A Good Egg – part 1 (The Mystery Man)

A Good Egg

Ian Miles

“In American cinema, and perhaps in the culture more generally, there is a kind of nostalgia for the frontier. There is a half-memory of a changing borderline place, somewhere where a stranger with no backstory can enter a town and make his mark. In my work, I use outer space, the future, the frontiers of science and technology, of humanity and otherness, as liminal areas. Here, it may be the protagonist, or the new beings or ideas that he [sic] encounters, that come without backstory, as agents of unpredictable change. Unlike the cowboy films, however, I am concerned with the effects of these novelties and uncertainties on people and their mentalities, sometime taming or erasing the frontier, sometimes erecting stronger walls and berries.”

(Vernilak, 1985 – published 1995).

“Is Vernilak himself a man with no history? Is he merely [sic] a Bob Dylan, concealing a banal backstory?  Or is the man of mystery a deliberate smokescreen, designed to hide a murkier past?”

(Boccho, 1995).

2020 marks the 50^th anniversary of Hatchlings (1970). This film was much-laudedin its day, but is little-known to most young cinema fans, even those particularly enthusiastic about SF and fantasy. This is an opportune moment, then, to take a look at the life and work of its creator, Vernilak. With the announcement that a drama miniseries on his life is being commissioned by Netflix, it is also important to consider the achievements of his work. There is a danger that viewers will be led down a rabbit hole of fantastic speculation about his personal history – which is, by now, unlikely to ever come into full focus – while losing sight of his cinematic achievements.

Vernilak was hailed in his early career as “the Eastern George Pal”, and later was portrayed as an amalgam of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg. Sometimes it now seems that cinema is dominated by SF and fantasy films,  or at least their special effects. Leading directors readily work in these fields – this is not completely novel, for example Godard and Truffaut were both known to dabble here. But in his prime, Vernilak was working almost exclusively in a genre that was regarded as best as of interest mainly to geeky kids and their grown-up equivalents, at worst as just cheap trash. That his work should be valued by connoisseurs of world cinema would itself has been seen as a piece of fantasy or satirical SF. That one of his films – not  Hatchlings but As It Was (1965)- has become a point of reference in contemporary philosophy and physics would be even less credible.

Vernilak is, of course, an assumed name. The artist has assumed a surname, with no first name. He tells us that he adopted this name in tribute to Jules Verne, whose pedagogic and exposition-heavy work had inspired him  as a boy. A more standard localization of the name would have been Vernisci or possibly Vernolic. But the name Vernilak was of particular appeal because, he claims,  it resembled verdilac, a Slavic variety of vampire. (The sense of unease created by this association, and the unusual  word-formation, may have played against him when he was in conflict with the authorities in later years. “Vernilak the maniac” was a label that had a lot of airing in the 1960s crackdown.)  The name Vernilak appeared on the very first of his films, way back in the 1940s. There is even some doubt about the authenticity of his supposedly genuine original name, H. G. Porat,  as recorded in official documents. The initials H.G. possibly hint that this is also a pseudonym. Only two biographical essays show evidence of original research, and one of these (by Zemek) reports persistent rumors that the name of Porat had been assumed during wartime work. The other (by Vis) does not touch on the subject, and is generally terse and superficial as to his early life.  

Porat is, of course, a Hebrew name, although not everyone might have known that in mid-twentieth century Central Europe. It might have been chosen by a gentile as a sign of solidarity with victims of the Holocaust, but we do not even know for sure that Vernilak asserted that this was his family name. It is at least likely that Vernilak was himself Jewish, despite his never mentioning, or being asked about, this in his interviews. This absence may reflect lingering anti-Semitism, even though these interviews were some time after the brief postwar suspicion of Jewish plots (inspired by Stalin’s paranoia). There are no hints as to any other birth name, and the double destruction of the National Archives – in the Luftwaffe bombing and subsequent fire, and in the controversial wrecking and looting that took place in the 1989 “events” – means that almost all chances of locating tangible evidence have disappeared. Human nature abhors a vacuum,  and in his part of the world whirlwinds of rumor and speculation are guaranteed to gust in to enflame any smoldering uncertainties.

The question arises as to what happened to Vernilak’s family during, and in the run-up to, the take-over by Nazis and their local allies. A recent study of Stanislaw Lem (Agnieszka Gajewska’s 2017 Zagłada i gwiazdy: przeszłość w prozie Stanisława Lema -The Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in Stanisław Lem’s Fiction] rather convincingly addresses this element in Lem’s life and work. She unearths how Lem’s writings are run through by memories of the Holocaust. She documents actual events in Lem’s life that are inscribed into his fiction. It is at least arguable that Vernilak’s output is molded in similar ways, but we know so little of his early years that this must remain speculative.

The two biographical essays tell us most of what we know about the man, other than what he chose to reveal in interviews (most of which are superficial or dealing with his appreciation of other directors), and what we can infer from his work, or ,glean from a few anecdotes from contemporaries.

Vernilak’s birthday seems to be established as July 7^th, with the year being variously assigned as 1920, 1921, or 1922. Vernilak was notoriously reluctant to discuss his early life. Of course, he offered very little about his personal life in general, but this could easily be a product of political contingencies, or of caution about going public about his sexuality. In the course of the only extensive interview with him to have been published – and that a decade after it was conducted – he refers to both the countryside (wandering though fields of mullein, the scent of roadside fennel)  and the sea (watching fishermen repair nets and gut fish). Boccho (1995, taking issue with Vis’ biographical essay as well as Vernilak’s own account)  claims that these memories were deployed as an act of misdirection. This is hardly convincing, given that the country and the sea would be holiday highlights of the life of a child from (presumably) a bourgeois middle class family in the 1920s and 30s.

Things become more distinct during the Second World War, where Porat is recorded as an airman. He, or someone with the same name, even features in one photograph of a set of pilots, in the air arm of the National Liberation Army (cf. Zemek on the authenticity of the photograph and the inscription on its reverse side). Probably, like other pilots from his part of the world, he had prewar flying experience. Likewise, he is likely to have spent time working with Britain’s Royal Air Force during early years of the war. The liberation struggle was mainly land-based, but the few national aircraft were deployed in aerial combats, and used extensively for surveillance and supporting ground forces. This experience informs Mystery Jet (1949; also known as Ghost Plane and Mystery Plane).

Boccho is not the only commentator to suggest that Porat/Vernilak’s aerial work was mainly a matter of military intelligence, and that this led directly to his becoming an intelligence officer with the revolutionary forces in the Turbulence following the liberation struggle. Wilder commentators have claimed that he may have been a spy, and even a double agent, rather than an active airman, during the war. No evidence other than rumor supports this, but with the national records destroyed, and most contemporaries long dead, there is no way of providing definitive proof. We wait to see how the Netflix dramatization of Vernilak’s life handles this period. The titles of the first two episodes are allegedly The Fog Of War and Underground, which does not raise hopes as to their veracity. 

When it comes to his entry into filmmaking, it is striking that he never discussed this, to our knowledge; nor does he refer to a love of cameras and photography in his childhood. An intelligence officer, of course, might well have been appointed to supervise or even lead, the making of the sort of jingoistic, propaganda-heavy films that started to be produced in the post-revolutionary period. Mystery Jet certainly has some of these attributes,  but also deviates from the mold in various ways. In fact, the biggest mystery is how it was that Vernilak and his co-director, Victor Macceldon, managed to burst upon the film world with such a competent piece of work, without any trace of their having been through any form of professional training in cinema.  It is hard to believe that experience of filming potential targets from an aircraft, and participation in amateur dramatics, would have provided the skills displayed in Mystery Jet. Though unpolished, and clearly made on a shoestring, the film is far more watchable than the routine celebrations of national struggle, endurance, and eventual triumph churned out by the national film companies. The division of responsibility between Macceldon and Vernilak is unknown. It may have been that Vernilak was actually working as an apprentice of a sort to Macceldon (despite the latter not being credited with any known earlier films – was he too using a pseudonym, perhaps because his name was tainted by some prewar associations?).

Whatever the case, Vernilak is on record as disowning Mystery Jet. It may be that he genuinely felt that this was really Macceldon’s work, and that he was merely an assistant whose own ideas and vision counted for little. It may be that Macceldon’s downfall and disgrace later in the 1950s impelled Vernilak to put some distance between himself and the older man. (Incidentally, we know little about Maccledon, not even his ethnicity. Was this surname a modification of a Hebrew name such as Maidson or Maltzman?) The film’s effectively racist portrait of Japanese, or unease about the topic, could have made him want to play safe. Some personal issue of which we are unaware could always been involved.  The film itself seems tamer than most of these speculations. 

Mystery Jet is plausibly inspired by the notions of “foo fighters” and the like, reported by many airmen during the war in the air. Officially a taboo topic, aviators of all forces were aware of stories that odd entities (lights, globes, discs, and other peculiar objects with peculiar ways of flying) were encountered unpredictably while on mission. In the film, a mysterious aircraft is repeatedly spotted by national pilots; this turns out to be a top-secret Japanese autogiro. Much excitement has been stoked up around the way that its semi-circular wings resemble the “flying saucer” of Western UFOlogy. This has been taken as hinting at knowledge of secret Nazi UFO programs, on the one hand, or as evidence of the global reach of alien visitations, on the other. The film makers’ choice of design of the autogiro may well actually have simply been a desire to create an unusual phenomenon. Foo fighters were most often seen as amorphous lights, and it would take some years before flying saucers became dominant in UFO reports.

Another anomaly is that Japanese forces were never active anywhere close to this part of the world. Their insertion into this film serves to portray an alien enemy – albeit of a terrestrial kind. The few segments of film actually portraying Japanese forces has them either as white-coated, bespectacled scientists, or as vicious but ultimately cowardly, fighters. There has been much consternation about this portrayal of the enemy, though it is no more extreme as the portraits of Japanese featured in American comics of the period. The portrayal of Germans (or local Nazi supporters) in this fashion would not attract the same opprobrium. But why were Japanese selected as the villains? Was this simply an attempt to render the enemy more alien, a reflection of early recognition of East Germany’s appetite for ideologically sound foreign films – or unwillingness on the part of the directors to render the hated Nazi presence more material? (On this point, I have myself seen passengers on a commercial flight in the 1980s traumatized by the appearance of Nazi parades and insignia in an Indiana Jones film that was being shown as in-flight entertainment). 

Being a very maneuverable device, this mystery plane (not a jet, though capable of spectacularly rapid flight) proves to be an effective weapon for sabotage missions, and causes some spectacular damage by dropping both explosives and some sort of incendiary bombs. Our hero – who is shot down in combat with the autogiro, near the enemy base – manages to capture it (killing the scientist and numerous Japanese troops in the process, and leaving the base in flames). Shot down again himself by his own side on the way home, he manages to crash and escape, but the enemy plane is destroyed. The national struggle surges on toward ultimate victory.

The film was a minor success, appealing particularly to newly demobilized forces (who were given reduced admission prices).

• Continued in Part 2