kiss Thermos flask full of weak lemon drink. Even William Shatner took to badmouthing the old school's pointless banks of flashing lights in AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL. To make matters even more run-of-the-mill, real-life off-the-shelf machines started appearing in key roles. Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix blasted off into space courtesy of an Apple IIc (with alien-derived plug-ins, natch) in EXPLORERS, while Anthony Michael Hall and, er, the other one off WEIRD SCIENCE boosted Kelly Le Brock's mayfly career with their trusty old Memotech MTX 512, arguably a step up from the machine's previous killer app, a gaudy Pac-Man clone called Blobbo. As computers in real life got more interesting, the reverse happened to their filmic counterparts, and the dull days of close-ups of furrowed brows glimpsed over the top of a laptop screen were upon us. But let's keep a little GOSUB in our hearts for the good old days of the big old humming terminal, and the best computer ever to appear in a film - yes, the Wedded Bliss dating computer from CARRY ON LOVING, in which Sid James gamely commandeered the punchcards and switches, only to reveal - of course! - that the whole thing was a chipboard fake, and Hattie Jacques was sat round the back, looking bored, with a cup of tea. Now there's a finale which would have improved 2001 no end.
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