Vernilak was by no means untouched by the political upheavals of the mid-1960s. He came in for more than his share of criticism from official quarters, as the leader himself ailed and his coterie squabbled over the course that the revolution might take in the case of his demise. It was in this period that “Vernilak the maniac” was denounced on state radio. Numerous artists, intellectuals, and other creative spirits were dismissed in sneering tones by party hacks assuming the role of cultural police. He spoke of funds being cut, difficulties in getting actors and personnel to work with him, restrictions on the freedom of movement of many key people. These difficulties surely impeded an eventually abandoned project, the proposed filming of the screenplay he’d drafted from Algernon Blackwood’s short story The Willows (1907).
Most probably, however, the main reason for the failure of this project, is the problem that Vernilak himself spoke of in his Folios de Film interview. The power of the story lies in the depiction of internal states of dread and foreboding; these are hard to depict without falling into the sort of overacting prevalent in silent films of the 1920s. Vernilak had wanted to dispense with those elements of Blackwood’s short story that described visions of paranormal entities, and to focus on more naturalistic phenomena – sightings of a strange otter and then of a boatman shouting warnings while being borne down the river, the ominous movements of the willows themselves in the winds, the loss of provisions and the damage to the canoe, and the discovery of a dead peasant. Perhaps a director more familiar with expressionist horror cinema could have pulled this off, but Vernilak claims that he found it beyond his capabilities to develop a satisfactory screenplay. The realization on screen of Blackwood’s vivid descriptions of unease and a deepening sense of barely-glimpsed but pervasive hostility, would have been a considerable achievement. We can only speculate as to whether finding a suitable leading man would have inspired him. With the end of his relationship with Circassian, though, the obvious candidate was off the scene. Another reason for the failure to proceed with the film may simply have been that Vernilak was seeking to transform his own perceptions of an once-charmed, but now increasingly oppressive political regime into a parable about the natural world turning upon those who are trying to embrace it. If this film had been made, it would most probably be seen as an early example of the subgenre sometimes known as eco-horror. While some lists of eco-horror movies do include the rat-infested Willard (1971), the nearest parallels that I can think of are The Birds (1963), of course, and more closely, the less well-known The Long Weekend (1978, and remade in 2008) from Australia; but these films’ atmospheres are very different.
Despite the domestic political discord and hostility of more “official” artists and critics, Vernilak had never had his studio taken away from him. Compared to less commercially successful contemporaries, he actually remained fairly well-resourced. He was also unusually free to travel for many years, which of course triggered some resentment among his peers, and speculation in the West that he was some kind of stooge. He attended several major film festivals and was even able to accept awards at one of these. In France during 1968, he was present for that year’s abandonment of the Cannes film festival. The evenements must have influenced the film he was subsequently to complete, Hatchlings (1970). The tortuous production of the film has often been described. It has been cited as an inspiration for satirical scenes about the difficult art of cinema in French and other films made around that time, such as Truffaut’s (1973) Day for Night, though these may also have been inspired by Fellini’s 8½ (1963). Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971), in contrast, seems to have emerged from a completely different context: arguably, its addled view of the process of film making derives more from its own director’s alcohol and drug problems than from the struggle with personalities and politics that Vernilak, Fellini and Truffaut encountered.
Hatchlings (aka The Heavenly Eggs) further reinforced his reputation as a director to be reckoned with. The success of As It Was surely lay behind the decision to make more funds available, allowing for international settings to feature in several episodes of the film, even though the bulk of the story takes place in an unspecified country and city that looks very much like Vernilak’s own. What is presumably an alien visitation has taken place: saucer-shaped craft have descended from the sky, in all parts of the inhabited world. Typically, these perform some local miracle – weapons directed at them are turned into shiny trinkets; ancient monuments restored to pristine glory; arid land, deserts, and forests damaged by human intrusion given new life – and then depart as suddenly and mysteriously as they arrived. But on departure a pile of shining egg-like artefacts are found at each location of their visits. These “eggs” prove impenetrable to x-rays, and confound efforts to drill into them with machinery or to cut into them with lasers.
Some years later, there has been no further visitation, and while some regimes have the “eggs” under lock and key, in many countries they have been widely shared across scientific facilities and even museums and art galleries. The protagonist is again a scientist, Professor Morell (played by the previously unknown Evgeny Tchulok, as a bearded and craggy heroic type). He realizes that his discovery that one batch of eggs is glowing and becoming warm actually reflects a widespread phenomenon. Perhaps significantly, this is happening over the course of one Christmas period, which gives the director opportunity to contrast festive celebrations, and consumer and conflict, around the world. He is the first to establish that this is also related to the eggs being in close proximity to pregnant women – experience with his own pregnant wife being the clue that sets him off, despite initial ridicule from his colleagues, and subsequent efforts to suppress his research. (These bureaucrats even include one sneering character who dismisses Morell as a maniac!) This is not quite the scenario of Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos (published 1950, with the first – and most faithful – of the several films it inspired, Village of the Damned, appearing in 1960). In Wyndham’s novel, aliens (never seen) have impregnated Earth women, who go on to bear children who start to display telepathic and mind control abilities. The women in Hatchlings are already pregnant, in contrast, but what will the effect of the eggs be on them?
Morell manages to institute an international survey of the several thousand children identified as associated with the phenomenon, finding like-minded scientists. It is stated that he has collaborators in ten other countries, though scenes from only six are displayed. Under the guise of a health study, the children are regularly examined. The main features they display in common in the first years of life are simply that they seem to radiate calmness and to have the ability to defuse conflicts between people around them. Morell first recognizes this latter characteristic as the common element across a number of scenarios which the film illustrates vividly: a brawl at a Soccer match somewhere in South America, a tense stand-off at a border in South Asia, a feud between religious leaders in Israel…. These moments were often cited in the favorable reviews won by Hatchlings. Even Pauline Kael, usually immune both to sentimentality and SF, recognized the power of the depiction, and it was she who fits described Vernilak as “a good egg”.
The children later grow to be leaders of one sort or another in their communities, and in the culmination of the film, when the eggs are again warmly glowing, and alien craft are hanging in the sky, they are shown as soothing anxieties and eventually acting as emissaries from Earth to the aliens (who are never actually shown). Many viewers felt let down by the concluding sequence, where the young adults are heading to the meeting with the aliens, was too inconclusive – what would they find? Were the aliens really as friendly as they had seemed, or was this prelude to an invasion? Many others thought that this lack of definitive answers was really coherent with the sense of wonder of the earlier sequences of the film, and left plenty of scope for the audience to exercise their imaginations and to debate the implications of alien contact for humanity. Arthur C Clarke was an admirer of the film, and may have been more than half-serious in claiming that the likely resolution of Hatchlings would have been close to that of his 1953 novel Childhood’s End (itself the subject of a TV miniseries, aired on Syfy in 2015).
In the early 1980s I had a rare encounter with SF royalty, when I was attending a Society for International Development conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Clarke, resident in Colombo, had given a keynote at the conference. Clarke had spoken, as I recall, of the coming era of cheap, high-capability, and pervasive communications technology, of the threat to dictatorships that would be posed by ordinary people gaining the ability to stream live video of, for example, police suppression of demonstrators. When I was making my way down the long driveway that led from the conference venue to the road back into town, Clarke was driving by in his Land Rover – or perhaps he was being driven, I can’t recall. He stopped to give me a lift. I took the chance to ask him what he thought of Vernilak and his disappearance. I knew that Clarke was reticent to talk about being gay to those who were not close confidants, so I first asked about how familiar he was with the director’s work. I posed the question as the innocent SF fan that in reality I was. Clarke made a joke, I realized, by saying something like “I do hope nothing bad has happened to him: He’s a good egg.” (Presumably he knew the Kael review.) After a pause he added: “if a little scrambled”. I asked what he meant, and got a response about Vernilak’s films being something of a curate’s egg, good in parts. It was then that he drew the comparison between Hatchlings and Childhood’s End. Whether he would have said more, or moved into reminiscences about film makers, I cannot say: I had to get out and head off in another direction, losing the chance to get Clarke to open up more. Clarke may or may not have been familiar with the Strugatskys’ The Ugly Swans (circulating as samizdat in the 1960s, published in West Germany in 1972, and the basis for a 2006 film). Vernilak himself could well have known of this novel, which is often, though debatably, seen as pursuing themes similar to Childhood’s End. The “aliens” of the Strugatskys’ novel may be from humanity’s future, but their bonding with present-day young people – elders are often antagonistic – does have parallels with Clarke’s work. Themes of young people with extraordinary powers are of course longstanding n SF: for example, the mutations induced by a nuclear apocalypse in Henry Kuttners’ Mutant (1953 as Lewis Padgett) and Wyndham’s own The Chrysalids (1955), each of which features telepathy.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of Hatchlings, it is striking how well this film has stood the test of time – so well, perhaps, that there has never been an attempt to remake it. The specific political contingencies may be strictly historical, the special effects may be scrappy, but the piecing together of riddles and the unfolding of successive mysteries remain powerfully evocative. I have elsewhere argued that the best SF from the “Eastern bloc” frequently involves protagonists struggling to coexist with, or subsist within, alien and largely incomprehensible systems. Lem and the Strugatkys are obvious cases. I have seen this as reflecting the lives of questioning and creative people under Stalinism and its successors and offshoots in the Cold War period. (Recent revelations about Lem’s work now lead me to think that Nazism and the Holocaust may also play a significant role: even before these monstrosities, of course, Kafka was an early master of articulating such encounters.) The contemporary resonance is less vicious, though recent trends in nationalism, populism and cryptoFascism are certainly foreboding. But the experience of living in societies where corporate forces, remote governments, and complex technoscience leave many people bemused, cynical and suspicious, is pervasive. And we can only wait to see how the Chinese moves in the direction of techno-surveillance will unfold.
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